Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 34, Number 5, 1 May 2017 — He Au Hou: Storytelling in a new era [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

He Au Hou: Storytelling in a new era

By Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada Hawaiian culture and mo'olelo are often described as ancient, yet we Hawaiians have long enfolded new techniques and technologies into our cultural practice. Metal hooks for lūhe'e, zithers and 'ukulele for mele, cotton cloth for pā'ū, ehieken wire for imu. When we began our move toward widespread alphabetic literacy in the 1820s, the wooden Ramage press that had eome over with the missionaries was cutting edge technology. Today the digital realm is an 'āina many of us inhabit, and we have to ensure that our mo'olelo and worldview shape this virtual landscape. Kanaeokana - a newly formed network of 'ōlelo Hawai'i, Hawaiian culture and 'āina-based schools (preschool through university level) engaged in collaborative efforts to strengthen Hawaiian education - has recognized this need to tell our own stories. "We have to bring Hāloa and his descendants into this digital space," says Dr. Kēhaunani Abad, who directs Kealaiwikuamo'o, a division within Kamehameha Schools KūamahiCommunity Education dedicated to supporting Kanaeokana. With the proliferation of easily accessible digital and social media, Abad asserts that "we need digital artisans to work alonuside

hula dances, chanter: orators, scholars, farmers to share mo'olelo; and ideally, these I digital artisans would actually be hula dancers, chanters, orators, scholars and farmers." Kanaeokana: The I Kula Hawai'i

Network has inaugurated a series of free workshops entitled

"He Au Hou" to give students skills and opportunities to tell mo'olelo in these I new digital genres. It is a series of workshops on creative writing and art for this new au, this new era, we I live in, but also to push the au, the

current, in new direcI tions. He Au Hou began on March 10, 2017, with a

successful one-day workshop on "Telling Mo'olelo through Comics" led by the New York Times bestselling author Marjorie Liu, who

worked on p o p u 1 a r Marvel titles

such as "X-23," "The Astonishing X-Men," "Han Solo," and "Black Widow." The showcase workshop of the He Au Hou series, however, is the upcoming three-week free workshop on "Telling Mo'olelo through Video Games," held in collaboration with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures from Canada. AbTec and IIF have held four previous workshops for indigenous youth in the Montreal area in their successful "Skins: Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling in Digital Media" series. Skins was developed by AbTeC co-founders Jason Edward Lewis, Professor of Computation Arts and co-founder of AbTeC, and Mohawk artist Skawennati, who says of the original Skins series: "We developed the project to encourage First Nations youth to be producers of media, not just consumers of it." The inaugural He Au Hou collaboration between Kanaeokana, AbTeC, and IIF brings together scholars, artists, technologists and practitioners to plant seeds for the future, carving out space for Kānaka Maoli in the

cyber world and giving new mana to our mo'olelo. Lewis, who is Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Sāmoan,

further says that these workshops allow us to imagine how "individuals and communities might leverage digital media as a tool for preserving and advancing culture and languages, and for projecting a self-determined image out into a mediasphere awash in stereotypical portrayals of Native characters." Through He Au Hou, Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace + Initiative for Indigenous Futures will present a unique curriculum that begins with traditional sto-

rytelling and proceeds to teach participants how to tell a story in a very new way - through virtual environments and video games. The students learn important skills for the production of video games and virtual environments, such as game design, art direction, 3D modeling and animation, sound and computer programming. The workshops are taught by a mix of game-industry professionals, indigenous artists and academics, and a core team of senior game design students from Concordia University in Montreal. By the end of the workshops, the students will have created a playable level of a video game based on a mo'olelo they have chosen, whieh ean be further developed and polished after the workshop. Besides the important training mentioned above, some participants will be invited to facilitate future workshops and projects, ensuring that we create generational abundance in this virtual 'āina the same way we do on our real-world 'āina, with kaikua'ana nurturing kaikaina, all for the benefit of the lāhui. ■

KAMA&okamA

Kanaeokana is a collaborative network of schools working to strengthen Hawaiian education. - Photo: Courtesy Kanaeokana

He Au Hou workshops will teach participants to share mo'olelo through video games, similar to the Skins series. - Photo: vimeo.com/channels/skins.; At right, digital rendering of Hawai'i's terrain. - Photo: Courtesy Kanaeokana