Pulu

For the Tibetan ball game, see Polo. For the King of Babylon, see Tiglath-Pileser III. For the Ismo Alanko Säätiö album, see Pulu (album). For the village in Nepal, see Pulu, Nepal. For island in Australia, see North Keeling.
Cibotium glaucum

Pulu is a silky material obtained from the fibers of the hapuʻu pulu (Cibotium glaucum), a tree fern of Hawaii.[1] It is made of the brown hairs that cover the young fiddlehead as it uncoils.

Ancient Hawaiʻi

In ancient Hawaiʻi, pulu (which means "mulch" or "padding" in the Hawaiian language[1]) was used to embalm the dead. Women used pulu as an absorbent during their menstrual cycle. When their time came around, they were isolated to a house called the hale peʻa or menstrual house.[2] Men were strongly discouraged to set foot on the grounds of the hale peʻa, by strict social custom known as kapu. Hawaiians organized the hapuʻu fern into two genders; male and female. Males had the tough pulu, and females had the soft pulu. All soiled pulu was then buried around the hale peʻa.

19th-century industry

For a period in the 19th century, pulu was collected, dried, and exported to California commercially as pillow and mattress stuffing.[3] A stone structure in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park known as the Old Pulu Factory was a site for drying and packing pulu. However, the discovery that pulu breaks down and crumbles into dust after only a few years led to the demise of the industry. Pulu was collected by cutting down the slow-growing ferns, an extremely unsustainable method. The industry shut down by the 1880s.[4]

References

  1. 1 2 Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Hoyt Elbert (2003). "lookup of pulu ". in Hawaiian Dictionary. Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library, University of Hawaii Press. Retrieved October 20, 2010.
  2. ↑ Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Hoyt Elbert (2003). "lookup of pe'a ". in Hawaiian Dictionary. Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library, University of Hawaii Press. Retrieved October 20, 2010.
  3. ↑ Louis Harmuth (1915), Dictionary of textiles, Fairchild publishing company, p. 128
  4. ↑ Douglass H. Hubbard (June 1952). Ferns of Hawaii National Park. Hawaii Nature Notes. V. Hawaii Natural History Association. p. 6.

Further reading

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/23/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.