From "Place Names of Hawaii":
Nīnole. Land section and village, Honomū qd.; land section, homesteads, village, cove, and gulch, Honu-ʻapo qd., Hawaiʻi. There are freshwater springs at the Nīnole in Honu-ʻapo; see Pū-hau. A cannibalistic moʻo, Kaikapū (hag), lived at the Honu-ʻapo Nīnole; her pretty granddaughter led travelers to her cave, where she ate them raw (HM 264). Lit., bending.
"The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness" is the state motto of Hawai’i and allegedly the motto of the Great King, Kamehameha I. I have memorized the words of the original, but somehow the translation never seemed to make a lot of sense, neither as a sentence, nor as the motto of a king.
Now that I have been learning Hawiian a little, the translation makes even less sense, because I have the underpinning to understand a little more of the structure of the sentence. I’ll reveal my new tentative translation at the bottom, but give me a little time first to explain how I got there.
While in Hilo last time, I decided to buy an 8 CD course of Hawaiian. It promised to be full immersion, so I decided to put it in the car CD changer and devote time to it on my way to work.
After a funny incident at the beginning, when I put in CD 6 after CD 1 and almost died of language shock (that’s what you get for being smug!), things are progressing well. The amount of time I spend with the course is not sufficient to learn the vocabulary, and it’s sometimes hard to really hear the exact spelling of words, but otherwise it’s helping me a lot.