Kahilinai is known only genealogically, as the mother of Urutonga, the woman who married Hemā and bore the heroes Tāwhaki and Karihi. She plays no independent role in the recorded narratives, and no tradition of divinity attaches to her; she is entered as a mortal ancestress of the heroic line. The form of her name, with a sound foreign to Māori, evidently reached the received record through a cognate Polynesian genealogy, as happened elsewhere in the pan-Polynesian Hemā and Tāwhaki traditions.