The brackish waterway on the shore at Honohononui is beautiful: Walls of ancient stones define its banks, and the water flows gently around a green, grassy knoll. It wasn't always this way. A visit to this seaside spot would have been very different even as recently as the early 1990s, when Haleolono, this four-hundred-year-old fishpond outside of Hilo, was all but gone, buried under overgrowth after decades of neglect.
Today Haleolono has been restored and is meticulously maintained by the Edith Kanakaole Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the descendants of its namesake, the late kumu hula (hula teacher) and Hawaiian cultural leader. Restoring this loko ia (fishpond) was no small challenge, in part because no one knew quite where it was: The foundation tapped into generational knowledge and scoured old maps to find it. The two-lane road cutting the area in half illustrates the tension between modernity and tradition so common in Hawaii, but despite the changes wrought by development, the foundation discovered that most of the pond's stone walls were intact.
It took roughly ten years to revitalize the pond, which now yields about three hundred pounds of fish every year-there's lots of amaama, or mullet. The foundation shares the bounty with the volunteers, students and community members who help maintain it.
Edith's great-grandson Luka Kanakaole, now 32, was a child when the work began. "I grew up picking up rubbish at the first pond," he says. "It had become a gathering place for dumping trash." After a few years of digging and clearing debris, the freshwater springs slowly returned, and the fish soon followed. "Places like this," says Luka, looking out across the water, "they start dying. People forget the name of the place, and the function disappears."
This year the United States Mint launched its American Women Quarters Program, featuring female icons on the reverse of select coins. The inaugural group of five women included the likes of writer Maya Angelou and astronaut Sally Ride. When the second group of five women was announced in March, it included a name few outside of Hawaii might recognize but that's woven into the fabric of Island culture: Edith Kanakaole.
Kanakaole was many things: mother to six children, instructor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, kumu hula, composer and chanter-and in all of these roles she worked to elevate the relevance of traditional Hawaiian practices. She was instrumental in establishing early Hawaiian language programs in public schools, inspirational to the University of Hawaii students who pushed for a bachelor of arts in Hawaiian studies, and she traveled the world showcasing less conventional styles of hula. In its statement regarding Kanakaole's inclusion in the series, the US Mint noted that "her moolelo, or stories, served to rescue aspects of Hawaiian history, customs and traditions that were disappearing due to the cultural bigotry of the time."
The family of the late kumu hula (hula teacher) and Hawaiian cultural practitioner Edith Kanakaole stands in Haleolono fishpond in Hilo (seen also on page 42). From left to right: Lanihuli Kanahele, her brother Luka Kanakaole and their parents Huihui Kanahele-Mossman and Kala Mossman. The family, through the nonprofit Edith Kanakaole Foundation, has taken on the kuleana (responsibility) of restoring and caring for Haleolono, among many other projects that preserve and perpetuate Hawaiian culture. “Places like this,” says Luka, seen also on page 43 with Lanihuli, “they start dying. People forget the name of the place, and the function disappears.”
Kanakaole was an influential figure in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance of the 1970s, and long after her passing in 1979, her presence continues to be felt through the nonprofit established in her name. Formally incorporated in 1990, the Edith Kanakaole Foundation carries forward much of the work that Kanakaole was doing in the past century. Several members of the Kanakaole family have dedicated themselves to the effort, including Luka. He's the foundation's project manger as well as its communications officer. "In a small organization like this," he says, "everybody wears a lot of hats." Based in Hilo, Luka is integral to many aspects of the foundation's day-to-day operations, though there's one thing he doesn't do: hula.
The foundation is probably best known for Halau o Kekuhi, a hula school teaching a tradition passed down over eight generations of kumu hula in the Kanakaole family line. The halau hula (hula school) is known for its ancient aihaa style of hula, featuring low-postured and "eruptive" movements evoking the volcano deity Pele and her sister, Hiiaka. The foundation prides itself on preserving this distinctive hula, rooted in traditions reaching back to a time before Western contact.
Having two left feet in a renowned hula family initially shook Luka's confidence and sense of identity. "I was bummed out about it because I wasn't good at it, and everybody in the family does it." He still remembers the day his grandmother Pualani Kanakaole Kanahele, one of Edith's two daughters who established the foundation, called him out. He was around ten years old, and they were in the family kitchen. "My grandma, she says, 'Yeah, you're not very good at it,'" he recalls, laughing. "She can be pretty blunt."
But after that blunt remark, she pressed him to find something else, another place to put his energy and do meaningful work. "One thing she did tell me is you can go do something. Find a practice that you can be a kanaka [Native Hawaiian] at. It doesn't have to be hula-just find a practice."
Luka (center) joins volunteers to clear weeds from the rock walls of Haleolono. For Luka, who works primarily in the foundation’s land manage-ment programs, restoring the pond is just one way in which he carries on his great-grandmother’s legacy. He’s currently working with local tour operators to ensure that visitors are educated about Hawaiian history and knowledge of place. “Instead of giving visitors a cocktail on the beach, we want to give them more informed experiences,” he says.
So he took up paddling and developed an interest in conservation science, studying on the Mainland and at UH-Hilo. He also became a chanter. "I've always been that guy," he says, "the 'Hawaiian guy.' People always say, 'Oh, you can do the chants for us.' And I have to say, 'Well, instead of me doing this chant all the time, how about I teach you guys and you can do it, too. I want to give you the tools so you can understand these things yourself.'"
