Hawaiian Feather Cloak (ʻAhuʻula)
Royal cloak of the Hawaiian chiefs, built on a netted base of olonā fibre and covered with hundreds of thousands of small feathers tied in bundles by a technique called kahekahe. Yellow feathers were taken from the ʻōʻō and mamo — birds whose feathers were pulled by the tens of thousands, contributing to their extinction — and red from the ʻiʻiwi and ʻapapane; Kamehameha I's great cloak is said to contain some 450,000 yellow mamo feathers. The ʻahuʻula was the mark of the highest aliʻi, worn in war and ceremony as a living symbol of chiefly mana and passed down as the supreme heirloom of the k