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The Next Generation

All of the carvings we see at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau today are a modern recreation and restoration of what was once there. In 1823 the original kiʻi were removed by William Ellis, who then auctioned them off in Prussia to collectors. He fortunately made a lithograph first, which is now the park's best reference material. The site fell into disrepair in the 1800s, and restoration efforts started back up with the National Park Service in the 1960s. Chief among carvers for the restoration was Anton Akoni Grace, who came from a line of South Kona carvers nine generations long. Because Ellis’s journals describe the original carvings and scene in detail, the many-year restoration project felt accurate, and by 1971, Hale o Keawe and the heiau on which it stands were complete. Several carvers worked under Grace, including the venerable Sam Kaʻai from Maui. As has always been tradition, all of the trees were large ʻōhiʻa found and collected on nearby slopes.

Of the roughly two dozen carvings on the park grounds, the majority are the 16ft.-tall kiʻi ākua (carvings of gods) arranged in a semicircle near Hale o Keawe. These are ritually dressed during the opening of specific ceremonies and are considered the central meaningful images for the heiau. Each represents a key function. “When heiau are built or restored,” says Ranger Kahakaʻioikamālie, “part of the process is defining the function of the heiau: success in fishing, primacy in war, a sacred royal mausoleum, and so forth. The specific deities chosen support its function.”

For example: “The god Lonokīnaʻu is associated with the arts of healing and identifying defects so you can repair the defect,” he explains. “Lonomakahialele is about having a discerning eye and being careful and deliberate in your decision-making. For the puʻuhonua, or refuge, that this park once was, people seeking shelter there were running to it for a lot of reasons, and must be analyzed in order to see how the puʻuhonua will support their recovery.”

The park follows a loosely cyclical restoration plan as these elaborate standing carvings age, dry and crack. Roughly 25-30 years pass before the weathered and degraded kiʻi are replaced. After the initial reconstruction of the 1960s, the second generation of restoration efforts happened in the 1980s. The third generation of restoration spanned 2001-2004. There is now a carving hui (group) outside of but related to the park, and it includes Kahakaʻioikamālie, Sam Kaʻai (now in his 80s), and prominent Maori carver Lyonel Grant. They are preparing for the next, fourth generation restoration. As is the cultural tradition, the stately, dense, native ʻōhiʻa would be the tree of choice, but the new ecological threat of Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death, a deadly introduced fungus impacting native Hawaiian forests, may require a different tree.

Take a virtual tour of the park here: https://www.nps.gov/hdp/exhibits/puho/PUHO_Tour.html

Shop the park here: https://shop.hawaiipacificparks.org/collections/puuhonua-o-honaunau

More on the ʻōhiʻa tree is here: https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/forestry/plants/ohia-lehua/

The Transformation

Let us take ourselves back, say, 500 years ago, when a solemn group of people stood in the cool, deep forest on the flank of one of Hawaiʻi Island’s volcanoes. A massive ʻōhiʻa tree rose before them high into the shifting green of the canopy. Deeply resilient, impressively patient, ʻōhiʻa trees are able to generate even on barren lava flows and slowly grow to massive proportions as the ecosystem builds around them. Birdsong looped through the branches. A ritual began with chant and offerings. This tree, eight to ten feet in circumference and an elder of the Hawaiian forest, was about to be transformed. After being cut with gratitude and skillfully carved onsite, then carefully transported downslope to the village on the coast, it might stand on or near a heiau, a Hawaiian temple. Wherever the new carving was to be placed, it would now be tasked with the important job of holding the mana, the life force, of a Hawaiian god whose powers and attributes would contribute to that location and undertaking. It would become a kiʻi.

For the Maori of New Zealand, who lost less of their traditional carving knowledge with western colonization than the Hawaiians did, kiʻi is tiki, a word you may feel more familiar with. You may think of it as a wood carving, usually with a snarly face, most often seen as “tropical” decor in bars and restaurants. If you have travelled to any part of Polynesia, that bluegreen scattering of islands dotting the sea between Australia and the Americas, you may have experience of kiʻi that is more culturally authentic. Maybe you visited a national park site, like our partner Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park on Hawaiʻi Island. In that setting, the kiʻi are striking. Imposing, even. They are arranged throughout the park grounds as well as clustered around Hale o Keawe, a restored traditional structure that was once a resting place for the bones of Hawaiian royalty. Maybe you stood in front of the 16-foot-tall single-piece wooden carvings  and felt, in your bones, that something important was represented here in what was once a place of refuge, a puʻuhonua for those fleeing war or retribution. Maybe what you felt was mana. 

