A weekend with the Protect Kaho'olawe Ohana

entry two

Going to bed early the first night meant I had missed an important getting-to-know-you opportunity with the group. It also meant I got more sleep than everybody else. Waking up there on the island came with a magical feeling of excitement and enchantment, which carried us, dreamlike, to the gathering place at the sound of the pu. These instruments cried to us, from across the camp, calling us to come, to get up and to get ready. There were two or three, conches you might call them, but here they are pu, and sound like flutes or miniature bugles. Certainly enough to wake you, but perhaps my enjoyment of the dawn and the sound of the pu had more to do with my straight eight hours than anything else. Certainly there were others less enchanted than I.


Before dawn we gathered to greet the sun:

E ala e!
Ka la i ka hikina
i ka moana
ka moana hohonu
Pi'i ka lewa
ka lewa nu'u
i ka hikina
aia a ka la!
E ala e!

Arise
The sun in the east!
in the ocean
the deep dark ocean
Climb into the sky
the highest level of the sky
in the east
there is the sun
Arise!

We leave then, for our full day's hike. The ground is bruised and cracked; damaged by erosion after over-grazing by domestic animals and intensive bombing by the military. Scrub lies close to the ground and in clumps, holding the earth together here and there. Kiawe trees grow in the shallow valleys on either side of us and below the ridge we climb, taking just over an hour, to the top. From here it is all downhill to pua'iwi and the bell stone where we process barefoot in accordance with ritual, meditating, and hear from the Kua about the gods and the people of the land. It is 9am. On this promontory overlooking a wide ocean and Maui to the North, sat the navigators who learned to travel by sea to neighbouring islands and to Tahiti. Here also worshipped the people speaking to the land using the bell stone which resonates when struck, a sort of a drum that would murmur on the wind.


The group splits up and I go with the onward party to the adze quarry. Strolling through the desert land in the sun, and looking left and right at the warning signs of "UXO" - unexploded ordnance, that's bombs to you and me, I think to myself. After one of the Kua trained on the ordnance safety falls ill, there is debate over whether to proceed. In the end we do go on to the quarry. This site was hard to gain a feel for, being largely eroded, though you could plainly see adze lying around everywhere. Shaped pieces do turn up occasionally, discarded by their makers as broken or inferior, but obviously quite valuable to today's Hawai'ians. Many have been taken from the site by visitors. Our guide to the quarry, Uncle Maka, wants to see the quarry returned to its original use. Currently the authorities claim it to be too dangerous. Our walk home was by a longer route to include the shrines on the North Eastern edge of the island. From the top here I saw Big Island, Maui, Moloka'i and Lana'i. It is breathtaking here, a feeling of being embraced and sheltered by the islands; a country of itself inward looking and whole. Later I recognised that feeling as lacking from Honolulu where the horizon is outward, I feel on an island there.

the erosion is shocking

That evening John took me to a special place and gave me opihi - shellfish he kicked free from the rocks and gouged from their shells, washed in the sea, and ate - saying Ellen and I were representing cousins from Aotearoa New Zealand, and what's theirs is ours. The opihi tasted wonderful.