FLUX No. 36 Utopias

UTOPIAS

Editor’s Letter

Contributors FLUX PHILES

24 | Music

Twelvenoon & Midnite

28 | Plants

Silverswords

36 | Poetry

Merwin

44 | Culture

A Hua He Inoa

A HUI HOU

192 | Homecoming

FEATURES

50 | Human Nature

Faced with a warming climate, coral researchers in Kāneʻohe are working to reverse engineer the future through “assisted evolution.” Writer Timothy A. Schuler follows their scientific crusade and the queries their work poses for all of us.

66 | Young, Wild & Free

In a weekend camping excursion on Moloka‘i, children learn how to live off the land. Senior editor Rae Sojot channels her inner keiki to chronicle the experience.

78 | One Day

Ten photographers across Hawai‘i document the quiet corners of their daily lives. In the mundane and majestic, this photo essay unfolds to reveal life in the islands within the span of a single day.

96 | Restoring Kure

After seven months spent on Kure Atoll, photographer and conservationist Zachary Pezzillo shares reflections on the constant field work happening on the northernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago.

106 | Idyll Dreams

In the late 1970s, the infamous commune known as Taylor Camp was burned to ash. Writer Christian Cook recollects its free-spirited ascent and fall from grace.

 Image by Josiah Patterson

TABLE OF

CONTENTS

| DEPARTMENTS |

SPECIAL SECTION

ARTISTS

These conversations with Pacific creatives, who are exhibiting work with a sense of urgency and thoughtprovoking timeliness, speak to issues surrounding colonial histories, disenfranchised narratives, and stereotypes about Hawai‘i.

 Aotearoa artist Lisa Reihana ambitiously animates, examines, and challenges the imperialist gaze on indigenous peoples and cultures. Her exhibition Emissaries was recently on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Image by Meagan Suzuki.

ANYWHERE ALOHA ®

Kimi Werner World Champion Spearfisher and Freediver

Super Corals

Scientists predict only 10 percent of the planet�s corals will live past the year 2050. Dive into the Gates Coral Lab, at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, where a research team is making strides to fight climate change by developing resilient coral reefs. The restoration effort is one of the first to use corals selected specifically for thermal tolerance. “We might not be putting out the most biomass of any restoration project,” the lab’s principal investigator Crawford Drury said, “but what we are putting out, we hope is still going to be there in 75 years.”

ON THE COVER

Deep in Pālolo Valley, children zipline through the acreage of a family home built around sustainability. Seventy-five percent of the house’s building materials are salvaged or repurposed, including this postwar cauldron found buried on a Maui property. Photographer and writer IJfke Ridgley captured this whimsical scene for the piece, “The Build Up,” on page 150, about architect Aaron Ackerman and his dream to create a green living space in sync with its environment.

fluxhawaii.com /fluxhawaii @fluxhawaii @fluxhawaii

EDITOR’S LETTER

The night after the last presidential election, I met up with a couple of friends to eat Mexican food in Chinatown.

We were in immediate shell shock upon learning whom this country’s leader was about to be. Being in Hawai‘i, diverse and loyally blue, we admitted our casual ignorance of the reality that there is a very real voting block of very real people forcible enough to bring such a man into office. We ate our tacos, talked story over cheap beer, felt despondent and defenseless, but comforted by each other’s company. Eventually, the conversation turned to art. As citizens in creative industries—both of the friends are curators for galleries and museums—we chatted about what we could contribute in our small ways to this pressing moment, about where the intersections between our day jobs and resistance might meet. Editors, creative directors, and curators are often viewed in the community as gatekeepers (though I would campaign for a less possessive and hierarchical term, such as custodian or steward), and part of the job is to have a historical and instinctual sense for the current zeitgeist, where it’s been, where it is, and more importantly, where it should go. The fortunate consequence of unfortunate times is that it often produces a formidable stream of art across disciplines. I remember relishing the opinions of my friends about what we might demand of our artists moving forward. We came to a consensus that the work doesn’t require an explicit political message, but if you’re not going to magnify, decentralize, or challenge a point of view, if your reflex is to remain pedestrian and not be deeply personal, then why even do it? As individual rights come

under daily assault by this administration, it is not a time for artists to be shy about who they are, what they feel, what they think. This is certainly not the time for painting rainbows over mountains and calling it art.

Since art by its nature is in pursuit of some kind of ideal, for this issue on Utopias, it felt necessary to share who we consider to be vanguards in this regard. As producers of conversation-sparking pieces in their own rights, we wanted to present working artists in conversation (page 116) to illustrate the expansive and imaginative ways we can approach, navigate, and think about our world.

This issue also reaffirms that we need to broaden our definition of an artist. If the role of one is to shift another’s consciousness, then Hawai‘i’s scientists engineering super corals (page 50), Hawaiian language speakers naming interstellar discoveries (page 42), and an uncle teaching the next generation how to cleave closer to the land (page 66) are also artists. Whether they succeed or fail, there is something utopian about a world where people are endlessly striving.

With aloha,

Matthew Dekneef EDITORIAL DIRECTOR @mattdknf

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CONTRIBUTORS

Lindsay Arakawa

Born and raised in ‘Aiea, O‘ahu, Lindsay Arakawa has lived and worked on the west and east coasts of the continental U.S. She was formerly a social media strategist and creative for Refinery29, and has since consulted for Vice Media, Girlboss, and Women’s Health Japan. With 10 years of industry experience, Arakawa has developed a deep understanding of the different facets of social media while learning how to navigate the more personal benefits and setbacks it has on our daily lives, which she reflects on in her piece on page 172. “Having lived in and worked in major cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Tokyo, the chances of me being more dependent on my phone might be higher than most,” Arakawa says. “Because so much of my work revolves around me being on my phone, it’s been interesting for me to navigate my feelings towards this dependency.” Arakawa resides in Tokyo, Japan.

Emily A. Benton

Emily A. Benton is a poet, writer, editor, and coorganizer for MIA Honolulu, a monthly reading series for Hawai‘i writers. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge: Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Art, and ZYZZYVA: A San Francisco Journal of Arts & Letters. She has also contributed to outlets such as Honolulu Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. Her tribute to the late American poet W.S. Merwin, on page 36, is her first piece for the magazine.

“Merwin was one of our few contemporaries capable of adopting the idyllic poet’s life,” she says. “Who wouldn’t want to ditch the day job, move to the country, till the earth, and read and write for the rest of their lives?” Benton also edited a series of poems by local writers inspired by the photo essay on page 78 in this issue, published exclusively on Instagram at @fluxhawaii.

Wayne Levin

Wayne Levin is an oceanic photographer whose subject matter has ranged from surfers to shipwrecks. He was an instructor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and later founded the photography program at La Pietra, Hawaii School for Girls. Levin’s photography, published in the story “Human Nature” on page 50, is fueled by his passion for conservation. His 2001 project Other Oceans documented aquariums throughout the United States and Japan where he implied that more resources are attributed to “hi-tech mini oceans” than our natural oceans. Levin continues to focus his work on conservation matters. “My goal is to show a very real and visible effect of climate change,” he says. “Not only did El Niño of 2014 to 2016 have a devastating effect on Hawaiʻi’s ecosystem, but it was one of many ‘canaries in a coal mine’ warnings of the disaster humanity faces, unless we do something about it now.”

Zachary Pezzillo

Photographer and conservationist Zachary Pezzillo grew up on Maui with a deep appreciation for native species and the biodiversity found throughout Hawai‘i. In April 2019, he returned from his second winter season on Kure Atoll and works full time for the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project. Pezzillo wrote about his recent visit to Kure, published with images he shot while there, on page 96. “Despite Kure’s sheer remoteness, this once utopian habitat has struggled against both invasive species and an ongoing salvo of discarded trash and debris carried to its pristine reefs and shores by currents from faraway places,” Pezzillo says. “It was a privilege to spend time there and I am optimistic about its future. It was a life-changing experience and left me with a profound and deep appreciation of the important role we all play as caretakers of this extraordinary planet on which we live.”

 The otherworldly landscape of Haleakalā. Image by Bailey Rebecca Roberts.

UTOPIAS

“If you don’t get heaven right, you can’t get earth right.”—Brother Noland

Redemption Songs

In their debut musical release, two singersongwriters reflect on their experiences with depression and faith.

TEXT BY KYLIE YAMAUCHI

IMAGES BY MEAGAN SUZUKI

It was the morning after Christmas when Gabriel Miller and Freddy Leone, the singersongwriters behind Twelvenoon & Midnite, herded me toward a white SUV in a Starbucks parking lot. I had only just met them for coffee to ask them about Season , their new EP, but Miller and Leone preferred I listen to it instead. “Should I sit shotgun or in the back?” I asked. Miller pondered before answering. “Backseat,” he said, “then you can get surround sound.” Leone took the driver’s seat and turned on the car. Once we were settled, Miller swiveled around to look at me. A kolohe grin spread across his face. Leone fidgeted in his seat with a smile just as wide. “OK, you ready?” Miller asked.

Our meeting marked two weeks before the release of Season . From the way they acted, it may have well been the first time a public listener would hear their collection of five songs. Miller pressed play on his phone and a track titled “Sin” filled the car.

The song, which Miller wrote, began with wind chimes and ambient noise. The peaceful instrumental drew me into a spiritual space. I envisioned myself surrounded by nature. “I can’t believe these words you said to me,” Miller sang on the track. “Smoking, drinking, wash it down slowly.” He sang each line carefully, pausing between every couple words as if they were drawn out of him in religious confession, or like someone in a drunken stupor. Either was a possibility, considering the song juxtaposed themes of Christian faith and intoxication. “Every time I choose to do this, it’s a sin,” he continued defeatedly.

Miller wrote “Sin” as a testimony to the darker moments of his depression. Having been abused as a youth, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol. According to Miller, his depression grew over the years, eventually driving him to attempt suicide. “And many times, I’ve been looking to get away from here,” he sang in “Sin.” “And many times, I’ve been searching for a way out of here.” After his attempt, Miller found himself on the floor, still alive, the presence of God lingering in the room. Miller refocused his life on growing his Christian faith, a decision that alleviated his depression.

The haunting song came to a peaceful end, and Miller caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “You like it, yeah?” he laughed. Then it was Leone’s turn to play a song he wrote and composed.

 Freddy Leone and Gabriel Miller form the duo Twelvenoon & Midnite.

“Two-thirty” transitioned us into a rhythm and blues mood. There was an immediate distinction between the singers’ voices, aside from their natural tones. In “Two-thirty,” Leone didn’t treat his words cautiously but declared them defiantly. “Not myself, can’t recognize me,” he sang. “Zero confiding, there’s nothing guiding.” “Twothirty” is also about depression, which Leone developed a couple years back.

According to Miller, Leone could hardly imagine himself writing and performing music. After Leone attended a live public performance by Miller and friends, Miller encouraged Leone to join them next time. “Nah, it’s not for me,” Leone said. At that moment, Miller recognized the symptoms of depression in his childhood friend. Leone’s voice intensified through the speakers: “It’s so loud in here, yet I don’t want to leave, I crave your air so bad and I just want to breathe.”

It was hard to reconcile that the singers behind these songs filled with hurt and struggle were the duo in front of me, two men throwing out goofy dance moves.

“Two-thirty” faded to an end, and like “Sin,” its finishing lyrics avoided closure. I found myself wanting more of their stories, to find out how Miller and Leone had gotten to a point where they could move forward from their darkest moments. Miller turned to face me and asked, “OK, how about one more?” The next song, titled “Beautiful Life,” started with the lyric, “peace like a river,” and was sung by both of them.

 Season shares the mentalhealth journeys of the musicians and how they found healing in their religious faith.

 For more information on upcoming shows, visit twelvenoonandmidnite.com.

Paradise Found

Before the arrival of humans, the Hawaiian archipelago was a radical laboratory sequestered in the center of Earth’s largest ocean.

TEXT BY SHANNON WIANECKI

IMAGES BY BAILEY REBECCA ROBERTS

Around five million years ago, a tiny California tarweed seed blew out to sea. Perhaps it was swept up by a jet stream. Maybe it clung to the feathers of a migrating plover or rode the marine currents on a sturdy bit of flotsam. Somehow, this wee speck traveled more than 2,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to land on a fresh slab of lava: most likely the brand new island of Kaua‘i.

Rains came and watered the seed. The sun fed it, and it grew. In this wholly unfamiliar landscape, it bloomed, unfurled a scant, daisy-like flower and produced seeds of its own. With each successive generation, the tarweed’s descendants warped to their home. The mutants survived and thrived. Their genes bent in directions better able to tolerate the tropical sun, salt air, and volcanic soil. They bent until they weren’t tarweeds anymore but something new. Amazingly, they didn’t all bend in one direction. That single seed gave rise to a multitude of novel species: the 30-plus shrubs, trees, and vines known as the Silversword Alliance.

If this sounds like a superhero origin story, well, it kind of is. The pioneer species that found their ways here could endlessly perfect themselves, honing their compatibilities to the Hawaiian archipelago’s precise microclimates. Had Darwin sailed to these shores after the Galapagos, the pages of Origin of the Species would have burst with examples of endemic Hawaiian splendor: happy-faced spiders, 50-plus types of honeycreeper birds, and 800 drosophila flies, each with an identifiable stained-glass wing pattern. Hawai‘i would’ve blown Darwin’s mind.

The Hawaiian Islands were an evolutionary utopia for two reasons: isolation and height. Once a species arrived here, it couldn’t easily mix with others of its kind a few counties over. The Pacific was too great a moat to cross for casual encounters. Each new recruit had to forge its own tribe. And the height of Hawai‘i’s volcanoes—the planet’s tallest mountains when measured from their bases at the sea floor—meant that new arrivals had a plethora of climates to inhabit: coastal dunes, lava plains, rainforests, dry forests, sub-alpine forests, and mountaintops sometimes capped in snow. The diversity of terrain signaled both opportunity and challenge. A species that flourished at sea level had to reinvent itself in order to endure the frigid, wind-blasted atmosphere found at the 13,800-foot summit of Maunakea.

 Prior to human contact, the Hawaiian archipelago offered an ideal location for pioneer species to develop.

Hawai‘i offered its first inhabitants just about everything, but what it lacked was equally important. Reptiles, amphibians, social insects like ants and termites—entire taxonomies couldn’t survive the type of journey the tarweed endured. There are only two endemic Hawaiian mammals: the monk seal, because it could swim here, and the hoary bat, because it could fly. Every other furred creature came later and had the help of humans.

And so, as the islands emerged one by one out of the sea, they were populated by the humbler half of the food chain: plants, insects, and birds. Free from the pressure of grazing buffalo, deer, or giraffes, plant species shed their thorns, toxins, and means of long-distance travel. Birds became fat and flightless, swelling to fill niches of missing beasts. Two caterpillars turned carnivorous—the sole examples of meat-eating moth larvae in the world. The ecosystems that emerged here over the millennia were … weird.

Which brings us back to the Silversword Alliance. That solo tarweed hit the Hawaiian Islands running. It didn’t just

morph into new species, but three new genera. The most famous of its descendants is, of course, the silversword. The spikyleafed rebel chose the archipelago’s most extreme environment as its home: the parched peaks of Haleakalā and Maunakea. The silversword is almost alone in its ability to withstand the intense solar radiation and spiking temperatures found on Hawaiian summits, though it looks a bit like a giant metallic hedgehog snuffling around the red volcanic cinders.

The silversword’s succulent leaves are covered in silver reflective hairs that keep the plant from frying in the sun or freezing at night. It can live more than 50 years. Before dying, it produces a single magnificent inflorescence that towers up to six feet tall, bearing tiny fuchsia blossoms that resemble those of its distant progenitor. The plant’s powerful perfume lures Hawaiian hylaeus bees, who bury their faces in its pollen. Native drosophila flies pay visits, as do native tephritid flies, who feed on its fruit. In an otherwise stark terrain, the flamboyant silversword is an ecosystem unto itself.

 The eye-catching silversword is protected by silver reflective hairs which allow it to thrive on mountainous summits.

