In Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Instruction: Moving Forward by Looking Back [PDF], Joseph Keola Donaghy sez (emphasis added):

There is little documentation of the arrival of the guitar [in Hawaiʻi], and there appears to be even less of the development of slack key guitar. Beginning in the mid-1830s, Hawaiian language newspapers became the source of much information regarding Hawaiʻi’s rich oral history and society of that era, but there seemed to be little interest on the part of Hawaiians and others in documenting the use of the guitar in everyday life (Kanahele, 1979, p. 351). I tested this statement by searching the Ulukau Hawaiian Electronic Library, which contains approximately 7,000 text-searchable pages from Hawaiian newspapers printed between 1834 and 1948. Those pages contain only three references to "guitar," the earliest occurring in 1868, and 17 references to the partially transliterated "gita," the earliest found in 1862. The fully transliterated term kika occurs 165 times in the archive; however, in only three occurrences did the term refer to a guitar, the earliest appearing in the May 21, 1925, issue of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, one of the most prominent and longest-running Hawaiian language newspapers. The other occurrences of kika in the newspapers referred to a cigar or a tiger.

Because, of course, Hawaiian's limited consonant inventory makes /k/ the closest match not only to /k/ but also to /g/, /s/, /t/, and several other English phonemes. Elbert and Pukui use kika as an example when discussing loanwords in their Hawaiian Grammar, section 2.9.1:

We see that k, the most common Hawaiian consonant, is substituted for ten English consonant sounds. The Hawaiian word spelled kika has four variant spellings (tita 'sister', sida 'cider', tiga 'tiger', and kika 'cassia')—all from English. The only native kika means 'slippery'.

In the early days of Hawaiian it was more common to transcribe loan words with an orthography more suggestive of their origins, regardless of their actual pronunciation; thus <tiga> for /kika/ meaning "tiger", <sida> for "cider" — note that this one preserves the sound of the original rather than the spelling. But perhaps because these phonemes were not, in fact, distinguished, this sort of thing was eventually abandoned.

(Seriously, what kind of crazy language would force its speakers to learn an orthography preserving source information about loan words even though that information was (a) imperceptible in the borrowing language, and (b) easily reconstructible from context anyway?)

Kika shows up in Royal Hawaiian Hotel, by Mary Pulaʻa Robins, "written in honor of the present Royal Hawaiian Hotel when it was opened in 1927," as Elbert and Mahoe put it in Nā mele o Hawaiʻi Nei: 101 Hawaiian Songs. Here's the start of their transcription + translation, basically the same as what's at the link above for our purposes:

Uluwehiwehi ʻoe i kaʻu ʻike la,
E ka Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

A he nani la, ke hulali nei,
A he nani māoli nō.

Ka moena weleweka moe kāua la,
He pakika he paheʻe maikaʻi nei [...]

You are festive to see,
O Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Beauty gleaming,
True beauty

Velvet beds we sleep upon,
Smooth, soft and good [...]

(Okay, it's not exactly kika — it's kika plus the prefix pa-, which Elbert and Pukui's Hawaiian Dictionary defines: "Prefix to many bases, with general meaning of "in the nature of, having the quality of.")

But wait! Why don't E & P mention "cigar" or "guitar" in their discussion of kika? Because those were actually loaned as kīkā — note long vowels. Not homophonous — but, again, early Hawaiian orthography was a lot less strict about including those macrons (not to mention the ʻokina).