CULTURAL LEARNING AT KAALA
Building Community Through Hawaiian Skills and Values

By Eric Enos

The story of how the Cultural Learning Center at Kaala came to serve the community of Waianae is a story of many people whose collective vision made it what it is today. It’s the story of young men and women who wanted to bring their Hawaiian cultural heritage back to life. It’s the story of community elders, na kupuna, who wanted to pass along their knowledge to the young, especially those in need of guidance. And it’s the story of all the educational partners, from archaeologists to community service organizations, who through sweat and determination helped make this vision a reality.

If you visit Kaala Farm today, you will see a gently sloping valley floor terraced with loi kalo, or taro patches. Within the paddies, the big heart-shaped leaves of the taro tremble on their long stems. Water flows down the hill from loi to loi and then returns to the stream that feeds them, so that we take nothing from the land without giving something back. And in the loi, up to their knees in mud, are the children, cultivating the taro as they learn about Hawaiian traditions and values, about caring for the land and for family. They learn about the history of their community and how the valleys were once the poi bowl of the Waianae ahupuaa, feeding the entire Leeward Coast.

The practice of organizing the land through ahupuaa is central to traditional Hawaiian culture. Within these districts, the ancient Hawaiians lived in a kinship system that included the kalo, or elder brother that nurtured and fed them, and the land, or aina. The ahupuaa stretched from the mountain watersheds out to the reefs, and within them the poe kahiko, or people of old, had everything they needed to nourish their bodies and their spirits. The ahupuaa is not only a method of organizing the land, it also encompasses much of the traditional Hawaiian way of life, from spiritual beliefs to resource management. It is the concept that shapes our work at Kaala.

Back in the 1970s, this same tract of land was covered with dry brush. Early cultural sites were lost among the weeds, and the water had been rerouted to serve urbanization and to irrigate introduced agricultural products. For many of us in Waianae, the landscape of our lives was not much better. Many of us found it difficult to relate to the curriculum in the schools. Drugs and alcohol took many of our young people and parents, and jobs were hard to come by. Many of our youth and their families from generations back felt disconnected from traditional ways of knowing and being and found it hard to define themselves as men and women in the roles that were offered them.

These are the needs we try to meet through the many community projects that develop out of the learning center under the guidance of our kupuna. Through intergenerational activities, Kaala provides opportunities for Hawaiians, part Hawaiians, and others. These include developing marketable skills, gaining a healthy sense of what it is to be native Hawaiian or of this place, and healing bodies and spirits that have been exposed to too many toxic substances. Each year over 3,000 people, from elementary school students to adults participating in substance abuse programs, visit Kaala and take part in its projects.

From the Mountain
Among Kaala’s many projects are a variety of workshops for adults and students in traditional crafts like stone carving, wall building, landscaping, and canoe paddle and kapa bark cloth making. Working with local teachers and community partners, staff has helped develop programs that serve students in the Waianae High School Hawaiian Studies Program and 4th graders from 20 different schools. Activities for students connect informal learning, like working in the loi, with formal learning, like environmental sciences. Through these connections, students begin to see how classroom learning prepares them for real tasks.

For example, more than 70 high school students will participate this year in fieldwork in reforestation, health, archaeology, agriculture, and water quality and utilization. Their research will become part of the state record, demonstrating the value of academic skills in preparing for real jobs. We’ve been successful in encouraging many of the students in this program to look at higher education as a goal, and we’re proud of the students who have gone on to college. Some of them have returned to serve as mentors to the younger students in the same program.

Through the learning center, about 2,000 students and adults each year learn about kapa, the fabric from which all Hawaiian clothing was once made. In addition to offering kapa workshops on-site for both students and older community members, Kaala has created an outreach program that takes workshops into classrooms in the Nanakuli complex and to civic clubs as far away as California. These workshops are supplied in part by Kaala’s mala wauke, or paper mulberry garden. In addition, Kaala staff have established paper mulberry gardens at a number of elementary schools.

Other important nurseries and gardens grow native and Polynesian-introduced plants for use in healing, cultural events, environmental education programs, and reforestation. Over 100 species, some endangered, are propagated in these nurseries and then planted out at many different sites along the Leeward Coast. In one intergenerational project, elementary school students propagated the plants as part of an educational program, and student/parent teams planted them out in Makaha Valley, at Makaha Beach Park, and on Mauna Lahilahi.

To the Ocean
Under the guidance of Uncle Eddie Kaanana and Uncle Walter Paulo, different generations pooled their efforts to build a canoe that became part of the process of teaching traditional fishing skills, providing a link that embraces the other vital element in the ahupuaa, the ocean. This project is known as Malama i ka Waa, Pulama i ka Waa.

Uncle Walter and Uncle Eddie grew up in the village of Milolii on the South Kona Coast of the Big Island, Hawaii. They were raised by their grandparents, who lived traditional style. They learned the old skills, fishing with nets and using taro as bait. When Uncle Walter grew up, he worked teaching these skills in developing countries throughout the Pacific. It troubled him that so many Hawaiian men and women did not have this skill he has taught to others. So in 1981 he began to work out of the Sand Island “squatter settlement,” teaching fishing to the homeless, to men coming out of prison, and to the families who lived in the fishing camps there.

Right now we’re continuing efforts to develop curriculum for this project, which will continue to teach both students and older community members the value of utilizing and maintaining available resources – from the land to the sea – in a sustainable way. Recently we received from the Kekua Foundation the gift of a koa log from the Hamakua Coast on the Big Island. From this log, under the direction of Master Carver Phillip Naone, we’re making a dug-out canoe that students will use to fish for opelu, or mackeral scad. Our young men and women will learn these skills from their kupuna, as they did when the slopes of Mauna Kaala were covered with loi and the ahupuaa was a complete system that embraced all the people of Waianae and served their needs – spiritual, cultural, and social.

The way we look at it, we’re not just building a canoe. We’re building a community.