Less famous than its cousin, the greensword possesses equal superpowers. It dwells in some of the wettest spots on Earth, such as Pu‘u Kukui bog. The soil here is so saturated and acidic that tree species are dwarfed, growing only one or two feet tall. The greensword looms over this miniature canopy, dangling a chandelier of blossoms in the ever-present mist. Over on Kaua‘i, the iliau resembles a greensword on stilts, but belongs to a separate genus. Other members of the alliance include the koholāpehu (Dubautia latifolia), a ropey vine found only on Kaua‘i, and the na‘ena‘e (Dubautia reticulata), a tree in the east Maui rainforest. If it weren’t for their shared genus name, one might never know they are related.

All these idiosyncratic species sprang from a single pioneer many eons ago, and all are now imperiled by habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change. When humans finally found Hawai‘i, the fertile era of isolation ended. The laboratory was flooded with newcomers. An army of nibblers and grazers—rats, cows, pigs,

goats, deer—descended on the natives, which no longer had armor with which to defend themselves. Scores of species went extinct, some disappearing before humans even laid eyes on them.

Early Hawaiians did not often travel up to the high-elevation forest, known as Wao Akua, realm of the gods. But rats did. They jumped out of Polynesian canoes and beelined up the mountain to feast on the juiciest fruits. As a result, numerous species vanished before even receiving a Hawaiian name. Some are known only from the pollen record, or their fossilized bones. Consider the po‘ouli, a forest bird first discovered and named in the 1970s. It was only by chance that biologists found this species before it, too, succumbed to extinction in 2004.

And yet Hawai‘i’s peculiar endemic paradise is not altogether lost. Successful restoration projects on each island are not only preserving what’s left but also reviving degraded habitats and bringing them back to life. Pockets of the mystery remain for us to investigate, fall in love with, and fight for.

 Perfume released by the silversword attracts an array of native bees and flies to feed on its fruit.

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In Palms & Prose

The prolific poet W.S. Merwin leaves behind a treasured legacy of letters, lore, and his blooming love for the natural world.

TEXT BY EMILY A. BENTON

IMAGES BY CHRIS ROHRER

The late poet William Stanley Merwin, who spent 40 years turning an 18-acre Maui plantation into a lush palm forest, began his ode “Trees” in this way: “I am looking at trees / they may be one of the things I will miss / most from the earth.” The lines are fitting for a poet who lived by a daily ritual: write a poem, plant a tree.

However, to carry his meditative practice to the northern slopes of Maui, he first had to shed the Western attachments that came with being an established American poet.

Unlike his contemporaries in the early 1970s, Merwin held no permanent position at a university, though he’d given readings on campuses and protested the Vietnam War alongside students. Upon receiving a Pulitzer Prize in 1971, he had stated he was “too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel.”

While his New England predecessors had walked a mile outside town to Walden and his Beatnik peers drove On the Road , Merwin continued, throughout his life, to step into a more isolated existence reminiscent of earlier poets. Specifically, Merwin studied 12th century troubadours—poets who traveled on foot throughout Europe orating verse for peasants and the king’s court. As Ezra Pound once advised him to do, Merwin learned languages, and plenty of them: Latin, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Sanskrit, Quechua, Occitan. He translated medieval epics including Dante’s Divine Comedy and many other longform, narrative poems in his lifetime.

Merwin also departed from his father’s Presbyterian church in favor of Eastern spirituality, sidestepping commune culture for a more solitary study of Zen Buddhism. Not one for city life, the poet left the urban New Jersey of his childhood to reside in an abandoned farmhouse in the French countryside. In between writing and translating poems, he studied gardening in old French-language manuals and learned how to live off the land.

“When I first saw farmland and woods as a child, I wanted to be there, to get out of the car or the train and be surrounded by what I saw,” Merwin wrote in a piece later published in The Kenyon Review. “I was learning to read about people who did not read or write but who lived all the time in the woods. I said that was what I wanted to do.”

So when his friend and Zen teacher Robert Aitken introduced him to a fallow, offthe-grid pineapple farm on Maui in 1976, Merwin saw an opportunity. There, he began another garden, this time with a few pots of palm trees.

 Merwin, one of American literature’s most decorated poets, made his home on the island of Maui.

“I had long dreamed of having a chance, one day, to try to restore a bit of the earth’s surface that had been abused by ‘human improvement,’” he wrote. Planting a tree each day for four decades, from seeds gathered all over the world, Merwin established more than 2,000 palms and a home for many endangered plants and birds under their towering canopy. (Visitors would later recount the blind, aged poet feeding berries to birds out of his hand, knowing each species by its song.)

As Merwin connected with the land more deeply, his poetry ascended to new heights. On one of his first visits to Hawai‘i, he had given a reading at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa alongside San Francisco poet Gary Snyder. Among the students in the room was Frank Stewart, who later published Merwin’s work as editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. “Merwin was always friendly, always charming, but his work was thought of as rather formal,” Stewart recalled of Merwin’s earlier poetry, published in his

first four books. “Of course, that was a big contrast to Gary Snyder, to Galway Kinnell, and others.”

But the antiquated language and tight stanzas Merwin fished out of translated epics soon broke free from their nets. Over time, verse without punctuation and meter, in lines of varying length, became his signature style.

“I think Hawai‘i really got into his sensibility,” Stewart said. “I remember one of the first books where I felt that was called The Compass Flower , which was more sensual and more like the islands, whatever that means—less like the mainland.” In this 1977 book written against the backdrop of a rainforest replanted palm by palm, a place once inhabited by Hawaiians long before his stewardship, Merwin’s poems captured his appreciation for what had come before him.

“Hawai‘i enriched him as much, or more, than he enriched Hawai‘i,” Stewart said. “Even a very sparse style can have a flavor, a taste, and an aroma that’s drawn out of

 Merwin showed a deep appreciation for Hawai‘i’s landscape and people with his epic The Folding Cliffs. Right, Robert Becker, the poet’s cousin and vice president of the Merwin Conservancy.

the environment it’s written in. Merwin’s gentleness and inwardness are things that were elaborated upon in him because of Hawai‘i. I think it was under the influence of him really beginning to love the people.”

Moved by the islands’ history and voices of the Hawaiian Renaissance, Merwin wrote The Folding Cliffs in 1998, a 350-page narrative in verse about Kaluaikoolau, or “Koolau the Leper,” and the many Hawaiians endangered by Hansen’s disease and 19th century laws that sought to exile them. The book was informed by 12 years of research, including Merwin’s study of the Hawaiian language. In a 2010 article in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaiian educator Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele, a close friend of Merwin’s, praised The Folding Cliffs for how Merwin “got into the head” of characters and captured the emotions behind the story.

With his wife, Paula, Merwin established the Merwin Conservancy in 2010, a nonprofit that hosts visitors and runs an “arts and ecology” salon that invites guest artists and writers to speak at events on

Maui and O‘ahu. In 2018, the conservancy also invited 15 Hawai‘i teachers to the palm forest for a week to kick off a oneyear collaboration with Merwin and visiting poet Naomi Shihab Nye to infuse creative curricula into Hawai‘i schools. The conservancy is also developing a multidisciplinary residency that will host artists in the poet’s old home, an almost mythic place for today’s writers.

By the time he died in his sleep at his Maui home on March 15, 2019, Merwin had won a second Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He had served as the U.S. Poet Laureate under President Obama. He’d published more than 50 books of poetry, translation, and prose. For each page he wrote, for each tree he planted, he tried to give back a little to what a dying world had given him, from the most storied place he could find.

 The Merwin Conservancy hosts literary events. Above, Sonnet Kekilia Coggins, executive director.

 For more information on the Merwin Conservancy, visit merwinconservancy.org.

Written in the Stars

Inspired by a creation chant and an image of the once unseeable, astronomers and a Hawaiian language expert named one of history’s most captivating discoveries.

TEXT BY EUNICA ESCALANTE

IMAGES BY DINO MORROW

On a balmy morning in March 2019, three scientists, two Hawaiian cultural experts, and a communications consultant sat around a conference table. Moments before, two of the scientists had sworn the rest to secrecy. The information they were about to discuss was strictly confidential, “under heavy media embargo and guarded like Fort Knox,” as Doug Simons, one of the scientists and the director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, explained to me months later. The other two scientists, Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, and Geoffrey Bower, lead scientist of Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics’ Hawai‘i operations, were members of the Event Horizon Telescope consortium, a project involving eight telescopes and more than 200 scientists around the globe.

The consortium had found something. Or more accurately, had seen what was once unseeable, Dempsey and Bower told the group. There, at the heart of nearby galaxy Messier 87, was a glowing ring of light descending into the deepest, darkest abyss. The photographs that Dempsey and Bower presented were blurry, but there was no contending what they showed: a black hole.

“I had a hard time sleeping that first night,” Simons said. It was so bizarre, he recalled, seeing something that no one had seen before. “As an astronomer, I never thought I would live to see such an image.”

In two weeks’ time, these images would be disseminated to media organizations and scientific journals. The news would permeate the globe. An astrophysicist in the Netherlands and member of the consortium would passionately announce at a press conference, “We have seen the gates of hell.” Memes would be made with the

historic images, like one equating the black hole with the Eye of Sauron, signifying how much it had captured the public’s attention. It would be heralded as one of the most important discoveries of the decade, if not the century.

Yet on that spring day, as Dempsey and Bower presented the images of the black hole to the shellshocked group, the world was yet to know of its existence. And, more importantly for the people in that room, the discovery was yet to be named.

On April 10, at exactly 9 a.m. Eastern time, six press conferences across four continents would simultaneously unveil the images. Except, because of its time zone, Hawai‘i was at a disadvantage. “No one was going to come to a press conference at 3 a.m.,” Simons said. As the representatives for the Event Horizon Telescope’s two Hawai‘i-based telescopes, Dempsey and Bower didn’t want their team to get lost in the noise. They needed a media kit unique from the others.

Enter A Hua He Inoa. Directed by Leslie Ka‘iu Kimura, who runs the program under her post as executive director of ʻImiloa Astronomy Center, A Hua He Inoa has become well known among the astronomical community, having named celestial objects with the assistance of Larry Kimura, a Hawaiian language professor and pioneer of the language’s revitalization (and Leslie’s uncle).

Two years prior, the program and its concept of modernday Hawaiian celestial nomenclature was just an abstract idea conceived by John De Fries, a Hawaiian entrepreneur. In March 2017, he sent a memo to Kahu Kū Mauna,

 Hawaiian language professor Larry Kimura has been tapped to name tremendous cosmological findings.

a cultural advisory group for the Maunakea Management Board. Familiar with the group’s influence, he proposed a novel concept: to bestow every discovery made on Maunakea with a Hawaiian name. Prior to that, discoveries were only labelled with a system of acronyms and numerical codes. Except for those of key astronomical objects, names were little more than coordinates.

The memo made waves in the astronomy scene and arrived on Simons’ desk at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on recommendation from some members of Kahu Kū Mauna. Intrigued, he reached out to De Fries. Yet other members of the observatory community were skeptical, unsure of the concept’s viability and how the astronomical society would react.

Then, on October 2017, Haleakalā’s network of telescopes, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, detected an interstellar object hurtling past the sun. It was the first time that an object from another solar system was observed passing through ours. In the months after its publication, the discovery was linked to everything from the formation of solar systems to proof of extraterrestrial life.

Pan-STARRS astronomer Richard Wainscoat phoned Simons, asking for permission to use the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope for further observations. As Wainscoat described the significance of the observation, Simons’ thoughts turned to De Fries’ memo. “That’s when it clicked,” he said. “This was the big astronomical discovery that John and I had been waiting for.”

Proving its potential through a highprofile discovery would “give it a shot of confidence,” Simons said. He phoned Kaʻiu Kimura, a long-time colleague who he knew could connect him to Larry Kimura. The language professor, having helped perpetuate the Hawaiian language’s renaissance in the 1980s by founding one of the first Hawaiian language immersion schools, was the only person who could credibly name the discovery, according to Simons.

Larry was alerted and given 72 hours to come up with a name. They only had one chance to do so. The Pan-STARRS research team was wrapping up a paper that would announce the discovery in the science journal Nature, with or without a Hawaiian name. Once a discovery was made public, Simons said, “there would be no reeling it back.”

 The first-ever photo of a black hole, named Pōwehi, was released on April 10, 2019. Image courtesy of Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

PRESENTING SPONSOR MAJOR SPONSORS MEDIA SPONSORS

Larry didn’t need 72 hours. The name was ‘Oumuamua, meaning a scout or a warrior sent ahead of the pack to discern the strength of the opposing force. “It was coming from someplace sort of mysteriously, from another realm, so to speak,” Larry said. The salient characteristics that made it a unique and scientifically important discovery served as Larry’s inspiration. “It was checking us out in a way,” he said. “That would be something like a spy, like a scout.”

Though it was an interesting project, Larry didn’t anticipate that the name would leave the scientific community. But upon its unveiling, the Hawaiian word was everywhere: splashed across global headlines and on newscasts, albeit often mispronounced. Soon after, it was approved by the International Astronomical Union, the official designating body for celestial objects, making ‘Oumuamua the official distinction. The magnitude of the name’s reach—having “gone viral,” as Simons described— proved A Hua He Inoa’s potential.

Yet, upon the name’s publication, some Native Hawaiians disagreed with this use of their language, especially amid continued tensions surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope on Maunakea. For activist and Ph.D. student Iwakelii Tong, bestowing discoveries made on Maunakea and Haleakalā with Hawaiian names felt like “fabricating consent from Native Hawaiians,” he said. By aligning Hawaiian language and culture with their observatories, which have been a source of frustration for some Hawaiians for decades, it was as if these organizations “were sweeping everything under the rug,” according to Tong, rather than directly addressing issues brought up by activists like him.

For members of A Hua He Inoa, however, the Hawaiian language’s presence in the scientific sphere was progress. It was a step forward for a language that three decades ago was on the edge of extinction.

“There were stories from my mother about not being able to speak Hawaiian at school,” De Fries said, “not even in Kamehameha Schools,” an institution founded by Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop for Native Hawaiian children. Federal policies banned Hawaiian in schools. Native speakers stopped speaking to their children in Hawaiian. Use waned to elders and the island of Niʻihau. By 1984, there were only 32 speakers under the age of 18.

That same year, Pūnana Leo, a Hawaiian immersion school Larry founded with a group of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i experts, opened its doors. The school and its Hawaiian mode of

instruction became a part of a movement to restore the language by instilling it in the next generation. In the years since, the use of the language spread, revitalized by immersion schools and a larger Hawaiian renaissance. By 2016, Hawaiian speakers numbered more than 18,000.

De Fries cites ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i’s near extinction as partially having inspiring his concept for A Hua He Inoa decades later. Larry also sees A Hua He Inoa as an extension of this revitalization. When he saw the coverage that ‘Oumuamua attracted, he said, “I realized the opportunity we had to pick up where we left off.” Preserving the Hawaiian language is crucial to preserving Hawaiian culture. “Every language has a different perspective of living through this world,” and holding on to one’s native language, Larry said, “is crucial in preserving who we are as Hawaiians.”

Learning from ‘Oumuamua’s success, Dempsey and Bower invited Ka‘iu and Larry to join the black hole’s media team. Larry knew the name would involve pō, the “profound dark source of unending creation” as described in the Kumulipo. “But there were many types of pō, of darkness,” Larry said, estimating that pō was mentioned over a hundred times in the Kumulipo. “Which one would this be?” Dempsey described the image’s basic anatomy to Larry. “Ah, then I knew,” he said.

That orange halo amid the darkness reminded Larry of “wehiwehi,” meaning “honored with embellishments.”

Within the Kumulipo, one such pō was described to be adorned, as if wearing a crown. As far as Larry understood it, the black hole could only be named “Pōwehi,” the pō he had learned about in the Kumulipo.

Though the other telescopes were notified, it was slightly too late. Unlike with ‘Oumuamua, the black hole’s discovery papers were already in the final proofing stage. “Sometimes timing really is everything,” Simons said. All the Hawai‘i team could do was disseminate their press kit to as many media organizations as possible and hope that the name would catch.

