Haʻaheo Kaniu or Kaniuʻopiohaʻaheo (late 18th century – c. 1843) was a high chiefess (aliʻi) and member of the royal family of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
[2] Historian Abraham Fornander named High Chiefess ʻAkahi as her mother, who was a sister of Keawemauhili, Aliʻi Nui of Hilo and a rival of King Kamehameha I who conquered the Hawaiian Islands into a unified kingdom by 1810.
[13] In 1836, Kapaʻakea and Keohokālole initially promised their unborn child Kalākaua in hānai to Kuini Liliha, a high-ranking chiefess and the widow of High Chief Boki who were both former governors of Oahu.
Afterward, Kuhina Nui Elizabeth Kīnaʻu, who disliked Liliha, deliberated and ordered his parents to give him to Haʻaheo Kaniu and her husband Kinimaka instead.
[9][10] Haʻaheo Kaniu brought Kalākaua with her when the royal court and King Kamehameha III returned to Lāhainā, which was the kingdom's capital at the time.
At the age of four, Kalākaua was enrolled with his birth siblings at Honolulu's Chiefs' Children's School and formally proclaimed by the king as eligible for the throne of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
In 1858, Kalākaua successfully sued the heirs of Kinimaka for the rights to Haʻaheo Kaniu's landholding in a case presided by Supreme Court justice George Morison Robertson.