How can a piece of wood have any mana at all? Former HPPA cultural interpreter and National Park Service interpretive ranger Kahakaʻioikamālie was part of a group of park employees and area residents who tended to the cultural objects, which include two dozen kiʻi, at this park site. He said, “There is always an understanding that the kiʻi and the tree it was carved from are part of the same life force as everything, as all of us, so we acknowledge, when we take the tree out of the forest (and the plant and animal community living on it) that we are destroying something, and also taking out one of our water collectors in the watershed. When we take the tree, there is a protocol for how we are going to change it and give it a new life, change its mana.” The appropriate god or god aspect is invited to take up residence in the carving, imbuing it with mana relevant to the purpose of the location. “The resulting carved images are not what we think the god looks like,” he clarified, “because gods are incomprehensible. We carve a kiʻi to look humanlike so we can form a relationship with it and relate to it.”

Part 2 will post in September.

Discover Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park: https://www.nps.gov/puho/index.htm

Learn about the ʻōhiʻa lehua tree: https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/forestry/plants/ohia-lehua/

Shop the park: https://shop.hawaiipacificparks.org/collections/puuhonua-o-honaunau

Most young adults have no idea how one becomes a national park service ranger.  
 
The Big Island of Hawaiʻi is home to four national park sites including massive Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park (HVNP). Despite this density of parks in the island community, most island teens grow up unsure how to begin national parks careers. The National Park Service structure can look intimidating from the outside and the processes for hiring seem complex, with layers and levels and different statuses, permanent and seasonal positions, terms of one or four years. Getting to that uniform seems hard and confusing. Most teens turn to simpler jobs and forget about the park service. That youthful energy and idealism becomes directed elsewhere. 

Read more: So You Want To Be A National Park Ranger

National park sites in Hawaiʻi protect more than famous lava flows, beaches, waterfalls and lush forests. In Hawaiʻi, national parks also protect and preserve Native Hawaiian cultural sites rich with meaning, history, and even mystery. One of the most intriguing mysteries swirls around the meanings of those most Hawaiian of symbol systems: petroglyphs.

Petroglyphs are shapes made by pecking into stone using very hard rock tools to break through the shiny volcanic crust of a lava field. In pre-contact Hawaiʻi, where there was no writing, no paper and ink, petroglyphs may have been meaning-laden public messages, possibly a way to commemorate a place, event, or person. The word for petroglyphs in Hawaiian: kiʻi pokahu.

Read more: Stone Stories: The Mystery and History of Hawaiian Petroglyphs

The Arrival

Uncountable generations ago, a seed or seeds from a plant in the sunflower family landed in a favorable spot on the as-yet-unpeopled Hawaiian Islands. The soil was adequate, the sun and rain were as well, the seed may have been deposited by a bird and, therefore, have arrived with a little bit of its own fertilizer. Eons would go by before humans arrived in their canoes, eons that afforded these sunflower-family plants the time to do something truly marvelous and absolutely spectacular: in this all-new environment, they evolved. And wow, did they evolve into something breathtaking.

Read more: The Story of Silverswords

National park resource managers, who are biologists, ecologists, and botanists, act as stewards for some of the rarest plants and animals on earth. The national parks sites in Hawaiʻi, justly famous for their lava flows, ocean views, stargazing and coastal trails, are also entrusted with the cultural legacy of the Native Hawaiian people.

Read more: The Amazing Women Who Work In Resources Management

Rhonda Loh is the fiercely intelligent and unfailingly kind Superintendent at HPPA partner Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park (HVNP). She knows the park the way you only can by having walked, and studied, hundreds of miles of its terrain over decades. For Loh, this is home territory. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes has been her home, and her career anchor, since she first volunteered here in the spring of 1989.

Read more: Get To Know Rhonda Loh

January is officially Volcano Awareness Month in Hawaiʻi, an island state built completely of volcanoes old and new. Hot and fluid magma circulating in the planet’s mantle seeps up to and through the crust as a plume, and emerges on the seafloor in the middle of the Pacific Plate, where it methodically builds up a shield volcano. The plate is moving N/NW and subducting under Japan/Russia at a rate of about 5-10 centimeters a year. Like a great, slow, patient conveyor belt, the plate drifts over the “hot spot” of the mantle plume and volcanoes are built, one after the other.

Read more: Volcano Awareness Month is Every Month

Have you ever jumped in line to learn a simple hula? Woven a flower lei with the helpful advice of a cultural practitioner? Have you sampled the unfamiliar foods of a completely different culture? Tried your hand at throwing a handmade fishing net, carving a simple gourd, stamping your own creative designs on textiles? Have you attended a Hawaiian cultural festival at our partner national parks in Hawaiʻi?

Read more: Experiencing Authentic Hawaiʻi at the National Parks

It seems like they have always been there, part of the park experience, a wonderful visitor center store packed with “here and only here” books, clothes, art, photography, gifts for kids, and so much more. Where did they begin? Who runs them? What is done with the proceeds?

Have you ever wondered any of that?

Read more: Where Did National Parks “Bookstores” Come From?