The day had come. At the strike of 10 a.m., every major news organization in the world released the images. As expected, the joint press conference captured worldwide attention. And there, among the headlines, was a name. The black hole was everywhere, and everywhere, it was being called Pōwehi.

Members of A Hua He Inoa turn to Hawaiian chants, stories, and writings for guidance.

FLUX FEATURE

Human Nat ure

Faced with a warming climate, coral researchers are working to reverse engineer the future through “assisted evolution.” What if nature isn’t what needs to evolve?

TEXT BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

IMAGES BY LENNY KAHOLO & WAYNE LEVIN

The Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology occupies several bland, bunker-like buildings near the center of Coconut Island, which sits a quarter mile offshore of Kāne‘ohe. It’s not the easiest place to reach. You don’t just drive up and park. Instead, to visit the institute, which is home to a series of research laboratories affiliated with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, you must take at least two shuttle rides: the first in an aging, gray Honda CR-V, which ferries you from a parking area near Windward Mall to Lilipuna Pier; the second via a skiff with a makeshift shade canopy that collects you from the end of the pier and takes you the rest of the way.

Earlier this spring, I made the multileg journey to Coconut Island to visit the Gates Coral Lab. Founded in 2003 by Ruth Gates, a Cyprus-born marine biologist, the lab has produced some of the world’s most important coral research. Gates gained international recognition earlier this decade when she issued a clarion call for the world’s coral. Earth’s coral reefs were in serious trouble, Gates insisted in interviews with National Public Radio, National Geographic, and VICE News. The oceans were warming, and corals couldn’t keep up.

Like most living things, corals are capable of adapting to environmental conditions, but Gates explained that the Earth’s oceans are warming too rapidly for most coral species. Already, over the past century, average ocean temperatures increased 0.13° Celsius per decade, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change experts have projected the world’s oceans will warm anywhere from 1° to 4° Celsius by 2100. In 2015, in the aftermath of a violent heat wave, coral reefs along the Kona coast of Hawaiʻi Island saw mortality rates of up to 90 percent. In 30 years, it is likely that 90 percent of the world’s coral species will be extinct.

Gates saw an urgent need for scientists to intervene. In 2013, she began to experiment with something she called “assisted evolution.” The idea was to artificially accelerate the process of natural selection and engineer “super coral” that could withstand the predicted increases in ocean temperatures. Engineering, of

course, had little to do with it. The work consisted of old-fashioned selective breeding, the same technique used to create everything from golden delicious apples to golden doodle puppies. Gates and her team took samples of reef-building corals found in Kāne‘ohe Bay that exhibited higher than average thermal tolerance and bred them with other corals, with the goal of producing more resilient offspring.

Gates’ work made international headlines. The Economist and Netflix produced documentaries about her research, and she was a fixture on Hawai‘i Public Radio. Then, on October 25, 2018, at the age of 56, Gates died of complications related to surgery for diverticulitis.

“The Fight for Corals Loses Its Great Champion,” ran the headline in The Atlantic. “Ruth was magnetic,” Judy Lemus, the interim director of the institute, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “People were drawn to her.”

The scientists at the Gates Coral Lab grieved the loss of their charismatic leader, even as they endeavored to continue her groundbreaking research. Taking over as principal investigator was a young, squarejawed, surfer type named Crawford Drury whom everyone called Ford. When we first met outside the lab, he wore shorts and sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap. Neither he nor the institute were what I expected. I had imagined someone older, maybe wearing a white lab coat. And the island, well, it felt less like a place that produced world-class research than a science experiment that had gone awry, a Frankenstein of dredged earth and mysterious ruins held together by fossilized bags of Quickcrete.

Coconut Island, known also as Moku o Lo‘e, or the land of Loʻe, was named after one of four siblings who, stories say, traveled from Wai‘anae to make their home on O‘ahu’s windward shore. In the early 20th century, the island was purchased by an entrepreneur and heir named Christian Holmes, who for much of the 1930s, used the island for a tuna cannery as well as a private retreat. He dredged the bay to expand the island, cutting trenches in the reef and building long, spindly fingers of land that stretched out as if to touch Kāne‘ohe. He added a house, a

As the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans warm, bleaching events are predicted to become more frequent.



The research process begins with collecting samples of coral that exhibit a tolerance to higher than average ocean temperatures.

bowling alley, a shooting range, even a saltwater swimming pool.

Everywhere I looked, Holmes’ follies peeked through the foliage: large lava rock walls, stairs that led to nothing but jungle. Just inland from the now-abandoned swimming pool, a low-slung building housed a series of guest rooms, one of which was being cleaned by a young woman. She said the rooms were used by visiting researchers. When I mentioned all the strange ruins, she explained that the island used to be a zoo. “The elephant ponds were down there,” she said, pointing over the hill.

Indeed, Holmes had a thing for animals. He imported monkeys, a giraffe, a baby elephant to the island. When he died in 1944, the animals became some of the first residents of the Honolulu Zoo. For a few years following, the island was used for R&R for Marine officers, which is how the barracks came to be built. A group of five oil and gas executives then bought the island in 1947, after which one named Edwin Pauley became the sole owner. Pauley hosted renowned guests including presidents Harry Truman and Richard Nixon on Coconut Island, and he also helped establish a marine research lab there. The facility eventually evolved into the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, an independent research station of UH Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. In 1995, Pauley’s family donated $2 million to the University of Hawai‘i Foundation to help it purchase the island outright.

Coconut Island was still a menagerie of sorts when I arrived, though one with more scientific purpose than Holmes had in mind. Its most dramatic residents were the sharks, which cruised a small pond on the east side of the island, their tails flicking in a way that seemed almost feline. Just down the road was the Gates Lab, with its hundreds, if not thousands, of corals. I saw baby corals smaller than the spores on the frond

of a fern and adolescent corals that resembled shelled walnuts. One tray was full of a shape-shifting species that grew just as often into tall, spiky turrets as broad, flat plates. More than one specimen could have passed for fried chicken.

Most of the corals growing in the lab’s tanks were part of current experiments. Drury showed me how the researchers were implanting coral specimens with radio-frequency identification chips to track them more easily. In November 2018, less than a month after Gates’ death, the Gates Coral Lab received $1 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to test some of the researchers’ ideas in situ, in the water. The aim, Drury explained, was to understand the ecological implications of introducing more thermally tolerant corals into an existing reef ecosystem. The researchers would work with a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and volunteers from Mālama Maunalua to outplant nearly 12,000 baby corals at three sites around O‘ahu, in Maunalua Bay, Kāne‘ohe Bay, and offshore of Daniel K. Inouye International Airport.

The restoration effort would be unique, one of the first to use corals selected specifically for thermal tolerance. “We might not be putting out the most biomass of any restoration project, but what we are putting out, we hope is still going to be there in 75 years,” Drury said, “as opposed to the current restoration framework, which is get some corals, propagate as many as you can, however you can, and put ’em back on the reef. Maybe just dump a cooler over the side of the boat.”

Drury explained that when coral reefs are subjected to abnormal temperatures for extended periods of time, the corals expel their zooxanthellae, a type of symbiotic algae, which turns the reef a ghostly white. This is what’s known as coral bleaching. Without the zooxanthellae, which provide corals with food and

oxygen in exchange for shelter, the organisms are far more susceptible to disease and stress. It was something the scientists had seen firsthand. Between 2014 and 2015, more than half of Hawai‘i’s reef-building corals bleached. It was unprecedented. And it endangered not only Hawai‘i’s reefs but also the many hundreds of marine creatures—and human livelihoods— that depended on them.

As the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans warms, bleaching events are predicted to become more frequent.

“There’s a growing recognition in restoration that if you plant something out and it just turns around and dies a couple of years later, that’s a huge amount of wasted effort,” Carlo Caruso, a postdoctoral researcher at the Gates Coral Lab, told me.

I met Caruso, who previously worked for the National Park Service in American Samoa, as he was building the infrastructure for an upcoming research project, a massive experimental setup involving computer-controlled solenoids and commercial-grade chillers behind the Gates Lab’s research facility. He had erected a large shade structure to protect the corals from excess sunlight. A giant computer chip encased in plexiglass sat on a folding table. Caruso explained that it was a Raspberry Pi, an extremely simple type of computer that could run basic programs. He planned to use it to replay historic bleaching events. The Raspberry Pi would control the temperature of the water in the tanks, following a set pattern based on actual recorded ocean temperatures in locations around Hawai‘i.

“We can look back at bleaching events that happened here in Kāne‘ohe Bay and replay a segment that we’re interested in,” Caruso said, “like leading up to when we saw corals bleaching in the field, and essentially recreate that profile in tanks, but also tweak that, maybe have it go a little bit higher, to replicate what would happen in a more intense bleaching event.”

In lieu of any meaningful action taken by U.S. lawmakers, scientists were being forced to take the lead on averting a climate catastrophe, Drury said, and there had been a noticeable shift in how researchers approached a subject like coral bleaching. Historically, scientists simply wanted to know how things were. Increasingly, they advocated for how they should be.

“It’s very much a triage situation,” Drury said of Hawai‘i’s coral reefs. “This is urgent and going to get worse.” At the same time, he said, when it came to bleaching and coral die-offs, “on the fine scale, we don’t understand a whole lot about how it works. I feel like that’s a very non-scientist thing to say. Everyone always wants to seem like we know what we’re talking about. But we’re still very early in understanding what’s happening.”

Drury’s team didn’t know why some corals were more thermally tolerant than others. But on some level, it didn’t matter. If they could build coral reefs that would survive the coming conditions, that was what they were going to do.

Over the past 10 years, the tone of the conversation around climate change has darkened dramatically. What once was full of cautious but ultimately confident manifestos about clean energy and sustainability now overflows with bleak accountings: a million species threatened with extinction, thousands of humans dead from extreme weather in 2018. In May, researchers at Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory made history when they reported that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 415 parts per million, the highest point in recorded history. (When atmospheric carbon dioxide began being tracked in 1958, the number was 316 parts per million.) The first few months of 2019 brought a slew of new books by leading voices in the climate discussion. Their titles were not optimistic: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming; Losing Earth: A Recent History; Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

Psychologists have begun to recognize the profound emotional toll that these doomsday predictions are taking on humans. Earth is our species’ native habitat. We might live in towns and cities that feel manmade, but our home—the thing that meets the vast majority of our needs—is the natural world. Without oceans, valleys, forests, and soils, our bodies cannot function. The question, then, is what does it do to us to watch these natural systems falter and the birds we once saw outside our windows vanish? What sort of psychological wound is made when we dive beneath the water and see a pale landscape of dead and dying corals?

In 2018, a pair of Australian researchers published a paper in the journal Nature on a relatively new condition they termed “ecological grief.” “Climate-related weather events and environmental changes have been linked

 Scientists are still in the process of understanding how bleaching and coral die-offs work. Some are more focused on planting reefs made to handle the coming conditions.

to a wide variety of acute and chronic mental health experiences,” it read. Among the symptoms being reported were “elevated rates of mood disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and pre- and post-traumatic stress; increased drug and alcohol usage; increased suicide ideation; … and threats and disruptions to sense of place and place attachment.”

Ecological grief, as the researchers defined it, was “grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.” To this definition, they added a troubling observation: “We consider ecological grief to be a form of ‘disenfranchised grief’ or a grief that isn’t publicly or openly acknowledged. Indeed, ecological grief, and the associated work of mourning, experienced in response to ecological losses are often left unconsidered, or entirely absent, in climate change narratives, policy and research.”

Shortly after my visit to the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology, I attended a Honolulu Biennial panel discussion on the subject of “ecological grief and optimistic nihilism.” A stage was set up in the old Famous Footwear space, surrounded by dozens of art installations that tackled

themes of identity and ecological trauma: an epic graphic novel that presupposed no contact between Polynesia and European culture, found toys suspended in plastic molds. The panel comprised a mix of artists and scientists, including Chip Fletcher, associate dean for academic affairs at UH Mānoa and vice-chair of the Honolulu Climate Change Commission. Each panelist spoke of the personal despair they had felt when contemplating the coming decades. Fletcher said it was rare these days to get through a presentation without bursting into tears.

The event was organized by Ava Fedorov, a Honolulubased artist whose spring 2019 solo show, “Haunted Landscapes,” explored some of the same topics through large-scale abstract paintings.

“These landscapes are more than mere topographical geographies,” Fedorov wrote in her artist statement. “They are the overlaid arrangements of non-human and human life, translucent histories, and the physical tracings of space-time. They are intricately and indelibly woven into every aspect of the world as we know it, haunting our memories alongside our visions of the future.”

A few days after the panel, I met up with Fedorov, who arrived to our meeting wearing shorts and a tank top and carrying a bicycle helmet under one arm. Over coffee, I asked the 37-year-old if, given that a certain amount of warming is inevitable, the framework of grief, namely the five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—could help society process the impending losses.

She said yes, insofar as grief requires an explicit acknowledgement of the coming reality. “We have to change the way we embrace that future, and I think that’s the function of ecological grief,” she said. “It’s better than denial, whether it’s ‘We can still stop climate change,’ or ‘Climate change is not real.’ Those are both not as useful as, ‘OK, the shit’s gonna hit the fan—the shit is hitting the fan. It just hasn’t splattered across us yet.’”

She added that certain segments of humanity will experience the stages of grief very differently. Developing countries, which are likely to bear the brunt of climaterelated destabilization, “are going to be feeling the rage,” she said. “Because they are falling victim to behavior before they even have the luxury to adopt that behavior themselves.”

At the lab on Coconut Island, I asked Drury and Caruso if they experienced grief when they saw corals struggling to survive, or when they ran simulations meant to replicate end-of-century conditions. I wanted to know what the scientists who were on the front lines of climate change felt when they took stock of the situation. “For me, I end up not stopping. If I stop, I don’t think I can keep going,” Caruso said. But he said he didn’t get angry “because that would be to assign blame to some other entity, when really, as humans, we just stumbled down this path of being clever creatures that were trying to survive.”

If he felt anything, it was frustration. “I have two daughters, and they’re going to grow up in this era,” he said. “It’s still a beautiful world, but it’s changing, and

 Initially developed as a private retreat during the 1930s, Coconut Island is the current location of the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology.

it’s hard to know how it’s all going to turn out. And I’m frustrated that we can’t do a better job as a species of making it turn out as a utopia.”

I thought about the tiny corals in the lab, RFID chips ready to transmit signals back to the scientists, and the term “assisted evolution.” Ruth Gates wanted to help corals survive. She devoted her life to it. Now, her colleagues were carrying the mantle, working tirelessly, despite the projections, despite the headlines, to ensure that at least some corals lived into the next century. Drury and Caruso, and the rest of the team at the Gates Lab, I decided, really were more like triage nurses, more like caregivers, than scientists. And I couldn’t help but feel that Hawai‘i’s coral reefs were lucky to have them. Because who would be there to assist us when humans began to decline? Where was the giant scientist in the sky who would help us evolve?

“In a way, assisting the evolution of a reef is assisting our own evolution,” Caruso said. “We’re taking responsibility for this ecosystem around us. We’re making a vision of, what do we want this to be? And how do we get there?”

Healthy coral. Coral reefs support 25 percent of all ocean life. The resilience offered to island communities like Hawai‘i by coral reefs is just one reason restoration efforts are important and the Gates Lab team hopes its super coral survive.

Bleached coral. Ecological grief, as the researchers have defined it, is a “grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”

How do you mourn losses that have yet to manifest but that you can do little to prevent? When a loved one dies, it is the finality of the event that allows us to eventually accept the loss. But there is no finality with climate change or mass extinction, only degrees of horror.

In this way, ecological grief feels insufficient. All of us have played a role in poisoning the planet. Most of us did not intend it. We did not choose our culture or our economic system. Nonetheless, we share at least a fraction of the responsibility for the current crisis. Is there a word for this guilt-laden grief? This mixture of mourning and shame?

