Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 23, Number 4, 1 April 2006 — HŌKŪLEʻA RETURNING TO THE SOURCE 30TH ANNIVERSARY VOYAGE BACK TO TAHITI [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HŌKŪLEʻA RETURNING TO THE SOURCE 30TH ANNIVERSARY VOYAGE BACK TO TAHITI

By Derek Ferrar Public lnformation Specialist Photos: © Monte Costa n9S^fflBsH

pnl or early May, Hōkūle'a will set sail for Tahiti to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the ven'erable canoe's revolutionary maiden voyage in 1976. That first voyage established that Polynesian seafarers could have regularly sailed between Tahiti and Hawai'i using traditional navigation techniques, and it offered a key symbol of native pride that helped spark the resurgence of

identity known as the Hawaiian renaissance. Plans for the anniversary voyage eame t o g e t h e r q u i e k 1 y in the V

month or so, after it became clear that the new eanoe being built for Mau Piailug - the Micronesian navigation master who guided Hōkūle'a on its first voyage and then shared his precious knowledge with students in Hawai'i - would not be ready in time to sail to his home island of Satawal before the onset of typhoon season, as he had hoped. lDepending on Mau's wishes, that eanoe, the Mai.su, may now either be shipped to Micronesia or sailed there at a later date.) The Tahiti voyage, says maste'r navigator and Polynesian Voyaging Society leader Nāinoa Thompson, is intended to honor the pioneers 6f the voyaging resurgence in Hawai'i, as well as bringing together four "generations" of modern wayfarers - from original crewmembers of the first voyage to high school students who represent the future of voyaging. (Nāinoa himself was not on the eanoe for the first trip down to Tahiti, but he was aboard for the return sail to

Hawai'i.) Ka Wai Ola caught up with the extremely bus) Nāinoa, who also serves as a Kamehameha Schooh trustee and a mediator in the Forbes Cave artifaci dispute, at the Marine Education and Training Centei on Sand Island, where the voyaging society is now headquartered, thanks to a partnership with Honoluli Community College's Boat Maintenance and Repaii technical program. Before sitting down to talk, Nāinoa gave us a tour ol the facihty, whieh is hke a clubhouse for contemporar) voyaging canoes, with the Hawai'iloa's two massiv£ wood hulls out of the water and stripped down foi restoration, and the newer eanoe Hōkūalaka'i moorec around the corner from Hōkūle 'a, whieh recently eame out of dry dock. In a construction bay, HCC students are helping to build a mold that will be used tc construct a number of smaller sailing canoes intended to allow thousands of Hawai'i students to experience the Polynesian seafarin£ tradition without tying up the more costl) and resource-intensive deep-sea canoes. Nāinoa explains that the Tahiti trip is part of a five-year plan that wil include statewide educational sails as well as long-distance voyages to Micronesia and Japan, ane

\otearoa (New Zealand). "By the summer of 2007 we may have 16 voyaging canoes in Hawai'i,' he says. "Seven wil be capable of goin£ deep sea, and nin£ ■ will be basicall) more interis-

1975, when they launched Hōkūle'a, I don't think anyone could have begun to imagine that kind of growth." But that very growth,. he says, has also created an even greater need to train young leaders to take voyaging into the future. "We are strategically trying to pass the torch of leadership," he says, "and that challenge is part of why we're going to Tahiti." r #

Whaf do you see as f he main goal f / of fhis Tahiti trip? 1 / The whole theme for us this year is " / to honor our mentors and kūpuna, and /. MĒ our number one ' commitment is to / support Mau's legacy. So in addi- t tion to the construction of his new / eanoe as an extraordinary gift by / KĒ

Nā Kālai Wa'a Moku o Hawai'i f r* ' [the Hawai'i island voyaging . ditions. So on the > organization that also built the Tahiti trip we're t voyaging emoe-Makali'i], the going to bring some plan now is to honor Mau's of Mau's students from ' legacy, along with that of the Micronesia, as well i other voyaging pioneers as young students from in Hawai'i, through this Hawai'i. anniversary sail. * n f To keep Mau's legacy / You've said fhat an ' ahve, you've got to sail important aspect of this ; long distance. There j trip will be COnnecting difis nothing hke going / J ferenf generations of voyl deep-sea, because agers. Did the recent death ; that's where you f of one of Hōkūle'a's original practice real jP capfains, David Lyman, in a > navigation. And / ■ h arbor accident have somei then the other £'i thing to do with fhaf idea? pieee is train- A 'm Besides the absolute sense of empti- ; ing more X'i ness when you lose a friend, we also lost ' navigators /'j a real leader in Dave. And when you take and eap- / a moment to think about that, you start to ) tains to % 'Ē recognize that we don't have a lot of time. I perpetu- j Hōkūle 'a was born out of an extraordinarily ate the tr*T powerful vision. Herb Kāne, Ben Finney and i voyag- f ■ Tommy Holmes saw a destination that the I i n g V average person would never imagine - to build a t r a - Jf voyaging eanoe, sail it to Tahiti and raise the island JF"J| out of the sea. And to bring back dignity and honor Jī to our ancestors, who were arguably the greatest ' '. explorers on the face of the earth. I So what's important to me, when we look at the r four generations of linkage, is making sure that those ; / early pioneers - even the ones who didn't go, hke Herb ' + - are understood. Not just recognized or acknowledged.

