Nest of Voices:
Learning the Language of Hawai‘i
By Kathryn Wilder
A voyage to the heart of this place
“Ho‘alu!” The Hokule‘a crewmember expected a quick response to his command, but I stood there staring blankly at him. We were at Hokule‘a’s bow, our task that of lowering the jib to adapt to a change in the wind direction. He said it again—‘Alu!—and I knew exactly the look on my face that he was seeing, the one my sisters have teased me about for years. “What’s she doing?” one would ask. “Shhh,” the other would whisper, “she’s thinking!” And they’d crack up. But they were right. I could be anywhere, doing anything, and I’d stop, midair, midstream, midsentence, trying, often with great effort, to wrap my brain around some elusive, unimaginable thing.
“‘Alu!” the crewmember said for the last time, scaring me into dropping the line I’d clenched onto while awaiting comprehension of that simple word. The line zipped up the mast and the jib accordioned into his arms and that’s what he’d wanted, not to scare me but for me to ho‘alu, to slacken the line so the sail could go down. I finally saw the picture, saw the necessary action happen and how I’d stopped it with my confusion over a word and my attempt to leaf quickly through the very limited Hawaiian dictionary in my head.
I spend a lot of time in the real Hawaiian Dictionary. One word will lead to another, and each one can become a story, readily equipped with setting, place, often characters and, sometimes, conflict. In this instance I was looking up Na Mahoe, the name of Kaua‘i’s soon-to-be sailing voyaging canoe. Na makes something plural, that much I knew, and I also knew that Mahoe referred to twins. It made perfect sense that a double-hulled sailing canoe would bear that name—The Twins, for its twin hulls—yet I knew there would be more to the story. There always is, when it comes to the Hawaiian language.
Mahoe. n. 1. Twins. No mystery there. Mahoe also refers to two native trees that bear, as it were, single or twin fruits. I kept reading. There, at 3. “(Cap.) Names of months and stars. See Mahoe Hope, Mahoe Mua.” I did. And, as I finally suspected, Mahoe Mua is the name of a twin star, the “first twin.” Mahoe Hope, the “last twin.” These stars—Castor and Pollux in the Western world, and, more commonly, the twins (duh!)—mark the heads of Gemini (duh, again).
The dictionary thinks that Mahoe Mua is probably Pollux, which rises before Castor and is the brighter of the two. That the dictionary is not sure attests to the fracture and near loss of a language as a result of suppression by foreign powers; that the dictionary is making a good guess is proof that language lives in more than words—it lives in the culture and traditions of a people. In Hawaiian, sibling titles are more complex than English brothers and sisters. Kaikuahine hanau mua, for example, means older sister of a brother. This may be confusing to foreigners, but it makes sense and is important to Hawaiians, for whom the order of birth defines, in part, a person’s responsibilities, if not destiny. Here in the Hawaiian Dictionary the tradition lives on: The order of the twins’ rising, as indicated by mua, or hope, is significant to contemporary Hawaiian noninstrument navigators.
Before I closed the dictionary to look for Na Mahoe on a Polynesian Voyaging Society star chart, I skimmed the page again to see what I may have missed. Near the top I saw mahinahina, pale moonlight. We used to live in an old bungalow at a place called Mahinahina Kai. It has long since disappeared, but memories of pale moonlight over soft summer seas remain. I fingered down the page and a word hooked my attention. I had overlooked it earlier, but now the hook sank deep: mahoa. To travel together in company, as canoes. A letter different from Mahoe and there’s a whole new meaning, and in that meaning, the story.
In a word, the voyaging canoes of Hawai‘i traveling together—I could see them across the water just like quiet moonlight in my mind, sailing in a fleet, not tight, but within sound of each other, within pu sound, the blowing of the conch, and the people sleeping in the hale near the beach hear the pu and rise somewhat clumsily, rubbing their eyes and stepping into night’s end, the early dawn, seeing the wa‘a kaulua, the double-hulled voyaging canoes, on the faint horizon, knowing from the pu that this is friend, not enemy, it is family coming. Cousins! Welina! Welcome! And the outriggers on the beach get pushed into the water and paddled out to meet the voyaging canoes as food is collected onshore and people assemble for the formal greeting. On the decks, too, people scurry about, making ready.
All in a word. Mahoa. To travel together in company. Na wa‘a e mahoa aku ana: canoes traveling together. Like their younger siblings—the canoes born after the centuries-distant arrival in Hawai‘i of the first wa‘a kaulua—the double-hulled voyaging canoes now mahoa again, sailing together between islands, between island nations. That’s the story, and as I set the dictionary aside I marveled that in Hawaiian there is a word for traveling together, and that the simile of canoes traveling together is the one chosen to illustrate that word. This says so much about this place, about Hawai‘i nei. Language is the culture that creates it.