In 2017, journalist Alice Gregory profiled a group of men and women in the New Yorker who all had one thing in common: each had accidentally killed someone. Gregory described the unique, often debilitating mix of sorrow and shame these individuals carried around with them and the complete lack of resources contemporary society provided. “There are no self-help books for anyone who has accidentally killed another person. An exhaustive search yielded no research on such people, and nothing in the way of therapeutic protocols, publicly listed support groups, or therapists who specialize in their treatment,” Gregory wrote. What the individuals shared was a sense of responsibility, an ever-present awareness that no matter how they sliced it, they had played a role in taking a person’s life. A woman who had hit and killed a motorcyclist told Gregory, “At the end of the day ... I took his life. No matter how much you want to dismiss it as an accident, I still feel responsible for it, and I am.”

This is what many of us will soon feel. A grief curdled by a morbid sense of responsibility. An overwhelming tide of loss, anger, guilt. Guilt for sins we aren’t sure we committed but from which we know there is no escaping. Guilt that brings a new level of grief.

One way to deal with such feelings may be to process them collectively. Gregory cites the Old Testament, in which God instructs Moses to designate six cities as places of refuge for those who have accidentally caused a death. Their purpose, a rabbi explained to Gregory, was to allow these haunted individuals to process their pain with others like them.

“In the collective grief,” the rabbi said, “the individual’s grief is assuaged.”

If there is one thing I have learned in 10 years of writing about nature, it’s that humans are the beneficiaries of a mindboggling array of symbiotic relationships, a constantly regenerating network of plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi, entire webs of living things that, most of the time, go completely unnoticed. Without the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, we wouldn’t have food. Without bacteria inside our bodies, we wouldn’t be able to turn that food into energy.

Corals reefs are vital not only to the health of the marine ecosystem—singlehandedly supporting 25 percent of all ocean life—but to coastal communities around the globe, including in Hawai‘i. A coral reef is a natural defense against large waves and storm surges, which could otherwise destroy beaches, houses, and coastal infrastructure. When a reef dies, it doesn’t take long for the underlying structure to degrade. If it collapses entirely, any coastal protection provided by the reef goes with it. Surf breaks could disappear, along with beaches. Rising sea levels would become all the more menacing.

The resilience offered to island communities by coral reefs is just one reason restoration efforts are important and the Gates Lab team hopes its super coral survive. And there are reasons to be optimistic. “Our colleagues in Australia are modeling end-of-century bleaching events, and replaying those in tanks, and corals are surviving,” Drury said. “I mean, it’s a natural system that has flexibility and capacity to adapt to change, right? We don’t have a very good grip on the rate of change for the corals or for temperature and how it interacts with all those other factors, but it’s not a hopeless situation.”

In the end, none of this—the Gates Lab’s work, Fedorov’s paintings, even these words—is about coral. It’s about noticing. It’s about looking around and seeing not an island or an ocean but our collective home. It’s about acknowledging the interminable complexity that undergirds our world, that bright cord that binds us to Earth and to one another. It’s about our species’ endless quest for reciprocity, for symbiosis, for a way of life that leads not to grief but gratitude.

Historically, scientists simply wanted to know how things were. Increasingly, they advocate for how they should be.

 Coral

reefs are vital to the health of the marine ecosystem and coastal communities around the globe, including Hawai‘i, offering protection from large waves and storms.

FLUX FEATURE

Young, Wi ld & Free

On Hō‘ea Initiative’s weekend camping excursions, keiki learn how to fend for themselves and live off the land.

TEXT BY RAE SOJOT

IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK

Camouflage is the first thing I notice debarking from the plane at the airport on Moloka‘i. From T-shirts and pants to duffle bags and trucker hats, nearly every local person I see is sporting or carrying an item of camo. A little girl, no older than three, scampers to the waiting area in a pink camo-patterned skirt. Though it is a short 30-minute flight from O‘ahu, Moloka‘i is a world apart from its neighboring glittering urban island. Residents cleave proudly to traditional, subsistence-style living. Fashion follows function here, hence the camo.

I have come to Moloka‘i to join the latest cohort of Hō‘ea Initiative, a wilderness survival and cultural appreciation program created by Hawai‘i musician Noland Conjugacion, better known as Brother Noland. Unlike the tropical girl wooed by the high-fashion world of Hollywood in his 1983 breakout hit “Coconut Girl,” Brother Noland’s inner compass has always drawn true to his first love: the ‘āina. Nature, Brother Noland believes, is God’s original classroom. Since 1996, the expert survivalist and animal tracker has utilized Hōʻea Initiative as a platform to connect children back with nature and teach lessons that go beyond the outdoors.

Brother Noland greets me at baggage claim. Tanned and easygoing, with a gleaming shock of white hair pulled back into a ponytail, he channels equal parts shaman and surfer, samurai and sage. His insouciance is misleading. Those who know his tracking skills say nothing escapes his keen eye.

Surrounding him are the six kids signed up for this season’s three-day camp, a cheery group of five boys and one girl ranging from 10 to 15 years in age. Palakiko Yagodich, a former student turned Hō‘ea Initiative staff, is here to assist. A parent has come along too. We make a brief stop at Kanemitsu Bakery and Cafe in the sleepy town of Kaunakakai where Brother Noland’s relationship to the tight-knit Moloka‘i community is evident in the generous rounds of shakas and warm hugs exchanged at the diner. Midway through breakfast, Brother Noland approaches the kids’ table with a merry glint in his eye. “Enjoy your last meal,” he portends. “From this point on, we catch what we eat … and if we don’t catch, we don’t eat.” The children, momentarily shocked into silence, study their plates piled with steaming pancakes, eggs, and sausage. Brother Noland breaks into a broad smile and throws his head back in laughter.

Day I

Heading southeast along the highway, we make our way to Keawanui Fishpond, where we will be camping. Scores of fishponds, some dating as far back as the early 13th century, once flourished in this region. According to legend, the moon goddess Hina gave birth to Moloka‘i and afterwards took a stroll along the island’s southern stretch. Everywhere she stepped, pūnāwai (freshwater springs) sprang forth, delivering the sweet, cold water necessary for aquaculture. By the late 1950s, many of these fishponds had fallen into disrepair, suffocated with thick mangrove and kiawe growth. In

1989, restoration efforts revitalized Keawanui, and over the course of the following decade, life was slowly breathed back into the 800-year-old fishpond, inviting the return of fish, plants, and people.

Hanohano Naehu welcomes us in front of the twin lava-rock mounds that mark the entrance to Keawanui. A stout and hearty man, he is a kia‘i loko, or caretaker of the fishpond. The children remove their shoes and stand barefoot in the grass. They perform an oli of introduction and respect, requesting permission to enter the sacred space. Uncle Hanohano accepts, and then greets each child as they pass single-file through the entry. “Nature is chief. We are servants,” he says solemnly, looking each in the eye. Inside, Keawanui’s energy is enigmatic and palpable. Large swaths of grassy lawn serve as gathering spaces. Gardens of delights abound: useful hala trees and pili grass, noni and ti. There are fruits of all kinds: tangerine, mango, papaya. Waxy, cream-colored pua kenikeni blossoms release a heady scent. Beyond, the fishpond shimmers with a thousand points of white light.

Uncle Hanohano leads our group to a small pavilion sitting over the water. Ancient Hawaiians were shrewd scientists and engineers, he informs us, directing our gaze to the fishpond. He points out its three critical elements: the crescent shaped rock and coral kuapā (wall) that serves as the fishpond’s protective border; the sluice gate, called mākāhā (eye and breath), that gazes into the pond and out to the ocean, breathing in the tide twice daily; the puna (spring water) that provides the essential, brackish

mix of phytoplankton and zooplankton. Because nutrients from cultivated kalo fields upstream fed into water systems that made their way makai (to the ocean), fishponds often served as a barometer of what was happening mauka: A problem in the fishpond could indicate a problem upland. “Our ancestors were akamai,” Uncle Hanohano says to the children, tapping his head with his forefinger. “They knew everything was connected.”

In today’s technology-driven world, convenience and instant gratification are the norm rather than luxuries, and children are less inclined to spend time outside. “Kids are more preoccupied than previous generations, and they end up limiting themselves,” says Brother Nolan, who spent his childhood hunting, fishing, and diving. “Each generation becomes further and further removed from nature.”

Hō‘ea Initiative aims to mend that disconnect. Though Brother Noland and his staff teach the “fun survival stuff” like how to shoot a bow and arrow or make fire, he also emphasizes skills considered the hardest to master: the ability to sit still, to observe, to listen. The ability to do so allows the children to better connect with the world around them. In many indigenous cultures, co-existing with nature becomes a spiritual endeavor. Cultivating such mindfulness is not a skill just for the outdoors, Brother Noland explains. It’s a skill critical to an individual’s internal journey, helping to unveil the path to who we are.

That afternoon we take to the road again, hugging the empty, rugged coastline. To our left, the striated beiges and grays of exposed karst offer respite from the brilliant blue of the ocean. Through the first half of 2019, the kids have been learning to cast net at Hō‘ea Initiative’s monthly meetups on Oʻahu. Today they are eager to test their abilities. We’re instructed to scan waters for telltale shadows and splashes. La‘a and Noah, two of the older and more experienced boys, let out a whoop: they’ve spotted a promising cove. As we pull over, the two boys tumble out, hurriedly put on their tabi, and grab a net. “Throwing net” is an excellent way for the children to lōkahi (work together), or what Brother Noland likes to call “practicing the village.” In other words, it requires teamwork. Making their way to the water, one works as a spotter while the other cautiously steps to the reef’s edge. The boys nod to each other as an incoming wave surges and suddenly a translucent web arcs high and then unspools, graceful and swift. We collectively hold our breath as the net is pulled up. A couple fish thrash about, glinting sliver in the sun. Triumph. Brother Noland gives a nod of approval. I’m simultaneously impressed and relieved: We caught something. We can eat.

When we return from fishing, the children are dispatched to set up camp. They descend upon the designated area with boisterous glee. Some 30 minutes later, the scene resembles a Greek comedy turned hilariously tragic: Amid heaps of nylon and scattered tent

Initiative, inspiring lōkahi while also providing food.

poles, a couple kids sit hapless and morose. Excitement, it seems, does not translate to execution. With Brother Noland and Uncle Palakiko remaining conspicuously absent, the kids are forced to take stock of their situation. Moments like these are prime for catchy survival codes they’ve been taught: The “Two E’s,” Endure and Embrace, and the “Two A’s,” Adapt and Adjust. Eventually, frustration gives way to resolve and a collective effort ensues. Working together, the children build their village. That evening, after lights out, I can hear some of the boys goofing around in a tent. When Brother Noland issues a stern, guttural warning, the shenanigans abruptly stop and the guilty culprits shuffle back to their sleeping quarters. All is quiet in Keawanui. The stillness is broken when a boy named E.B calls out goodnight, his voice slightly wavering, to no one in particular. It’s a self-comforting gesture, I suspect, and my heart twinges. I wonder if this is his first time sleeping alone, away from home.

 Throwing net is one of the activities the children learn through Hō‘ea

Day II

The next morning, the children gather in a wide circle. It’s time for Opening Words, a Haudenosaunee invocation of greetings and gratitude to the natural and spiritual world. As Uncle Palakiko guides the children through the prayer of thanks, the children acknowledge the integral parts that make up the web of life—from the Earth Mother to the waters to the animal nations and the stars above. Each passage of the prayer is concluded with a simple statement, spoken together: “And now we are One.” An advocate of native knowledge, Brother Noland has long incorporated a rich mix of indigenous cultures’ practices, philosophies, and traditions into Hō‘ea Initiative’s curriculum, including Hawaiian, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, and Japanese. This mélange is intentional, mirroring the myriad cultural practices inherent in Hawai‘i’s ethnic diversity. “I’m teaching them aloha,” he says, “embracing culture and nature.”

Afterward, the children perform a regimen of stretching exercises. “Taking care of the body is bush medicine,” Brother Nolan reminds them. “The way to stay in shape is never to get out of shape.” There are multiple references to beasts—the students shake their bodies like a “dragon coming out of a mist,” balance on a single leg like a crane, and imitate a deer’s cautious step in the wood. “We can learn a lot from animals,” Brother Noland tells me as I crouch down low to the ground like a turtle in an effort to mimic the reptile’s slow, methodic breathing.

Later that afternoon, we drive west into the hinterlands, the pitch and yaw of the rough road revealing dusty patches of haole koa and kiawe and swaths of

dark-green gullies deep within. We are on private land owned by Billy Buchanan, a friend of Brother Noland. Uncle Billy is a man of few words. “Animals are all around us,” he says as we set off on our explorations. “They are watching you.”

Two by two, we walk in silence through the forest, pausing at intervals to glean information from our surroundings. We see trees with portions of their trunks rubbed smooth, an indication that it is the season when young bucks are growing antlers and jockeying for supremacy in the herd. We inspect scat for freshness. We scrutinize a deer track. Even a single hoof print can provide a wealth of information to an animal tracker, explains Brother Noland, pointing out the hallmark feature called the pressure release. Hidden within it is a cache of clues: Was the deer injured? Did it stop abruptly and change direction? What time of day did the deer cross this way? My mind wanders to something he said while telling a story about tracking bear in New Mexico: If you step into a bear track, that bear, wherever it is, will pause too.

The thickets give way to a wide, flat expanse. We have arrived at the mudflats, an area dubbed The Boneyard, which is used by local hunters to discard the skeletal remains after dressing their quarry. Thousands of bones of beasts, mostly deer, blanch white under a scorching sun. It’s a sobering and eerie place, and the children move about with curious deference. Finn, a wiry and quick-witted boy, remarks on the difference between bones: the older the bones, the whiter and cleaner they are, while newer bones retain scraps of fur and skin. Brother Noland asks for volunteers to assemble a skeleton for an impromptu, hands-on lesson in anatomy. When one child loosens a tooth from a jawbone to

Survival starts with the ability to remain calm and be attuned to the environment. To sit still. To listen and observe.



Throughout the 1990s, conservation efforts restored Keawanui Fishpond, which had been taken over by invasive plants.

slip into his pocket as a souvenir, the adults cluck their tongues. The message is clear: It’s bad luck to take a trophy from someone else’s hunt.

On our way back to the van, I ask what animals are the hardest to track. “It depends, all creatures are creatures of habit,” Brother Nolan says. “They have patterns.” He gives me a sideways, mischievous glance before adding, “Humans are the worst.” Later, I realize that Brother Noland’s animaltracking lesson is a clever one: On the surface, the children are learning to track animals, but the lesson serves a deeper purpose: They learn to track themselves.

That night, I awake to the yip of a deer carried by the wind. My phone battery had died long ago, leaving me no clue what time it is. Unzipping the tent, I step outside to a velvet sky. Directly above me shines a lā‘aukūlua moon, the luminous disc ringed with a hazy moonbow. Stretching out on the grass, I stare up at the heavens. A few minutes pass, or maybe an hour. Perhaps even a lifetime. I feel strangely at ease, as if a tightness that I didn’t know existed inside of me had been loosened. A remnant of a conversation shared with Brother Nolan earlier that day drifts dreamlike across my mind. When we spend time in nature, he had said, we are granted the ability to connect physically, emotionally, and spiritually with a higher power. The first two days of camp are spent reacquainting ourselves with that higher force. “Your spirit arrives on the third day,” he had said.

Day III

It’s our final day on Moloka‘i, and our schedule is openended and laidback. By this point, we have all fallen into an easy ebb and flow, and time feels like an irrelevant concept. Some boys are practicing net-throwing skills, taking turns gathering up the heavy netting on their arms and stalking imaginary fish on the lawn. Minami, the lone girl, is busy jerry-rigging scavenged fishing line and baiting crabs. Others are cooling off in the kīpuka, a small swimming hole adjacent to the fishpond.

