05/26/2026
At 14, she became Disney's first Pacific Islander princess. And she couldn't fully speak the language of her own people. And she almost didn't audition at all.
Auliʻi Cravalho grew up on food stamps in a one-bedroom apartment in Mililani. She slept in the bedroom. Her mom, Puanani, a single mother working as an administrative assistant, slept on the couch.
A talent agent spotted her singing in a charity contest on Oʻahu. She was a freshman at Kamehameha Schools, a soprano in the glee club. She wasn't chasing the part - there were "already so many great submissions," she figured, that she didn't think she needed to try. She was the LAST of hundreds to audition.
Then she met Moana. A girl told never to cross the reef. A girl who crossed it anyway.
By the time the world heard her, Auliʻi was barely 16. A kid from a one-bedroom apartment, suddenly carrying a whole ocean of people on her back.
So she bought her mom a house. "I bought my mommy a house. She's happily retired," she said. The woman who slept on the couch never had to again.
But here's what nobody told her at 14. That role made her the voice of a people who had nearly lost their own.
In 1896 - three years after the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown - the new government banned Hawaiian as the language of school. Children were punished for speaking it. In their own islands, in their own mouths, it became ILLEGAL.
It worked. By 1983, fewer than 50 children under the age of 18 still spoke ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. A language older than the United States. Down to fifty kids.
The language her own kupuna could have been punished for speaking was nearly gone before she was ever born.
And here was the part that should have stopped her. Auliʻi wasn't fluent in Hawaiian. She knew every line of Moana by heart - in English. Saying them in Hawaiian, she admitted, was "an entirely different ball game."
So she learned the language of her ancestors. And she gave Moana back in it.
In 2018, she re-recorded the entire film in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. Every line. Every song. The first Hawaiian-language Disney movie ever made.
"While I still flub on the words, because I'm not 100 percent fluent," she said, "speaking Hawaiian just feels like coming home." There was joy in it, she added - "with them being in the language of my ancestors."
Then they gave it away. A free copy went to every accredited school in Hawaii, pre-K through college. Not the version made for the mainland. The one in the language those same schools had once been forbidden to teach.
In 1983, fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian. Today, more than 26,000 people do.
In February 2026, the sequel premiered in Hawaiian at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, during Hawaiian Language Month. A room full of families. Children watching a Disney hero speak their language out loud, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. "There are few moments in our lifetime where we get to witness the power of our language being uplifted on a global platform," Auliʻi said.
She knew exactly what she was doing. Navigating by the stars, she said, was indigenous knowledge that was almost lost too, before Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson brought it back. "These stories," she said. "We own those."
And the role that started all of it? In 2023, Disney announced a live-action Moana. Auliʻi - the girl who originated her - chose not to play her again.
"I'm truly honored to pass this baton to the next young woman of Pacific Island descent," she said. She found the path. Then she stepped off it, so the next girl could follow.
Moana was a story about a wayfinder. A girl told the safe thing was to stay behind the reef. Auliʻi Cravalho almost stayed behind hers.
She almost skipped the audition. And a language her own people were once punished for almost stayed silent.
Instead, a girl who grew up on food stamps put her ancestors' language back into every school in Hawaii - and onto screens all over the world. That's not a Disney princess. That's a wayfinder.
Mahalo