My interest in learning Hawaiian comes from speaking Pidgin English as a child, from listening to Hawaiian songs, from following the story lines of place names, song lyrics, individual words. And it’s more than that. Hawaiian is a language of place, so you learn the story of the land itself when you trace the meanings of the words. But learning Hawaiian involves much more than dictionary time. It involves hundreds of hours spent with kumu and other haumana—teachers and students—listening and then actually speaking. It involves being among Hawaiian speakers, and this in itself is not easily accomplished—there are not a lot of places where Hawaiians congregate to ‘olelo Hawai‘i, to speak Hawaiian, and those places are not always open to outsiders. But I’m not in this for easy. I’m in it to learn.
I met someone a few years back, a newcomer fluent in Hawaiian, who spoke of living in France and training for the Tour de France. “I lived there for five years,” he said, “and I learned the language. I live here now—why wouldn’t I show Hawai‘i the same respect due France?”
Some people think that Hawaiian is a dead or dying language, largely because they are not in the places where Hawaiian is spoken. When missionaries came to Hawai‘i in the early 1800s, they taught Hawaiians to write the language and Hawaiians quickly became literate. Written literacy opened a door to a form of recording the history and genealogy of their people, and today the works of early Hawaiian scholars are invaluable assets in documenting and perpetuating a culture, as are the Hawaiian newspapers of the mid-1800s, the first newspapers published west of the Rocky Mountains. But the written word is not the last word, at least not in Hawaiian.
Before the Western world moved this far west, Hawaiians didn’t need to write. Their stories had been carried forth for generations by way of oral tradition. Chants, some of them hundreds of lines long, were memorized and repeated flawlessly in ceremonies and rituals for centuries, and new chants were created along the way. This plethora of story is Hawai‘i’s cultural encyclopedia, and people continue to refer to the chants for guidance, documentation and clarity. Unfortunately, not all the chants are intact, and many have been lost altogether.
There is a gap today in speakers of Hawaiian that reflects American influence. All across the North American continent indigenous peoples were punished and beaten for speaking their native languages; right up into the 1950s, school-age Native American children were still being hauled away from their homes and forced into Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, their languages cut off along with their hair. Things weren’t so different in Hawai‘i. Although the missionaries had initially taught and supported Hawaiian literacy, once Hawaiians could read and write in English the annihilation of the Hawaiian language began. As on the continent, the native children of Hawai‘i were pried away from their language, and the last decades of the 19th century saw a dramatic reduction in schools conducted in Hawaiian. In 1880, there were 150 such schools, with 4,078 students; in 1887, one school with 26 students stayed intact; by 1902, not one remained. Some kupuna, elders, spoke to their mo‘opuna in Hawaiian, but those grandchildren often suffered such internal conflict about being Hawaiian that they resisted learning the language.
Manaleo, Hawaiians for whom Hawaiian is their first language, were in decline. Before the language disappeared, however, Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert captured much of it in the Hawaiian Dictionary, first published in 1957. “Because language reflects culture,” says Elbert in the preface to the latest edition, “when a culture goes, so too goes much of the language.” Street signs may remain, but many of the place names are forgotten. The family names remain, but the meanings are sometimes lost. The connection, the genealogical line to the past, becomes badly frayed, and, without genealogy, without that past, Hawaiians have been in danger of losing a thread to themselves.
But Hawaiians, kanaka maoli, are a irrepressible people, and in the 1970s they decided to take a stand. While the American Indian movement was battling with the FBI in Pine Ridge and women and antiwar protestors were burning bras and draft cards in California and African-American athletes were raising fists at the Olympics, Hawaiians were renewing energy and courage and regaining momentum in a two-centuries-long effort to save their culture. While highly visible leaders like George Helm, who fought and died to save the island of Kaho‘olawe from further destruction by the U.S. military, stepped to the front line, others took a quieter tact. The slack key musicians, for example—people like Dennis Kamakahi—re-infiltrated Hawaiian music with Hawaiian language. Hokule‘a, the first Polynesian voyaging canoe to sail without use of navigational equipment in half a millennium, traveled waters connecting Polynesian nations and Polynesian languages, and turned distant relatives into ‘ohana, closely related families that could communicate with one another in the language of the sea. Other families, including the ‘ohana Kanaka‘ole, managed to keep language and tradition intact despite the dominant culture, and continued to pass along through their halau hula the oli and mele, chants and songs of their forbears. College students started studying the language.
