Sharks are amazing creatures...just watch NatGeo during shark week....awe and fear are about the best words to describe these prehistoric creatures. After over 15 years of surfing, I never did see a shark in the water. A few fished up... one or two washed up, but I've no doubt they've seen me plenty of times. Thats okay... I'm in their livingroom!

Ancient Hawaiians, living the original sustainable lifestyle, utilized the sharks to their fullest. Skin for drums, meat for food...it's said that the mother of Kamehameha the First was "ono" or craving the eye of the 'Niuhi" or tiger shark when she was pregnant with the future king. And the teeth for tools and weapons. I know first hand of how quick and decisive a cut with a shark tooth can be, having seen comarades in Lua, or Hawaiian fighting arts inadverdently slash themselves practicing moves. And it's not a clean cut like from a metal knife.... the skin splays open in a rather gruesome way.

Hawaii had no metal pre-contact except what little pieces may have washed up on shore from shipwrecks and such, but for most cutting procedures there were stone adzes for things like canoe and house building, tools from thinner cuts of stone and obsidian for finer work and even surgery, and sharks teeth for the making of other cutting tools and extremely deadly weapons.

In kapa work we have a small niho mano knife that we use to cut the length of the tree to free up the bast from the pith. Im sure it could certainly cut open a jugular vein, but for our kapa work it is quite sufficient.

{rokintensedebate}