Brother Noland watches as two boys build small targets to practice throwing rabbit sticks. Rabbit sticks, or hunting sticks, are simple weapons used to strike small quarry like rabbit or fowl. Initially, it’s just a fun game for the children as they hone their skills against the backdrop of play, Brother Noland says. However, it is not until one actually harvests something that the true significance of the act is understood. I think about how the children pitched in to help clean the fish that La‘a and Noah caught on the first day of camp. Some were responsible for descaling; others were tasked with removing the innards. I had been impressed by their maturity; no one had shied away from their duty or acted childish or melodramatic. “We start off as the boy, then the cowboy, then warrior and king, and finally the sage,” Brother Noland later tells me, describing

our ever-evolving understanding of, response to, and place in the natural world.

Some 20 years have passed since Hō‘ea Initiative’s debut, and Brother Noland still marvels at the sheer amount of personal belongings inadvertently left behind after camp each year. “I’ve been doing this since 1996 … Do you know how many tabis that is?” He chuckles, likening the phenomenon to snakes shedding their skin, except here, the children are shedding their possessions and anything else that doesn’t serve them.

“They don’t even notice that they forgot this or that,” he says. “They just surrender. They set it all free and their spirit is roaming. It is a cool thing to watch.”

 Tracking is another of the skills practiced at camp. Participants are asked to analyze an animal’s footprint or skeleton and then draw conclusions about the animal’s state, movement, or approximate time of death.

Sheraton Waikiki

FLUX FEATURE

One Day

On May 1, 2019, ten photographers documented the daily corners of their lives in the islands. In the mundane and majestic, this photo essay unfolds to show the span of a single day in Hawai‘i.

 Right, father and son in Mākaha, O‘ahu.

Image by Josiah Patterson

LEFT

Hibiscus.

Image by Christian Cook

RIGHT

Kapi‘olani Park on Lei Day.

Image by IJfke Ridgley

Nā wāhine in Honolulu, O‘ahu.

Image by Chris Rohrer

ABOVE

Kids on the west side, O‘ahu.

Image by Josiah Patterson

RIGHT

Shopkeeper at a fruit stand, Hawai‘i Island.

Image by Dino Morrow

A canoe club practices in the Wailoa River, Hilo. Image by Dino Morrow

Mokuola (Coconut Island), Hilo Bay.

Image by Dino Morrow

On the H1, O‘ahu.

Image by John Hook

OPPOSITE

Waiānuenue Falls, Hawai‘i Island. Image by Andrew Richard Hara

ABOVE

Net fishing.

Image by Kenna Reed RIGHT

Climbing a tree.

Image by Elyse Butler

A teenage boy at home in Mākaha, O‘ahu.

Image by Josiah Patterson

Keaukaha, Hawai ‘ i Island.

Image by Dino Morrow

PAGE

Waikīkī.

Image by Lila Lee

OPPOSITE

Kalaeloa, O‘ahu at sunset.

Image by John Hook

Restor ing Kure

After seven months spent on Kure Atoll, a conservationist reflects on its remote and challenging conditions.

TEXT AND IMAGES BY ZACHARY PEZZILLO

FLUX FEATURE

Iam standing alone on the highest point of a sand dune overlooking the western side of the island. From my vantage point, I can clearly see waves crashing along the far side of the outer reef. The wind has suddenly shifted to the south, and I’m not surprised to see the beginnings of a squall, its path towards me direct yet unhurried. I am not concerned. I have time.

The lagoon flanking the island is set apart from the ocean by a coral reef delineating the atoll I have called home for the past seven months. In contrast to the nearly black ocean, the lagoon’s waters are a striking medley of the most vivid shades of blues and greens imaginable. As the squall crosses the reef, I watch, fascinated, as tendrils of rain draped below the billowing clouds turn a brilliant turquoise. Suddenly, I feel a tug on my hat and instinctively duck as a pair of juvenile ‘iwa birds try to steal it. I hold the hat down with one hand and wave my other at them in an attempt to send them on their way. I have lost countless hats, sunglasses, pencils, and other objects to these mischievous birds. Unsuccessful, the ‘iwa birds eventually fly off in search of an easier target. Moments later, a magnificent mōlī (Laysan albatross) glides by my left shoulder, turning to gaze at me with intense yet curious eyes. Its gracefulness in flight belies its enormous sevenfoot wingspan. Impervious to the impending squall, it ventures out over the lagoon, gently dragging the tip of its wing though the water’s surface as it banks steeply toward the open ocean in search of food.

Kure Atoll, also known as Hōlanikū or Mokupāpapa, is the furthest northwest of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. It is the most northerly atoll in the world, lying roughly 1,400 miles northwest of O‘ahu. The remnant of an ancient volcano, the atoll has a circular reef that is at most six miles in diameter. I am standing on the atoll’s only island, a small, crescent-shaped spit of land totaling a mere third of a square mile in size, ringed by a continuous stretch of brilliant white sand.

Bordering the beaches are dense, tangled shrubs of naupaka, some of which reach more than 10 feet high. In the center is an open, grassy plain dotted with kawelu, a native bunch grass. The island is quite flat, the highest point being roughly 20 feet above sea level. Kure is populated only by the hundreds of thousands of seabirds that come here each year to mate and raise their young, along with Hawaiian monk seals, green sea turtles, and other marine species.

I turn my attention back to the reef. Beyond is nothing but open ocean for thousands of miles, yet I know that in a short time the MV Imua, a 185-foot-long offshore supply vessel that brought me here from O‘ahu nearly eight months ago with a crew of seven others, will appear to take us back to civilization. We arrived at the end of August with just enough food and supplies to sustain us for the

 Mōlī (Laysan albatross) are one of the many species of seabirds that populate Kure Atoll to mate and raise their young. The atoll is also host to Hawaiian monk seals, green sea turtles, and other marine species.

duration of our time here. Since then, we have been the island’s only human inhabitants.

As I look over the island from the top of the dune, I try to imagine the pristine paradise it once was, a truly native island where wildlife thrived in perfect balance of give and take. However, over the past 200 years or so, humans have left their mark on this avian utopia, bringing with them invasive plants, insects, and diseases from other parts of the world that choked out the native flora, causing the populations of native fauna to plummet. Every day the wildlife here struggle to survive amid the ever-encroaching hands of humankind. Albatross feed their chicks plastic they mistook for food while foraging on the open ocean. Netting and other debris cast aside by fishermen entangle critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals. Invasive plants that have naturalized themselves threaten the nesting habitat of the atoll’s native seabirds.

The State of Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife established remote field camps on the island 25 years ago. The goal of

the division, now supported by the Kure Atoll Conservancy, is to restore Kure Atoll as close to its natural state as possible, allowing its native inhabitants to thrive in a properly functioning ecosystem once again.

Small but dedicated crews of habitat restoration technicians such as myself arrive by ship after weeklong journeys by sea to spend either the winter or summer season living and working on this extremely remote outpost. There is no electricity or internet here. Communication with the outside world is limited to short emails sent and received via satellite phone. All food and supplies are brought with crews and rain catchment is relied on for fresh water. Potential crew members are rigorously interviewed and ultimately chosen not only for their experience but also for their ability and willingness to live and co-exist in these remote and often challenging conditions.

Our days here are long and rigorous. We work to eradicate Verbesina encelioides, a tenacious and invasive plant that once covered most of the island’s open areas and made it difficult for albatross and other seabirds to successfully nest and raise their young. Thousands of pounds of trash, mostly plastic and netting, litter the island, swept in with the currents from elsewhere. Knowing it is impossible to remove it all, we focus on collecting fishing lines, nets, and other marine pollution in which birds, seals, and turtles are most likely to get tangled.

We are heartened when we see the results of this collective work, both ours and of the decades of crew before us. Native plants are returning in areas that were once entirely covered in weeds, creating a better habitat for the island’s avian inhabitants and making it possible for future generations of seabirds to exist. When birds and seals become caught in detritus that has made it to our shores, we free them from it and, in doing so, are rewarded by the knowledge that we have saved lives. By restoring and maintaining

diversity among this isolated ecosystem, we are helping the much larger and more global ecosystem to function and thrive.

When I first arrived, I was told by members of the departing crew that Kure would change me. It has. Life here is incredibly simple, profoundly uncomplicated, and dictated almost entirely by nature. The absence of the constant thrum of noise associated with the outside world affords a sort of clearheadedness that doesn’t exist elsewhere. The ability to focus becomes intensified and even exhilarating. Learning and adapting to ever-changing conditions and circumstances becomes almost instinctual. Here, we learn to make do with what we have on hand; anything more is considered unnecessary and even frivolous. When the trivial aspects of our lives slip away, we are left with profound appreciation of the importance of family and friends.

I can feel the wind begin to swirl around me as the squall inches its way toward the shoreline. A pillar of ‘iwa birds rises into the sky from the south. They are like an ever-changing constellation, slowly sweeping across the horizon using the thermals of the approaching storm to keep afloat. Together, the birds form a visible tattoo across the sky. I can almost feel their excitement and energy as the storm nears.

Behind me in the central plain are thousands of mōlī that have been our constant companions since their annual arrival in October. They are now working hard to raise and feed their young, and shortly, the surviving chicks will fledge and head into the great expanse of the Pacific to experience lives of voyaging and exploration. Anticipating the storm, the parents hunker down, protecting their chicks from the incoming rain and wind. The squall has reached shore, and I can feel the first drops of rain. It is time to go. I head back to the one-story cinder block structure that has been our shelter through many storms this winter. The eight of us wait inside while the rain briefly batters

Every day the wildlife on Kure Atoll struggle to survive amid the everencroaching hands of humankind.



A sleeping albatross. Affected by ocean pollution, albatross sometimes feed chicks plastic they mistook for food while foraging on the open ocean.

the island and then, as with all the storms before, continues out to sea, where it meanders along at the whim of currents and winds until it finally peters out.

I will miss Kure and all the unique and quirky creatures that call it home: the stunningly graceful fairy terns whose tendency to lay their solitary eggs in the most precarious of spots defies gravity and common sense; the wild enthusiasm of the male ‘iwa birds, warbling loudly, their heads thrown back and their bright crimson gular pouches fully inflated while desperately trying to keep from falling off their perches in the naupaka; and finally, the mighty mōlī, whose regal presences reminds us daily of the importance of our work.

I will miss being at the mercy of the rawness and strength of nature’s elements and the extreme isolation that is difficult

to find anywhere else. I will miss the moments that define our time here and the camaraderie forged from sharing these experiences. Memories tend to fade with time, but knowing that, in my own small way, I have contributed to preserving this remarkable place is an undeniable honor that will remain with me always. When the last remnants of the squall have dissipated, we head outside once again. Upon hearing a shout announcing the ship’s arrival, I make my way down the path to the shoreline to greet the new crew members. As they disembark at the water’s edge and step onto Kure for the first time, I see reflected in their eyes the same mixture of excitement and nervousness that I felt months ago, and I tell them that the island will change them, too.

 A mōlī and an approaching storm. Thousands of mōlī arrive every October and settle in the central plain.

FLUX FEATURE

Id yl l

Drea ms

In the late 1970s, the infamous commune known as Taylor Camp was burned to ash. But documentary photographs and stories from the campers themselves remain.

TEXT BY CHRISTIAN COOK

IMAGES BY JOHN WEHRHEIM

Fifty years ago, a man named Howard Taylor set sail from the coast of O‘ahu and disembarked with his wife and children on the sandy shoals of Kaua‘i’s north shore. Upon landing, he declared that he was selling all his belongings and moving the family to Kaua‘i. A native of London and brother of movie star Elizabeth Taylor, Howard looked a lot like the classic image of Sinbad the Sailor, and he no doubt felt as much wonder as that legendary mariner while exploring the island’s beaches and cliffs. He purchased a 7-acre plot of land at the end of the road and began drafting plans for his modernist dream home, which he completed but couldn’t obtain a permit to build. Frustrated, he drove with his family in multiple cars to the county jail in Wailua, bailed out 13 hippies from Berkeley who had been arrested for vagrancy, told them about his acreage at the end of the road, and said they should live there and do whatever they wanted. What this group started there came to be known as Taylor Camp.

In 1967, just a few years earlier, about 100,000 people had coalesced in a small hilly neighborhood of central San Francisco. They were drawn together by opposition to the mainstream ideals of the 1950s and ’60s and the clarion call of beat poets and authors like Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. The Vietnam War had been raging for years, and America’s youth were being used up as fodder in a war with motives the public had questioned for years. Dreaming of living a back-to-the-land lifestyle, building authentic communities, and being free, the flower children who gathered for the Summer of Love were linked by a desire to expand their consciousnesses and develop new modes of thinking. However, while organized around ideals of love, community, and ecology, the masses that gathered in San Francisco lost sense of proportion and awareness, resulting in crime, pollution, and drug addiction. Similar problems would be reflected on a smaller scale around a decade later on a small beach called Mākua.

As the shockwaves of the Summer of Love crashed and receded, some of

its refugees washed up on the Pacific island of Kaua‘i. Refugees from the dying American Dream, the original members of Taylor Camp were still running from the world that had killed its heroes with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. In 1969, the plantation industry in Hawai‘i was falling apart and the island’s population was declining. Homes sat empty. Mango and banana trees were untended, boughs heavy with ripe fruit enriched with the nutrients from Kaua‘i’s loamy soil. They were a valued resource for individuals willing to break the law to get free food.

Other ideal resources were plantation homes sold by Kilauea Plantation with the stipulation that they must be dismantled and taken offsite. For $100, buyers could get the materials for an entire home, and if they cleaned up the lot the house sat on, they got a $50 discount. The community destined for Taylor Camp envisioned the materials as expansive tree houses. Large veranda windows would be transformed into skylights and moon doors along sections of the 100-foot walls of “The Big House,” becoming portals into a unique and fleeting time in space. Rooms would also be illuminated by light traveling through a canopy of kamani and the layers of translucent plastic that formed the roofs of most of the tree houses.

Heading to the end of the road in Hā‘ena, the members of the camp found a place to heal, get back to nature, and find community and peace for maybe the first time in their lives.

Emerging from an original group of 13, Taylor Camp grew to more than 100 members. Initially drawn by word of mouth and later by the media, people from all over the world bought tickets to Kaua‘i to find their spot at the camp they had heard so much about.

Many of the free-spirited ideals of

Kauaʻi’s Taylor Camp residents have since become trends in mainstream society.

Established as a place with no rules, elements of the outside world eventually emerged in the microcosm of Taylor Camp. Order began to form as campers constructed a church and a free store where they could pick up groceries. The only rule enacted was “No More Houses,” which helped the camp population stabilize. Life at the camp consisted of farming, fishing, surfing, yoga, kung fu, and  Luigi Nino and Kali, 1970s. Taylor Camp grew to more than 100 members, who filled their days with yoga and swimming.

spiritual practices. Many of the radical ideals of the Taylor Camp residents have become trends in mainstream society.

If the camp was off the map, nearby Kalalau was its own universe. Long, meditative swims along the coast’s craggy shoreline to the beaches of Hanakāpiʻai and Honopū revealed beautiful fingerlike cliffs descending downwards, worn fine and thin by millions of years of rain and wind. Time alone in the natural wonders of Kaua‘i would bring anyone closer to God. Lots of the campers ventured into the depths of the Nāpali Coast to get clean, to be one with nature, to grow pakalolo, or to just be deeply alone. The campers got away to these magical places when the idyllic mellowness of Taylor Camp became too much, or when they started getting loaded a little too consistently, or when they lost it; maybe an acid trip was too heavy, or they got hooked on harder drugs that started coming around, losing touch with the sense of community and healing they had found in the natural refuge of Kaua‘i. Nāpali could bring that back.

The campers found some measure of peace, sometimes lost in revelry and nudity, and sometimes

in the pure bliss of being, but their lifestyle disturbed and upset Hawaiians and locals in the area. Violent physical altercations sometimes resulted.

Near the end of the camp’s time, after Surfer magazine published a story about the camp in 1973, its grounds were overrun with transient surfers who slept on the beach and chased waves, not contributing to the community and leaving refuse and trash in their wakes. Like the Summer of Love a few years distant, the camp became a source of pollution and decadence, in opposition to the dreams of back-to-theland harmony shared by permanent campers. To add to the irony of the situation, the camp also disrupted the lives of local residents whose families had been farming and already living off the land sustainably in the traditions of their native ancestors.