Which is, in sum, the foundation's mission: empowering people to apply the practices Edith Kanakaole revived in a modern context. In his university studies, Luka learned environmental conservation from a Western perspective. When he began working with the foundation in 2018, he realized that many of the concepts he'd learned were already built into Hawaiian oli, or chants, sung generations earlier. Luka inherited an understanding from his elders that in Hawaiian culture the spiritual and practical are linked. "Not only do you get a spiritual connection when you do an oli, but you're reciting a thesis about, say, the water table in our forest floor." The stories conveyed in ancient chants, songs and dances, Luka says, connect to data points in the natural world-data that can inform contemporary conservation practices.
Luka spends most of his energy on the foundation's land management program, Papaku Makawalu. Through research and workshops, he and his colleagues foster modern land management practices that align with his ancestors' methods of understanding the environment. The foundation runs approximately a half-dozen Papaku Makawalu workshops every year, with participants from universities, research groups and nonprofits from around the world.
The Western and Hawaiian approaches to land management and the natural world "are different languages for some of the same ideas," Luka says. "These are the same processes you study in school, but to our ancestors these processes were gods." He points to "Kane" as a prime example. When simplified," says Luka, "Kane refers to fresh water. You won't find a reference to this in the dictionary, because it isn't a direct translation. It's inference. But there's an oli called 'E Kanehoalani E' that we chant to the rising sun. If you think about it, you can ask, 'Well if we're calling Kane fresh water but also calling Kane the sun, how are those two things related?' It's because Kane represents not just fresh water but the elements that move water, and the element that moves water the most is heat, specifically heat from the sun. So Kanehoalani can project heat on the surface of our world and move water upward from the ocean and land surfaces. There are so many examples of how these nomenclatures represent natural phenomena, elements and processes."
Lanihuli Kanahele shores up the walls of Haleolono during a recent community workday. Since the foundation began restoration work ten years ago, Haleolono went from a neglected, vegetation-choked relic to a functioning, productive fishpond, one that had fed the community since pre-contact times.
During the pandemic, as tourism abated and Hawaii residents contemplated how the state's biggest industry might come back in a more sustainable way, Luka was approached by Hawaii County leaders about developing a program to certify tour operators who want to align their modern businesses with ancient practices and knowledge. "We've created a template called Kipa," says Luka, "to talk to tourism operators about how Hawaiian knowledge can offer them the tools to better present and implement authentic and accurate knowledge to their clientele."
A pilot version of Kipa got under way in June 2021 with a six-session workshop designed for helicopter tour operators. The curriculum is based on the Papaku Makawalu program and designed to be as specific as possible to the places where the participating operators work. Luka points out that there are over thirty names for certain spots along the stretch of Hilo coastline where the foundation does most of its work. "What does each name mean, and how does it describe the natural function of each place?"
Such granular knowledge, as Luka sees it, does more than just enrich visitor experiences; it teaches what's needed to protect a specific bay or trail or reef. "Instead of giving visitors a cocktail on the beach, we want to give them more informed experiences," said Luka. "When I visit places, I always understand how to conduct myself, how to get the most out of learning from the culture that I've entered. In Hawai'i that sense of a code of conduct has been thrown out for the sake of profit. When we have visitors, we want them to see the water cycles and how the birds interact with the trees. We don't want to sell the Jimmy Buffet experience anymore. We want to sell the health of this diverse ecological phenomenon. We're hoping for an industry that's more contributive than extractive."
The program has the support of John De Fries, the first Native Hawaiian to serve as president and CEO of the Hawai Tourism Authority. Under De Fries' leadership, HTA is investing in sustainable and regenerative tourism initiatives like the Malama Hawai'i Program, which rewards visitors who volunteer for a day with a free additional night in their hotel, as well as waived change fees for airline tickets. "We all know what aloha is," says De Fries, "but we want malama-which is to nurture, to protect, to care for-to become a kind of sister Hawaiian value. The things we aloha are the things we nurture and protect. It's going to come down to people like Luka Kanaka'ole. If we can get all the families like the Kanaka'oles to invest in this way, they will reinvent tourism."
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The foundation’s work is part of a larger push within the state to direct its number-one industry—tourism—toward more sustainable and “re-generative” practices. To mālama, or care for, the Islands, as Hawai‘i Tourism Authority president and CEO John De Fries (seen above left) puts it. “It’s going to come down to people like Luka Kanaka‘ole,” De Fries says. “If we can get all the families like the Kanaka‘oles to invest in this way, they will reinvent tourism.”
Both De Fries and Luka hope the new quarter featuring the Kanaka'ole matriarch will be another way to help the foundation make a difference in the Islands, one project-and one coin-at a time.
"It's really awesome to have her in the series alongside the other awesome women," says Luka. The family was grateful to the US Mint for engaging them during the design process for the quarter. "Sometimes you see more stereotypical Hawai'i, with palm trees and a rainbow, and that's not who she was."
The coin features Kanakaole's face prominently. Her long, windswept hair is adorned with a lei po o (head lei), which morphs into a vivid landscape at her side-a river valley with mountains in the distance. Below her name and likeness is the phrase "E ho mai ka ike," or "Grant us knowledge," a guiding principle for Kanakaole and the foundation that bears her name.
Luka and his family spent a great deal of time describing Kanakaole's work to get the image on the coin just right-and the designers listened. "They were really good, really patient with us. We're excited because maybe some people will see her on the quarter and discover who she was and what she did. Hopefully, that can help us accomplish our mission of heightening Hawaiian consciousness and heightening Hawaiian intellect."