"One of the reconections we're trying to make on this trip is with significant places in Hawai'i when it comes to voyaging," says Nāinoa Thompson. "So we're using different legs to make that eonneehon." Among the planned stops: 1 Honolua Bay, Maui, one of the initial stops on Hōkūle'a's first voyage. Kealaikahiki on Kaho'olawe, believed to be an ancient navigational training site.

but really understood for their extraordinary contributions to Hawai'i. And the way we ean honor them best is by making sure that young people know them and what they stood for. Otherwise, hke David, those memories will be lost. Whaf do you think have been some of fhe mosf important momenfs in fhe last three decades of voyaging revival? Clearly the vision, going back to Ben and Herb and Tommy Holmes. It was the awakening, and for so many of us, it captured our imagination. And the other thing was Mau coming. What sets Mau apart from any other navigator is that he eame back and 1 taught all these years. Because Mau could have helped support an event in 1976, but without the teaching, voyaging would have ended again. But I don't want to under-represent all of our other teachers, too. Mau was a teacher that we had to have, but we had a whole extraordinary pool of teachers. The arrival in Tahiti by the '76 crew - that's another pivotal point, because they were the first to go, so to me they were really the ones that took the greatest risk. What an enormous achievement that was. And then the '78 voyage, when we lost Eddie 'Aikau - as devastating as it was, it was pivotal. Eddie is as important as any other individual in voyaging, simply because of the ehoiee he made of putting everybody else in front of him, and going out and risking everything to save others. Eddie's passing broke the community in half, with one half saying voyaging isn't worth the risk and the other half instinctively saying, "We've got to keep going." We needed new leadership, someone with vision and extraordinary courage, and who understood the pieee that we didn't: eommitment. And that leader, to me, was my dad [the late civic

• Hōnaunau, on Hawai'i island, home of artist Herb Kāne, one of the original visionaries who conceived of Hōkūle 'a. • Ka Lae, or South Point, where there are ancient eanoe mooring sites and whieh Nāinoa calls "a very spiritually important plaee for voyaging." • On the retum trip, the eanoe is intended to land at Hilo ("if we navigate Ā properly, Nāinoa says) and Kalaupapa, Moloka'i, both of whieh were stops on the 1976 retum voyage. J^Ē

leader Myron "Pinky" Thompson]. In a lot of ways, he was our greatest navigator - even though he never sailed an ineh. Honestly, it's easier to sail the eanoe across the sea than it is to pull people together.

During the early voyaging time, s*~\ my dad never / J g o t mkP

involved, because it wasn't his kuleana. But after the \ ! eanoe swamped and * we lost Eddie, he asked me to get all the leadership guys together in a meeting. So we got together, but we couldn't even look at eaeh other - so mueh trauma and shame.

And then my dad eame into the room-and told us, "This ■ trip is not for you. It's for all those who will not be op the ' V eanoe that share your hopes and aspirations - it's for them 'l H and their children. So if you folks want to go back to Tahiti, 4 H then you need to understand and harness the power of vision. , ■ The only thing that will pull you together is if you ean eome up * H with a set of shared values that you all agree on and never let go." 1 V Then the meeting was pau, and in that single 40 minutes of time, ( ■ he had gotten us back on course. I ■ The other pivotal part was in convincing Mau to eome back \ - not just to navigate, but more importāntly, to teach. Because it \ D was absolutely clear: if Mau no eome, we don't go. So I went and \ M found him on an atoll in' iyiicronesia, and I sat on a driftwood log and 1 H talked to him. He was really sad, because he knew about Eddie. And 1 ■ I think in some way he felt' responsible, even though he had nothing ĒH to do with it. 1 Vi l When 'I asked him, "Can you eome teach us?" he took a long time l V I to think about it, and then just said, "Well, we'll see." Then a eouple of 1 ■ I months later,- 1 get a phone eall from his son in Saipan saying, "Ma'u will \ L I r be at your house tomorrow." He stayed two years and never went home 1 ■ [ onee, he was with us all the way. 1 '. | After that poinh everything else is kind of for me, because * V (basically these teachers created the environment in whieh we were free to 1 ■ explore and grow. So really after all of that comes everything, but it had to \ ■ eome from that sense of freedom. * ■

For you personally, fhe journey has led you off of the ■L eanoe and into board rooms, classrooms and courtrooms. Is fhat something you ever anticipated? | 1

If I were to make a self-definition of who I am, I'm a fisherman. It's the first thing that took me to the oeean, and my first l occupafion. I rarely fish anymore, but my experience in the oeean, and my understanding of how extraordinarily rare 1 and bēautiful Hawai'i is, drives me. So I don't do my work p fishing anymore; I do my work in places where I ean have an impact and inlluenee change. But I still need to sail. I need to be able to touch the ^sea. When I go on the oeean, it keeps me grounded in the importance of seeing the long term, and being very clear of the values that define the destination. Leadership roles ean be a lonely plaee, and you sometimes have to make very hard choices. So mueh of my challenge in the position of decision-making is finding a way to navigate change. To do that, I need to sail to keep me sharp and clear, to keep me grounded and strong. I need to sail to stay me. H

Want to know more? Read an extended version of thisinterview at mw OHA.com.

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