Taylor Camp’s story is beautiful and multifaceted, sparkling but sometimes as dark as black tar heroin. Freedom allowed creativity, one of the highest forms of human expression, to run free and wild, but this freedom also allowed in a decrepit element, one that would rather bask in artificial

 Diane’s house, 1976. When the camp grew too confining, campers ventured to the Nāpali Coast. In time, Taylor Camp became a strain on the local community.

Teri and Debi, 1976.

Don plays guitar, 1976.

euphoria than experience the joy of community and compassion. The camp was a dream to many but a hellish nightmare for some. It relieved the responsibilities of an average life, which left space for addicts to indulge their addictions and get lost in the sway of their drugs. As years passed, the more constant stewards of the camp slowly drove out these influences, but not without emotional casualties along the way.

But the cultural ramifications of Taylor Camp live on. Elizabeth Taylor was photographed wearing puka shells, a gift from the campers, and an international trend was born. Howard Taylor, the first celebrity resident to live on Kaua‘i’s north shore, inspired a wave of celebrity transplants to the area. Like the campers who were drawn by radiant Kodachrome photos of Kaua‘i in the 1970s, modern romantics from all over the world are still lured to the island by beautiful images in magazines and online. The azure hues and white sand beaches are

prime social media content, a call to hordes of tourists who congregate daily on the same beaches. Once an isolated and serene setting, droves of visitors now walk along Kūhiō Highway to Mākua Beach, since nicknamed Tunnels. Homogeneous white Ford and Jeep rentals line the roads, the occasional local’s car with its sun-faded hood standing out like a sore thumb, an unintended silent protest against the march of tourism and commercialization of Kaua‘i.

In late 1977, after fighting legal battles for nearly a decade, the campers were evicted. Their tree houses were burned to the ground by police. Some of the campers left for other parts of the world. Some headed to Hawai‘i Island. Some stayed on Kaua‘i and dealt with the shame of society after living lives the mainstream might have called derelict. But stories and photographs of the campers remain, glowing embers that still throw sparks to the wind. For a moment, they were free.

 Alpin at door, 1976. The original members of Taylor Camp were hoping to escape a society that had killed their heroes, including Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

 Detail of Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique by Jean Gabriel Charvet. Image by Meagan Suzuki.

SPECIAL SECTION: ARTISTS

“There’s literally a battle over the memories of the new generation.”—Paul Pfeiffer

The Artists

Reem Bassous

Paul Pfeiffer

Lisa Reihana

Kainoa Grupse & Tommy Hite

db amorin

In today ’s climate, artists are needed more than ever. They imagine new futures and activate inventive ways of decoding the past—all to better examine our present cultural moment.

In this section, these conversations with Pacific diasporic creatives, who are exhibiting work in Hawai‘i with a sense of urgency and thought-provoking timeliness, speak to issues surrounding colonial histories, decentralizing narratives, and reframing contemporary views of Hawai‘i. All interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Reem Bassous

 Stepping into the cave-like Kaka‘ako studio of painter and educator Reem Bassous, with its etched-up walls, paintsplattered canvases, and tapedup pencil drawings, calls to mind a stark bomb shelter or a recess like Lascaux—somewhere haunting and prepossessing. In memorializing landscapes, the post-war experience, and immigrant struggles, Bassous isn’t afraid to settle into the shadows of memory and consciousness. Her work is often explorative and laborious: it’s a physical exercise to excavate and reflect the lived experience of growing up amid Lebanon’s civil war. Her persistence to uncover and understand the enduring result of that shock recognizes that political conflicts never really end for their so-called survivors.

What was the stimulus for your latest body of work?

The color black has always been very significant to me. I knew I wanted to work on a black painting. The title of the work is Courting the Infinite and the infinite is like a can of worms with philosophical ideas. Bringing that into the studio to convey them through painting is an exciting thing. In my research, I realized I needed to come to terms with death, with the idea of what happens later and of losing people.

Did anything about death reveal itself to you during the process?

Yes. I’m terrified of death. (Laughs) I get this sense of near panic when I think about it. And it’s not my own death I'm worried about, it’s people I'm close to like my parents, my daughter. It’s almost to the point of a severe phobia. Part of this processing is just imagining the inevitable and trying to determine how you would deal with the situation when it comes. I don’t have any answers yet.

But your work tends to not really supply answers.

All of my work pretty much leaves you out at sea. And that’s probably because that’s still where I’m at. I don’t know that it’s my role to supply conclusions or closure. I think there’s something very honest about showing everyone that I’m in the same boat too.

Well, I do feel compared to your other work this one is more optimistic than your other paintings.

Yeah, I refuse to believe that this is where we end. I just feel if that were

the reality, if this is where everything stops when we die, it’s terribly unfair to so many people that have had very hard lives. It’s horribly unfair. I refuse to believe that this is it. In a way I think that’s hopeful.

But at the same time, I think the work has matured because I have been at this for almost 23 years. That’s probably why I’m assessing these big ideas from a more analytical perspective. They’re in a way less emotion driven, even though it’s a very emotional subject. But the execution is more analytical.

Do you feel like you're working in a certain artistic tradition? Or do you feel like you're trying to get away from that?

No, I don’t think I’m working in a specific tradition. I do pay homage to the abstract expressionist painters who had their roots in very strong observational drawing. I am of that school. But it’s always the painter’s question with respect to what are you going to add to the table and how are you going to show people the physicality and the material of paint in a way that they have not seen before. That’s why the application of paint is an endless study. As many individuals as there are, there will be very different marks created.

I’ve sometimes sensed a frustration with painting in your body of work. You seem to recognize the limitations of your medium. I feel a connection with you in terms of trying to honor a form, but also wanting to break from it and take it elsewhere.

I love that you get me. I think that's certainly true, in terms of me being very aware that paint is limited in its

Text by Matthew Dekneef Images by Vincent Bercasio

physicality. For example, in the series that I'm working on now, which is a series of portraits titled Moribund Outlivers , the series tackles a very difficult subject, which is trying to convey the psychological state of the postwar survivor in Lebanon, the war survivor living in postwar times. That's why the title of “moribund” is so important and “outliver” as well. I mean, they’ve lived past their expiration date. There are so many things associated with that. There’s survivor’s guilt. There is a coming to terms with a non-war existence.

Basically, who am I now without this attached to me as a label? How do you convey that specific hysteria through the mark? That is something I have tried so hard to convey and I have failed more times than I’ve succeeded. I’ve been working on the series for about four years now, and I’ve only finished about 10 portraits. It’s not because I’m trying to paint a traditional portrait that looks distressed, but I’m trying to channel this hysteria into the paints and then into the mark and having that mark form the face. That’s incredibly difficult. More often than not, you end up with no face.

I’ve always understood the figurative elements in your work to be ghostly. Never mutated or demented or scary, just ... not fully there. It reminds me of a thought by another writer who was defining ghosts in tandem with migration: A ghost is something that has no home, which is essentially what a migrant is in another country. These are people who are not fully at home anywhere.

Yeah, they haven't arrived. In my work, one can think of them as disintegrating as well. Within the

past year I would say every painting I’ve done has had a figure in some capacity and these figures have taken different roles.

Why do you think you are drawn to create more representational figures these days? How do you think your work is speaking to or in conversation with our political climate?

I did a painting recently, Endless Red , that’s a hybrid study of Picasso’s Guernica and Peter Paul Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents . The piece has very obviously narrative scenes of violence, like blood gushing out of someone’s neck, for instance. It took me a good hour to mix a specific red for that painting and it has approximately 10 or 15 different colors in it. It’s a very, very complex red that I mixed. I’m in an endless state of anger about the political situation these days, not only in the Middle East, but very much in the United States. It’s very hard to be an artist with the level of sensitivity we operate within and not feel affected to a degree, regarding what’s been happening in this country. And I’m also an immigrant and I’m a minority and the list goes on.

What do you think is the purpose of memory in terms of your art?

The thing about memory that’s so interesting is that no matter how well you remember something, it’s never the exact reality. I remember very specific things about my childhood or about the war in Lebanon, and then sometimes I would have these discussions with my brother and his memory of the very same thing is very different. So it not only depends on the person, but it depends on the perfect alchemy of elements that led

to that specific person experiencing the memory or the reality at the time in a specific way, which then became a memory.

Memories can be very haunting and they can manifest themselves in repeated nightmares, like the ones I ’ve had over the years. I really hesitate to use the word therapeutic when it comes to painting. But in some way, there is an element of catharsis when you’re working on a subject that has haunted you for so long and then you get to this point where you don’t have those recurring nightmares anymore and you feel like you have more power over that memory. With respect to negative memories at least, I think that it’s necessary to address that, to process your past before you can even start to address your present and future.

Is there a relationship between the use of abstraction and your memories and first-hand experience of growing up in a war-torn environment?

There were three years which consisted of a lot of trial and error, where I was trying to depict Lebanon and the war zone from my memory. After those years of heavy experimentation, I discovered it’s really not about what that experience looked like, but rather about what it felt like. The abstraction is very much connected to sensation—it is the mark that creates the sensation of the situation. At one point I was using a lot of fireworks in the paintings based on instinct, it just made sense to do that. To mimic that level of violence. I was constructing the image and I was deconstructing the image and I knew when to stop and I was in control.

THE MULTIMEDIA SCULPTOR

Paul Pfeiffer

 Paul Pfeiffer contributed two installations to the 2019 Honolulu Biennial. One of them, Poltergeist , is a site-specific commision which incorporated the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum as frame and backdrop. Crown Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Kaleiopapa a Kamehameha, as depicted in a famous royal portrait, anchors the memory palace Pfeiffer has built. The installation includes several child figures posed in the same manner as the prince, constructed out of 3D-printed materials and wood carved by Filipino master craftsmen whose skills are often applied to the iconography of the Santo Niño, the Christ Child. The piece allows Pfeiffer, and ourselves, to ruminate on memory, celebrity, poverty, sacrality, and the vulnerability of children in the global economy. How does a person so regarded slip from memory? Whose bodies matter? These are questions which demand every feeling person’s attention.

As a Hawaiian historian, I wondered, why did you settle on the image of Albert Kauikeaouli Kamehameha?

I am interested in the human figure or specific personalities. Even the history of images of the human figure, and the kind of psychological and historical weight of that. Since my earliest days as an artist, I have always been looking intuitively for images with a strong visual charge.

So, to get to your question, over the past couple of years, I started to think about the nature and the position of children in society. Children, to me, are a particularly potent emblem of capitalism. We think of them with a certain kind of purity or innocence. At the same time, it would be very hard to deny that in some ways, children are on the front line of everything that is the most perverse and messed up about the world right now. Children are used regularly by politicians as tools, to sell their brands. It is common knowledge that the advertising industry specifically targets young people. There is an interesting contradiction to me that’s embodied in children. We hold them up as everything that is pure in us, that we want to protect, and at the same time they are the most at risk as the world becomes evermore driven by the logic of the marketplace.

I had a question when I read the title of your piece, “Poltergeist.” I felt like it was a dumb question, “Who’s the poltergeist?” But actually I think the question is, “What are we haunted by?”

Yeah, exactly. Poltergeist, the German word, refers specifically to a playful ghost, but to me there’s an assocation with the irruption

of the uncanny in this kind of everyday scenario of a suburban idyllic situation where everything is evidence of having attained a certain level of success. To then find horror in the middle of it raises the question of like, what happened?

Honestly, I was surprised to find the figure of Prince Albert. I just found it interesting that very few of my friends and family knew who he was. Why would somebody so important be forgotten?

In highlighting that this trauma or this hope is buried, what do you think is at stake? What do we lose or what do we gain when we forget past trauma?

There is now an open debate about how the Marcos regime is remembered. The current administration, Duterte, has made moves to heroize Marcos. There was a real danger of people forgetting what Marcos represented, the blatant antidemocratic extremes his regime represented. There’s literally a battle over the memories of the new generation. Current leaders attempt to harness nationalism as a relatively easy, go-to form of identity, which has a lot of emotion behind it, in order to do whatever they want to do. That’s the danger.

Combining 3D printing with customary crafts of people known for carving these images for churches, I don’t know if that’s a comment on sacred and profane meaning, or plasticity and the kind of transience of which we are calling modern, but it’s disposable. I wanted you to address what these juxtapositions elaborate for you in the piece.

Over the past couple of years I ’ ve been on a particular exploration in

Text by Noelani Arista

Images by Chris Rohrer and Joey Trisolini

the Philippines, an exploration of religious image-making there and the workshops that make the Catholic saints. A lot of wood carving also happens in Pampanga, specifically, towns like Bacolore and Betis, where historically religious icons have been carved for centuries. Technologically, an image and the making of them, it’s coming from the same place, the desire to exalt the human figure for whatever political or spiritual ends. In that context it suddenly occurred to me that the most important religious icon there is the Santo Niño de Cebú. Legend has it that that was the first religious icon to enter the Philippines and to be accepted by Filipino culture. At the Basilica Santo Niño, every year tens of thousands of people go to Cebú city to pay homage to the image of the baby Jesus ... one image that was brought by Magellan. It’s another example of where the image of the child becomes emblematic of capitalism. It has become both the image of the purest thing that we could think of, which is the Christ child, and at the same time it’s like Christ child, the king. It’s the most powerful figure of all. How can that be? In one image you have the image of complete innocence, and in a way, via power, complete corruption. To me, there is a connection that I make mentally to Prince Albert there. To me it’s a huge contradiction, that on the one hand we feel very protective of our children and of innocence, and at the same time, we have a very high threshold to accept systemic perversion.

It did fascinate me, these images of the children. You’re showing this innocence and then juxtaposing them in this pose of Albert, like an

echo. You’re setting up a relationship between them and him.

The photograph of Prince Albert Kamehameha shows him in a very stately pose, wearing very stately attire. It’s really the photograph of a crown prince, and the doppelgangers are the duplicates, specifically of children who occupy the lowest rung of the economic ladder in the Philippines. These are the children of fisher folk. It’s attempting to recast the poorest of the poor as being worthy of being valued the way that a crown prince would be valued.

I am sort of forcefully pointing to a connection across the Pacific. You know, it would’ve been much more obvious to cast children in Honolulu as Prince Albert. I’ve been asked, why go to the Philippines to do this? All I can say is that in the context of the Picture Gallery [in the Bishop Museum] you’ve got Hawaiian history on one side [in Hawaiian Hall] and you’ve got the history of migration across the Pacific in Pacific Hall on the other side. It’s known by most Filipinos in Hawai‘i that to a large degree the Philippines in that migration story is not fully represented. They left the Philippines off the map on the floor.

Wow. I didn’t even notice.

Check it out. That wooden map made with inlaid wood. A lot of trouble had gone into that beautiful map on the floor. Kids are brought in from all the schools to sit on that map on the floor and talk about their position in the migration story. And there is no Philippine islands there.

Did you tell the museum that?

I learned it from them [the staff at the museum]. I mean, they kind of sheepishly told me that. Growing up the way I grew up, that is an American story and that is a legitimate 21st-century story— people move around the world all the time and I’m trying to represent that movement. In some ways that movement is too complicated for a nationalist perspective. From a nationalist perspective, like in the Philippines, you fall off the radar if your past is too complicated.

Right, exactly.

America’s an expert at this kind of erasure of identity, erasure of history. I’m interested in scrambling that because I don’t believe in nationalist narratives. I feel like there are very questionable reasons why we subscribe to them. My interest in contemporary culture is the populism aspect of images that are meant to reach the greatest number of people and the way language is changing at this particular moment in history. We have a rise of leaders who are really experts in how to talk to the masses. This is a real thing that’s happening. There is a kind of experimentation going on with how to communicate with people. The rise of populism has to do with the rise of a new type of language, which is not verbal, and in a way, not logical, but more neurological. I’m interested in clocking this evolution and also participating in it to hopefully bring it to light, so that it’s not used to create some kind of a familiarity with what’s going on, so that people don't fall for it so easily.