Following Elbert’s reasoning, when a language is revived, so too is a culture. In 1983, a group of Hawaiian-speaking educators met on the island of Kaua‘i to discuss the fate of the Hawaiian language. At that time, most native speakers were over 70 years old. Less than 50 children under the age of 18 were fluent. Things looked dismal. But Maori activists had begun opening centers for preschoolers in Aotearoa, where the children were taught in Maori, and this inspired the newly formed preschool, ‘Aha Punana Leo. E ola ka ‘olelo Hawai‘i became its motto. The Hawaiian language shall live! A Punana Leo preschool was established on Kaua‘i, where the last community of Hawaiian-speaking children outside Ni‘ihau could mingle with English-speaking children. The founding of a Hawai‘i Island preschool followed; and families put their children in the care of Hawaiian speakers and took on the challenge of learning the language themselves in order to support the keiki at home.
Punana Leo means nest of voices, and from this nest fledgling speakers lifted their wings in a movement that gave life to an ailing culture. Despite a state law in existence since the time of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by the American government in 1893 that prohibited teachers from using Hawaiian as the classroom language in elementary and secondary school, students leaving Punana Leo needed accommodations in the public school system. ‘Aha Punana Leo was determined to support them. In 1986, under pressure from Hawaiian activists, the law was repealed, and today in Hawai‘i there are 18 Hawaiian language immersion programs with more than 2,000 students from preschoolers to seniors.
In 1999, Nawahiokalani‘opu‘u of Hawai‘i Island and Anuenue of O‘ahu graduated the first classes of Hawaiian language immersion students. In 2005, for the first time in more than a hundred years, a Moloka‘i public school graduated students taught in Hawaiian. People came forth islandwide for the ceremony, bringing with them armloads of lei for the seven students and food for the pa‘ina, the party that followed the ceremony. Also this year, the largest class of immersion students to graduate in the state, 12 young women and men from Kula Kaiapuni o Maui ma Kekaulike at King Kekaulike High School, went through intensive training and protocol to prepare for the historic day. The ceremony, conducted in Hawaiian, lasted more than two hours.
That there were 12 Maui seniors is both wonderful and sad—it’s the largest class to graduate, yet it’s a small handful of Hawaiian students and ‘ohana who are able to take on this demanding pursuit.
See the picture,” my kumu often tells me. I am not a quick learner, which is to say I’m a slow learner, and a frustrated one at that, as I’m not an audio learner, either. I need to see, then do (next time I’m attached to that jib line I’ll probably be able to function, though there are no guarantees). This makes learning Hawaiian difficult, at best. I come from a culture dependent on literacy, a culture in which learning the three R’s is more highly valued than understanding the cycles of the moon or the changes of the seasons. Yet my kumu ‘olelo Hawai‘i does not let us write during class. After, maybe, but not during. No note-taking at all, unless you’re willing to risk her wrath. “Hawaiian is an oral language,” she tells us, “not a written one! You learn by listening.”
My kumu has been teaching Hawaiian for more than 25 years. She is one of those mo‘opuna whose grandmothers took them aside when they were small and spoke to them in the voice of Hawai‘i. She carries forth that voice. She is that voice, which echoes in the hundreds of students she has inspired to learn to ‘olelo Hawai‘i, to speak Hawaiian, and to do it well. Her children and husband are also fluent. Hawaiian is their language, and, wherever she is, wherever they are, they are in a place where the language is spoken. And it is possible, even for an outsider, to enter that place.
I may not know the words or sentence patterns I’m hearing; I may bear on my face that look that my sisters still tease me about; I may be unable to respond in the voice of Hawai‘i, but I see the picture: If you honor a place, you learn its language. And so I brave my own limitations, I abstain from taking notes, I accept humiliation and I listen. For listening to the language of Hawai‘i is a voyage into the heart of this place.
“See the picture,” Kumu says, and, when I do, when I step beyond my culture’s approach to teaching and learning, to reading and writing, hiki ke maopopo ia‘u, I can understand. Mahoa, canoes traveling together. ‘Alu, and the jib goes down into waiting arms. ‘Ölelo Hawai‘i, and I see dozens of Hawaiian immersion students from Kaiapuni o Maui ma Kekaulike standing and chanting the king’s genealogy, each class sitting down when it gets to a certain point in its learning until only the graduating class remains. Together, these 12 students, who have traveled in each other’s company for more than 12 years, chant more than 70 pages of genealogy—from memory. The picture? Ola ka ‘olelo Hawai‘i! The Hawaiian language lives!
KATHRYN WILDER works for the University of Hawai‘i as coordinator of Navigating Change, an educational program for Hawai‘i’s youth based on Höküle‘a’s voyages and emphasizing ocean and environmental health
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Special thanks to Bea Woodward for passing this on!
Last updated on November 05, 2005