Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 17, Number 2, 1 Pepeluali 2000 — E Hoʻomana Hawaiʻi maoli [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

E Hoʻomana Hawaiʻi maoli

fROM AWAKEA to awakea, Jan. 8-9, across the pae'āina Hawai'i, we gathered with our families. with our eommunities. We gathered in our ahupua'a of residence, in our ahupua'a of origin. We gathered at wahipana and kauhale according to practice and preference. at high places and cardinal points, and we prayed. The 24-hour vigil, 'Aha Ho'omana. followed previous vigils, Kamaka'eha in 1993 and Keauea in 1994. We gathered with focus upon the Hawai'i maoh of the elements. the land and the sea, and the natural and human orders. We gathered with a focus on gaining and maintaining the well-being of the Hawai'i maoli, considering the past and the future. One of the directives of those who ho'omana 'ana, was to bring native plant species to our places of prayer as ho'okupu. We were asked to plant as remembrance of events past and as active contribution to revegetation present. This directive

was comphmented by the Hawai'i forestry 2010 Symposium. On Jan. 12 and 13, we gathered to review the 1994 Hawai'i Tropical Forestry Recovery Aehon Plan, to study successfīil actions to revitalize the forests of Hawai'i, to prioritize those still outstanding objectives and to develop strategies and budgets for their implementation. Eric Enos of Ka'ala Farms and Mo Moler of Ka 'Ohana o Kahikinui gave presentations on the accomphshments at Ka'ala on O'ahu and Kahikinui on Maui with regard to community based resources management. Their presentations embodied the introduction I wrote for the 1994 Action Plan, read for the forestry and offer here. "We of Hawai'i, in the most fundamental of ways, eall ourselves kama'āina, 'children of the land.' Ours is a way ffagile, enduring and vulnerable, even as are the forests, wet and dry, the water ways, on the surface and

beneath it, and the oceans, near shore and pelagic. / / 1 k Ēe are filled with won1 Ē Ider when we leam a yU new lesson from a W W venerated kumu or a I I cherished kupuna. We are filled with wonder when we go into the forest and learn something for ourselves that the elders knew all along. We are filled with wonder by what we see of the natural order around us. "We are not always filled with

wonder in the marvelous sense, however. There are those among us who have become hurt and cynical when, directly or indirectly, we know that our government has strayed from pono as managers of our natural and eultural resources. And we wonder, 'Why?' There are those among us who have become hurt and cynical when, directly or indirectly, we visit a famihar plaee and the ho'okipa no longer embraces us. And we wonder, 'Why?' "'Why?' When our land base has long been recognized as a precious and cherished thing. We divide it most fundamentally into the wao akua, the dominion of the gods, and wao kanaka, the dominion of man. For social, eeonomie and political purposes, the ahupua'a was devised and serves us still. "The ahupua'a offers us a marvelous interpretive and management tool. We ean leam of the history of cultures, natural resources, economies, and management through our study of ahupua'a. The classical lesson is that resources management is nothing new and that the interconnectedness of the clouds, the

forests, the fishponds, the seas, and kanaka has long been recognized. "As the interconnectedness of the natural order was recognized, so was the interconnectedness of the community of kanaka. The chiefs and the farmers, the healers and the fisher-folk, nā kūpuna and nā 'ōpio, lofty bom and lowly bom, men and women, every individual was a meaningful component of the whole. Protocol governed divisions of labor and the well-being of the whole. Pono prevailed. "And so, the formation of the task force and the efforts of the working groups cause some of us to be hopeful. We are full of the hope that the ahupua'a will take its rightful plaee as a model for integrated planning and an interpretive tool for sharing the cultural and natural histories of the islands; that protocol may evolve whieh shall weleome tenant and landowner, environmentalist and hunter, bureaucrat and citizen, equally to the table or the forest. We are full of hope that "E mau ke ea o ka 'āina i ka pono." ■ % 1

[?]

TRUSTEE MESSAGES

[?]