Lisa Reihana

 I may not have seen a more impressive (and inarguably immersive) piece of art this year than Lisa Reihana’s Emissaries , specifically the epic 64-minute panoramic video installation that was on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art this past summer, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] . Inspired by the 19th-century French wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique by textile designer Jean Gabriel Charvet, Reihana challenges its colonial depictions with an expansive and animated narrative, drawing out provocative parallels and brilliantly vivid counterarguments, all the while exploiting technology’s cinematic advances with marvelous result.

What depictions in the Charvet painting initially startled you? What parts of it did you take most issue with?

Charvet was very canny. He looked at the illustrations made by artists such as John Webber and Sydney Parkinson which were circulating around Europe in the 1800s and were kind of the talk of the town. He gathered a number of those images together and then created this incredible wallpaper. What I liked about them as an artist is thinking about those artists who originally went out and created portraits of very famous people like Tupaia, our heroes of the Pacific. But what Charvet has is versions of versions of versions of versions, so they become further and further removed from the truth. So that was the place that I felt from which I could create work and talk back into that space, really thinking about presenting the imagery and the ceremonies that we perform.

By being there as living, breathing people, we’re not a dying race. We are survivors. We are the embodiments of our ancestors and the philosophies and ideas that flourished from that time.

How did you arrive at the title? Why did you want to include the word “infected”?

Well, “in pursuit,” I love the idea of endeavor because there are so many endeavors within the work itself. Venus is also associated with the name “love” or “aroha” or “aloha”— certainly alongside “infected” it’s really crossing against this idea and it does pack a punch. It’s really to put the audience on notice that there are more things to see than meets

the eye. “Infected” also talks to this idea of the pathogens that were traveling on board and things that we have to look out for, even today. It’s certainly part of moving through space and time.

Also, the idea that once you know something, you can’t unknow it. The maps that Captain Cook made— once that knowledge was out there, that opened everything up.

Can you talk about how you approached casting this project and the people you included?

I’ve been lucky enough to gather friends that I’ve always wanted to record. There are non-actors, training actors, professional actors. I’ve written little scenes as cameo parts, people I know that I wanted to have in here. It’s been a really great structure thinking about the wallpaper as a way of inviting lots of people in.

Some of the vignettes or dramas were scripted and sometimes people came and I talked about my hopes and aspirations for the piece and then asked them if they had a personal response that they might want to put into the work. For instance, I went to Australia and got permission to tell stories from some of the elders there. It was really about agreed representation. I wanted people to feel very comfortable about how it is they were going to be seen by an audience.

Also, I knew I wanted to depict artists in here because I think that artists are really brave. Even, Parkinson, Webber, and some of those really famous illustrators

Text by Matthew Dekneef Images by Meagan Suzuki

of the time. What I wanted to show in this work is that they’re generally out in the field recording without accompaniment. I think of them as being quite brave and very personable, in a sense that they needed to go and negotiate with some of the people that they recorded portraits of. I’m really interested in the artists because of the impact their work has had on how we think of ourselves today and how we looked at those points in time.

The source material being a wallpaper is so intriguing to me—this visual product of an image plastered onto and over something already existing to fashion another landscape altogether. How does that material shape and inform the piece here?

The series of vignettes play out on a digital illustration, and that is very much related to the wallpaper. One of the reasons that it looks so strange is because the illustrator who made the wallpaper went to Guadalupe but never came into the Pacific. Some of the palms and things are not actually correct. When I was making this work, I had this possibility to remake everything and maybe kind of set the record straight in a way, but I decided I wanted to keep a sense of authenticity to the wallpaper as the thing that I’m kind of resisting.

Also, because it’s a green screen I couldn’t use green greenery. So, you know, there is no authenticity—this is very much a confabulation that’s made for the particularities of the digital technology that we built and created

for this work. It is this completely made-up platform that doesn't actually belong anywhere—it isn't representing anywhere specifically.

What that does for me and the way I’m thinking about it was from a scholar, Deidre Brown, and the way she posits it. She thought it was very interesting that, because it belongs to no one, it can be everyone’s. Every voice can stand here in this work and speak because it’s nowhere, but we are everything. Hopefully that kind of disjunct reminds you that this is isn’t real and is creative and an artistic work, but I love the way that people can speak across it.

There’s an undeniable electricity that energizes the exhibition space. What mood were you aiming for and what did you want to leave the viewer with?

When I started making this work, my initial feeling was to really make people rethink what they think of the Pacific. I was thinking about the exoticization, like in Hawai‘i with the impact of tourism. People come here seeing it as this exotic place to be free, but there are histories embedded in the land and people. It’s incredible how many people are looking at how many people—so many people looking at people— because we are always intrigued by others. That’s why we travel so much.

The piece uses a very new cinematic language, it’s a bit like theater. The editing comes about by the way that people come to look at it and view it. It’s your choice to choose to look at one scene or another. Because it

scrolls around you, there’s this sense of a series of unfolding worlds and new stories to come—this kind of endless nature of time and that we are still here. It’s a very interesting, unusual work—in a way it’s full of wonder, and people don’t quite know what it is that they’ve come to encounter.

They need to spend time with it to unpack it. With digital technologies and devices and social media and all the ways life has become busier and busier, it’s very hard to make people stop and feel that sense of wonder and to try and work out what’s going on. To engage your own brain and come to your own conclusions about whatever it is that you’re seeing. Because there are scenes in this work that an indigenous person will read really differently from a Western perspective. And so those are two different truths operating in the same space and time, and that is true of life.

Hopefully with taking the time you can come to an empathy and seeing things from multiple perspectives. This kind of complicate its and just indicates that there are many different stories and many different ways of living and many different philosophies in the world.

Kainoa Gruspe & Tommy Hite

 Kainoa Gruspe and Tommy Hite are two of my favorite artists and oldest friends. In 2016, I had the privilege of arranging their first solo art exhibits of paintings, only months apart, in the basementgallery of Hound and Quail in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Since then, dozens of solo and group shows, and collaborations with brands like In4mation and Napalm have followed. Their careers have taken off. However, they hardly ever speak about their craft. Actually, they hardly speak at all. It’s hard to say whether their quiet dispositions are inherent to their character, a matter of personal choice, or if they’ve simply never been asked to properly explain themselves. Whatever the reason, we got them together to speak with one another about their practice, upbringings, and what they hate most about painting.

Tommy Hite: All right, questions. I brought a couple. What first got you into art?

Kainoa Gruspe: I think I first got into it through skateboarding. Seeing other skateboarders in the world doing art, seeing people like Ed Templeton, all these cool board graphics and stuff. And then I was always doodling in school. I didn’t take any art classes in high school or anything. I started in college when I took a drawing class.

TH: Oh shit, really? But you were drawing before that?

KG: I was drawing my whole life, but I never really took it seriously.

TH: Yeah, same here. What age then?

KG: Did I start to get into it?

TH: Yeah, when were you like, “this is my number-one hobby”?

KG: When I first took a painting class. I was 18 or 19?

TH: Same. I always did more graffiti, lettering, and shit in high school. I started drawing when I was like, 11. I skated, too. I was getting into drawing because I wasn’t good at skating, so I would just draw instead. It took a turn in college, when they started teaching me things, and I started figuring out what I can do. When they were like, “OK, this is the art world, and this is how people make money.” I started to figure out that I don’t want to make things for other people, I want people to want the things that I make.

KG: Let’s see, I wrote some questions here, they’re a doozy. How do you

start? Do you lay out the image first, like sketch it out? Or do you have a single picture or idea that develops over time?

TH: It’s all over the board. At first it was hard in school, when they tell you that you need a focus. But then, once you find a focus that kind of makes sense for you, you can do a riff on anything. My work is really specific to Hawai‘i, whereas your themes are more international. A lot of the stuff I do is more about local quirks, inside jokes. I try to make it obvious to the rest of the world, if the rest of the world is even looking, for it to be understood.

KG: Yeah, I get that from your work. There are motifs that anybody would recognize, like the rainbow or the palm tree, but there are more specific things that only people from Hawai‘i will understand and resonate with.

TH: And teach people.

KG: Are you annoyed at the idealized depiction of Hawai‘i? All these paintings of sunsets— do you see that negatively and, like, that you’re rebelling?

TH: Probably to some degree. You see what everyone’s doing, and then you’re just like, yeah, fuck that. I don’t want to do that. Growing up, I didn’t really go to the beach at all. We’d just skate around and flip off trolleys and shit. Remember mooning trolleys? You can’t help but make fun of this idea of Hawai‘i. I always thought it was interesting how, for most of the world, Hawai‘i is only this one thing, this one idea. But there is more dimension, there are subcultures. There’s a lot of uniqueness in Hawai‘i. Whether it

Text by Naz Kawakami Images by Chris Rohrer

is known or not, we are cool. It’s definitely a goal to bring that up. It is kind of irritating if someone paints a sunset and then has a big following because of it. But, also, that’s OK. I’m stoked for them.

KG: Yeah, that kind of stuff makes me super annoyed. It seems like your stuff consciously negates or pokes fun at the rainbow and the palm tree.

TH: Yeah, for sure, there’s definitely some teasing. The more you paint, the more you figure out what you’re doing. I think I’m taking what people think Hawai‘i is, and what it really is, and combining them in a picture so that they contrast each other. But they also make fun of each other. And that’s like as simple as I can explain it. I’ve noticed that you kind of poke fun at that too.

KG: Definitely. A lot of the stuff that I make stems from being super annoyed at something, things that are just boring and that are accepted by everybody. What influenced you to do art growing up?

TH: It was the graffiti artists. I always hung out with skaters and artists at Wilson Park because I lived across the street. There were kids in high school who were drawing amazing sketches in composition books, just chilling. I was completely mesmerized by the shit they were doing with pencils and ballpoint pens and Sharpies. That’s literally how I started drawing. I used to like building stuff and taking stuff apart. I always had to be doing something. I wanted to create things. I wanted to be an inventor when I was young,

but I couldn’t figure out circuits. I remember watching the news and seeing these kids building computers and I gave up that day. I was like, “fuck that!” They’re my age and they’re building computers. I was super into, like, Harry Potter. That was another fascination. I started writing “Magic Staff,” and then people started calling me that.

KG: I’ve noticed sometimes there’s a wizarding, magical element in your paintings.

TH: There is an essence of that whole magical thing that’s appealing and trendy. There’s something about the magical, the fictional—stuff that’s present in Harry Potter, Howl’s Moving Castle —there’s something in them I find alluring. The weird whimsical stuff came about when I just had the idea to put the rainbow from one trashcan to another and I think that’s kind of what set it off— it was like me trying to break away. The BFA show at UH was when I tried to make up my own scenes. I felt like I wanted to hone in. It was that rainbow, I just thought it’d be super funny if I just put the rainbow in a trash can…

KG: And from then you figured it was just more fun to invent your own pictures?

TH: Yeah, and then, that matched the fire hydrant with a cone on it that I painted the next day. That’s how all that came about.

TH: When you come up with an idea for a show, does it take you a long time to do each of your pieces?

KG: Sometimes it takes a super long time for one painting. And sometimes it can just be a day. I like starting something and it kind of comes together in the first day and I can kind of see where it’s going. It feels like I’ve got a lot of momentum to keep working on it. I like being surprised when I only do a little thing and that little thing totally makes it work. You put one little piece of color somewhere and then the whole thing looks good. I like that.

TH: All right, well, this was cool.

KG: Yeah, this was fun. Hopefully we sounded smart.

db amorin

 The artist db amorin’s latest piece, grazed my neck w/ a burnt piece of land in liliha , operates like a magnet. The installation, a suspended video screen that projects static over a cracked surface of Pacific-sourced sea salts on the floor beneath it, seems to equally attract and repel. Or at least that was my experience being in its presence, finding myself unsure, yet also able to strangely intuit, how to trace my own way around viewing this work. Decentralization and deconstruction are the primary approaches amorin takes in assembling all of his canon, and to the viewers’ benefit: this mode of engagement shows us alternative, non-linear methods of negotiating narrative, history, and identity.

Your junkyard aesthetic and means of culling material deeply informs your art-making. I would dare to describe it as refreshingly non-judgemental.

My work uses noise aesthetics and glitch aesthetics as a way to talk about personal dysphoria and perceptual dysphoria. This work is the culmination of a lot of autoethnographical kind of research into my genealogy, my family’s experiences, and the location of my childhood home in Liliha. I come from a mixed family, AzoreanPortuguese and Samoan. A lot of the information about where we came from is no longer available. It’s been lost over time or obscured by different versions of the same event told by different people. A lot of my work takes those discrepancies and amplifies them. In a way, it is to draw attention to the gaps in knowledge and the negative spaces that are formed when information is lost and people are left to navigate these large distances within their histories.

How has Hawai‘i influenced your approach to art?

Growing up on an island really has colored the way that I go about my process of making art and treating time and material as something that can be explored, broken, re-manipulated, abstracted, or amplified. The cyclical nature of time and location on an island— driving around it, or even, like, wave cycles—has definitely mirrored the kind of perceptual disturbances and perceptual distortions that I like to use in my work. These ephemeral or immaterial things about growing up

in Hawai‘i has really dictated where my work has gone and where it continues to go.

What draws you to video?

It’s something that I’m comfortable working with in the same way that a carpenter would work with wood or a painter would work with a palette to create these modular experiences that are durational, to take them apart and really exploit their elasticity. I love working with a medium that is so fluid.

Can you talk about how you decided to install and position this piece? It’s inviting and alluring, but not exactly easy to navigate either. I wasn’t sure where to place myself, or where you, the artist, wanted the viewer to be, exactly. Ultimately, I just had to surrender to that.

The things that I’m most inspired by are these moments between frames, or moments where there has been something that maybe once existed and no longer is present, and you’re kind of left to decide what it means to you and what it was. It’s in those spaces that you’re allowed to be free and renegotiate what that means to you and how you present it. With my work, I hope to create these media-driven experiences that stand in contrast to what a cinematic experience would give a person.

Rather than being immersive, it’s definitely calling attention to the division between the audience and the piece. I'm hoping when people are experiencing it, there is an ambient narrative that is coming

Text by Matthew Dekneef Images by Chris Rohrer

through and it’s more sensation driven rather than intellectual or even sequential. I'm hoping that some of the immaterial qualities, such as the heat lamps or the reflection or catching it at an awkward angle where there’s a glare, gives the person a bodied feeling. That they’re able to get that transmission of what’s being communicated, which is more of an abstract notion rather than a traditonal narrative.

Your interrogation of identity is a constant in your work. How has your relationship to your self, or the self, evolved over time?

I had begun doing a lot of selfportraiture and using my own body as a material, amplifying that, distorting that, and then moving on to these more non-representational ideas around identity, where multiple modes of communication about who a person is or what a group of people are and can be are deconstructed to the point of abstraction, and then using that as a template to build upon. So I think it’s important to explore identities, but I don’t necessarily think it’s beneficial to stay within representational modes.

Since we took portraits and recorded an interview of you talking about your work, I want to ask: How does that make you feel as a video artist concerned with boxing-in and packaging narratives?

It’s kind of interesting to be a person who primarily deals with digital imagery and also personally have such an adverse feeling towards

the proliferation of digital images. (Laughs.) Maybe you can actually see that in my work, where I take something, a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end, a story that comes from a human, and then I break it down to the bare minimum. Then, I break it down further by corrupting a file, amplify that, and then serve that up as, you know, my grandmother ’s story or the thing I found in the basement, or a box that my dad gave me. So thinking about the ways in which noise serves as protection is also really prevalent in my work because I have a responsibility to my family to tell a story, but not exploit their story.

Your treatment of sound as material, as something rich and tactile, especially comes through in the way you title your pieces. The characters themselves are stylized—some words are more oblique than others, in italics, in all caps. There’s an explicit texture.

A lot of my work has its roots in language, like you said. The “graze my neck” portion comes from a poem I wrote over 10 years ago, which was the impetus for this piece. It was after a really visually arresting dream that I had of the actual burnt land that I'm depicting in this work. I use a lot of these types of dream logic, then expressed as language, and then take it and extract it from there.

What you were saying about the tactile nature of my work, paired with what I was saying earlier about what I want people to take away from it, which is a bodied experience, a static-flavored shape [an iteration of

this piece] is kind of a nod to that. To throw in a synesthetic description of this piece denotes that I want people to walk away with this sort of crosssensory experience—where you’re both getting heat and watching something tumbling, or wincing at a glare that got too close or was a little too bright—but also kind of lulled by, you know, a gentle wave of static. I want these conflicting kind of experiences of my work because the lived experience is just as conflicting.

 In the jungle of architect Aaron Ackerman’s family home in Pālolo Valley. Image by IJfke Ridgley.

LIVING WELL

“I saw this habitation to be safe, to be inwardly quiet, when there was great stirrings and commotions in the world.”—John Woolman

Radical Silence

In Mānoa Valley, a devout gathering of Quakers meets to hear the divine from within.

TEXT BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

IMAGES BY LILA LEE

From the outside, the house at 2426 Oʻahu Avenue looked like any other in the neighborhood: large front lawn, lava rock detailing, covered lānai. Inside, however, it was full of oddities. The living room, largely empty, was furnished in a lopsided fashion with two chairs, a couch, and a bookcase all shoved to one end. And in the hall, where one might expect family photos, a bulletin board was cluttered with clippings of upcoming community events and peace protests.

The house is the home of the Honolulu Friends Meeting, a congregation of the Religious Society of Friends that was founded in 1936 and has been meeting in Mānoa since 1957. You may know the group by another name: Quakers.

Nearly every week for the past 83 years, a small group of Quakers, or Friends, as they often refer to themselves, have gathered in Honolulu for worship. About the only thing Quaker worship has in common with that of other churches, however, is that it takes place on Sunday morning. At the meeting for worship of the Honolulu Friends Meeting, there is no music, no liturgy, no communion. There are no baptisms, no sermons, no rocking in seats or speaking in tongues.

Mostly, there’s no speaking at all. An unprogrammed Quaker meeting is silent. For roughly an hour, attendees sit in a circle and wait to hear a message from the divine, or “the light within.” Sometimes, maybe once or twice a meeting, a person will receive a message they discern is meant for the whole community. Only then will someone speak.

The reason for the silence, David Foster told me, is to better hear what Quakers refer to as the “still, small voice,” a reference to the Bible’s book of First Kings when God is revealed to the prophet Elijah. David and his wife, Jenny, serve as the Honolulu Friends Meeting’s “resident couple.” They live in the back of the meetinghouse and take care of the property and also arrange accommodations for occasional visitors.

David first attended the meeting in 1981, when he was a visiting professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Later, he and Jenny moved to Molokaʻi, where Jenny worked as Molokaʻi General Hospital’s first nurse-midwife. In 1988, the Fosters returned to the continent, eventually moving to Atlanta, Georgia. When Jenny retired from her role as a clinical professor at Emory University in 2018, the Fosters returned to Honolulu to serve as the meeting’s resident couple, a two-year post that will end June 2020.

Honolulu’s meeting is not the only Quaker gathering in Hawaiʻi. Maui, Kaua‘i, Moloka‘i, and Hawai‘i Island all have Quaker meetings, though some meet only once a month, or in people’s homes. The Honolulu community is by far the largest and most active. On Easter Sunday in April, approximately 40 people sat in a circle in the spartan living room. It was quiet, almost disconcertingly so. Some people had their eyes closed, others open. Some nodded their heads as if in silent conversation.

Silence has been at the center of Quaker practice since it emerged as a faction of Christianity in the 1600s (though not all Quakers consider themselves Christians). Quakerism represented a rejection of the institutionalized hierarchy of the Church of England. The movement’s most well-known leader, George Fox, believed that everyone, not just priests, could receive divine inspiration. “His thing,” Jenny explained, “was that people put too much stock in buildings—the churches, the cathedrals—and even in books, when really what was divine was within.”

Fox’s ideas were radical, if not blasphemous. Quakerism’s embrace of equality represented a threat to

 Quaker meetings of worship differ from those of other churches: there is no music, no liturgy, no communion. Silence has been central to Quaker practice since the 1600s.

both the Church of England and much of Western society. “Right from the get-go, in the 1600s, they gave women the same status as men in the church,” said Michele Shields, who spent most of her life as an ordained Methodist minister but now attends the Honolulu Friends Meeting. “They abolished the priesthood and ‘elevated the laity.’”

The movement was enough of a threat that in the 1660s, Quakerism was briefly outlawed in Boston, and over the span of two years, four Quakers, including a woman named Mary Dyer, were hanged.

Shields, who most recently served as the director of spiritual care at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, said that Quakerism’s acceptance of all people is as radical today as it was 350 years ago. In many mainline Christian denominations, women and queer people are still prohibited from becoming ministers or serving in leadership roles. Shields left the Methodist Church when it became apparent the denomination was becoming more conservative. “Theologically, the Methodist church moved away from me,” she said.

Shields began attending the Honolulu Friends Meeting when she retired two years ago. “I’d always liked the mystics, you know, Julian of Norwich and Saint John of the Cross,” she said. “They believed in seeking God directly through individual experience and not through a priest or from scripture.”

On the Sunday I attended worship, Shields sat on a low couch next to her husband, Jim. I waited for someone to speak, though I knew no one might. A longtime member had told me, “Right now, our meetings are fairly quiet. We don’t have people give messages too often.” But I was curious what sorts of messages were shared, so I found myself selfishly wanting someone, anyone, to break the silence.

After 20 minutes, no one had. I decided to try meditating. Quakers are among the more mystical branches of Christianity, and in practice, they share more than a few similarities with other mystic sects, including Zen Buddhism. Bob Stauffer, a historian and longtime member of the Honolulu meeting, compared Quakers’ “expectant waiting” to Zen meditation.

 The congregation convenes in a seemingly typical Mānoa residence. Inside, the house is void of living arrangements and dedicated to creating an open space.

“From a Zen point of view, you try not to be cluttered with the mind,” he said. Eventually, I settled into the silence. My mind quieted, and I entered that deep, interior realm that exists somewhere below the superficial world of thought. In some wordless form, I recalled my own encounters with the light within.

Then a woman spoke. “John Woolman said, ‘The place of prayer is a precious habitation. I saw this habitation to be safe, to be inwardly quiet, when there was great stirrings and commotions in the world.’”

Was that it?

That was it.

No one said another word until the meeting ended a half hour later. I spent most of it trying to remember the woman’s—or rather Woolman’s—words.

LGBTQ individuals. In general, Quakerism allows for a diversity of beliefs. Shield’s husband, Jim, is a practicing Buddhist, but even he attends the meeting on Sundays.

In place of a lot of doctrine, Quakers try to live by five shared values: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality. They have a long history of activism and civic engagement, both in Hawaiʻi and abroad. Among the founders of the Honolulu Friends Meeting was Catherine Cox, an educator and early environmentalist who helped found The Outdoor Circle and the Honolulu Museum of Art, serving as the latter’s director from 1927 to 1928. During World War II, members of the meeting helped raise funds and find jobs for families of interned Japanese residents.

As a small, rather obscure religious sect (of the 2.3 billion Christians in the world, 380,000 are Quakers), I had expected Quakers to be insular, with long family lineages. But nearly everyone I spoke to had converted to Quakerism as an adult. Becoming “convinced,” Quakers call it. Kay Larsen, a longtime member and former school social worker who now spends her time driving for a blind social club, was raised in the Church of the Brethren. David Foster grew up Presbyterian.

“Sometimes people come to Quakerism having been somewhat wounded by other denominations,” said Jenny Foster, who grew up “secular Episcopalian.” “They come seeking a refuge because they have felt oppressed by certain kinds of dogma or practices.”

The Honolulu meeting is what’s known as an open and affirming community, meaning it is explicitly welcoming of

In a time of renewed civic engagement, particularly among marginalized groups, Quakerism feels as relevant as ever, a model perhaps for a more equal society. And yet the number of Quakers around the world is dwindling. Kara Wagoner, a data analyst at Kapi‘olani Community College, told me that she’s among the younger attendees of the Honolulu meeting, and she recently turned 40.

Shields is hopeful that others will discover Quakerism. “You do have to have a mystical bent, and you do need to read and study,” she admits. “It’s sort of the opposite of the authoritarian approach, where you follow one charismatic leader and get told what to believe and who to vote for. That’s not Quakerism.”

Instead, Shields said, Quakerism is “trusting that each person has the ability to follow the light.” Over the years, she has found herself spending more and more time in contemplative prayer, or complete quiet.

“Less talk,” she said. “More silence.” It was hard to imagine anything more radical.

 The Honolulu Friends Meeting, a congregation of the Religious Society of Friends founded in 1936, has been meeting in Mānoa since 1957.

SPEAKING UP

One of the most famous Quaker-led protests took place in the Pacific in 1958. Eisenhower was president, Hawaiʻi was a U.S. territory, and the United States was detonating nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands. To protest the nuclear testing, a group of Quakers decided to sail a yacht called the Golden Rule from San Diego into the restricted testing area. The crew was restrained upon federal order in Honolulu, but several crewmembers continued the journey anyway, only to be intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and sentenced to two months in jail.

Earle Reynolds, an anthropologist who later become a Quaker, picked up where the Golden Rule left off after hearing the crew’s tale, sailing his yacht, the Phoenix of Hiroshima , with his family from Honolulu into Enewetak Atoll, part of the testing area, in July 1958. They were caught a few days later, and Reynolds was sentenced to six months in prison.

Both sails received national media coverage and generated public support for the passage of a 1963 treaty that outlawed the above-ground testing of

nuclear weapons. “It really engendered a national debate,” said Honolulu historian Bob Stauffer. Now, the Golden Rule , which for years languished in Humboldt Bay, California, is returning to Hawaiʻi.

Later this year, a crew including Dan Lappala of Hilo and Connie Burton of Kauaʻi plan to retrace the yacht’s 1958 route as part of a pan-Pacific voyage to promote peace and nuclear disarmament. Although the yacht isn’t crewed by Quakers, many Hawai‘i Friends are excited to see the Golden Rule return to the islands. The boat is scheduled to arrive on Oʻahu where, 61 years ago, it helped change the course of history.

 Quakerism is known for allowing a diversity of beliefs and lifestyles.

 For more information, visit hawaiiquaker.org.

The Build Up

Architect Aaron Ackerman’s fantasy of constructing a sustainable family home in Pālolo Valley rises to a unique challenge.

TEXT AND IMAGES BY IJFKE RIDGLEY

Tucked deep in the recesses of Pālolo Valley, where clouds hang over green creases of jungle infringing upon twisted streets, sits a house hidden high in the foliage. To reach it, you must enter the property at the bottom of a steep hill and climb a long flight of stone pavers through ferns and heliconia. Gazing up from the end of the path at reclaimed redwood dripping with flora— Spanish moss hanging in front of windows, acting as natural sunscreens—it is hard to tell where house ends and forest begins. That is exactly the point. When architect Aaron Ackerman bought this plot in 2011, his wife, Jessica, was pregnant with their first child, and they ambitiously set out to build a green home, a living space in sync with its environment. They fixed up and moved into a humble structure already

 The home has a zipline winch system that includes a repurposed WWII Marine cauldron.

built high up between trees on the property and spent the next few years studying the land: the vegetation, topography, and where the water went when it rained. It wasn’t until four years later that they started construction on the final version, using this data to inform how and where they built.

The site, like any structure evocative of a treehouse, is a child’s dream. The couple’s three children, who are aptly named for the three elements found in every woody plant—Xylem, Cambium, and Phloem— hang out in nets high in the trees. The home has a zipline winch system that looks like a prop out of Hook, featuring a repurposed WWII Marine cauldron from Maui found buried on the property as a carrying container, which Aaron installed to haul a 500-pound stone birthing tub up to the house. Of the house’s building materials, 75 percent are salvaged or reused.

Aaron has worked as an architect and sustainability facilitator at Bowers and Kubota for 15 years. This might be the firm’s most ambitious project yet. Its name is Haleola‘ili‘āinapono, an amalgamation

of the Hawaiian ideas of a living house (hale ola) managed by an individual for the betterment of the community (‘ili ‘āina) in a morally conscious way (pono).

The purpose of this house is to raise the bar for what people consider an environmentally friendly building. “How we live has an impact, and we spend, on average, 90 percent of our time indoors,” he says. “That means that we are very impacted by the buildings that we occupy.” There have been LEED-certified developments in Hawai‘i before, but Aaron built his house based on the much more stringent set of standards outlined in the Living Building Challenge.

Created by the International Living Future Institute, the Living Building Challenge consists of 20 imperatives a building must fulfill to receive its Living Building certification. The criteria are challenging, including generating all the building’s energy from renewable resources and using rain catchment for all its water, with all wastewater and stormwater reused for urban agriculture or groundwater

 Given the name

Haleola‘ili‘āinapono, the treehouse-esque structure is a child’s dream.

recharge. In short, a building that passes this test aims to do more than just save some energy—it aims to have a net-positive impact, giving back more to the land than it takes.

Aaron had to get creative, as building in Hawai‘i poses unique challenges. One of the rules of the Living Building Challenge is that the majority of the materials used must be sourced locally. He figured that the few native materials available, such as lava rock and koa and ‘ōhia woods, are better left preserved, so he turned to the steady stream of waste generated by the demolition of single-walled homes on O‘ahu. This provided materials, like cedar and redwood, that had already proven resistant to Hawai‘i’s high humidity, corrosive air, termites, and strong ultraviolet rays, which the project saved from the landfill.

While the home is well-equipped with state-of-the-art appliances and devices, Aaron’s true inspiration was nature and Hawaiian culture’s relationship with it. Water, for example, is an important, protected resource to Hawaiians. The roof is vegetated with laua‘e ferns to absorb stormwater and keep the house cool. Wastewater from the toilets and kitchen sink is treated aerobically and then used for subsurface irrigation of nonedible plants including the a‘e tree (Hawaiian soap berry), whose berries can be used as a laundry detergent. Greywater is stored under the house for future use after any heat it retains is extracted to heat new water. Collected rainwater is used for everything from drinking water and showers to irrigation for more than 25 varieties of fruit trees on the property, including lychee, macadamia nut, coffee, and mango.

Some of the imperatives of the Living Building Challenge go beyond quantitative measures to demand qualitative aspects that are much harder to measure. To Aaron, these are the most important. Biophilia, for example, is the innate human tendency to seek connections with nature, and to meet this Living Building imperative, he designed his home to echo the surrounding nature with natural ventilation and biomorphic forms. “The house is an experience,” he says. “It offers perspective, sanctuary, mystery, and risk. As you are experiencing the house, it draws you around the next corner, you never really see the whole thing.” Local artist and friend Maya Lea Portner used reclaimed tile to create earthy mosaics that dance over the stairs and through the bathroom. A bright orange, midcentury modern Condon King Aztek fireplace from Reuse Hawaii brings humans’ natural attraction to fire to the living room.

The house is on track to be finished at the end of 2019, after years of work by the Bowers and Kubota team, help from donors and partnering companies, and the support and patience of Aaron’s family. Then it will begin a year-long Living Building assessment. If it passes, it will be the first certified residence of its kind in Hawai‘i. (The Energy Lab at Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy is a certified Living Building.) Homes such as this one could not only solve dire emergencies Hawai‘i faces of polluting cesspools, freshwater shortages, and landfills at capacity from construction waste, but could also get us back to living in harmony with the land. “We can’t just look at the bottom line from an economic standpoint,” Aaron says. “We have to ask how the decisions we make impact society, the environment, and economics.”

 Ackerman lined the roof with laua‘e ferns to absorb water and cool the house, and draped Spanish moss in front of windows to act as natural sunscreens. Previous spread, an aerial view by Landon Hamada.

But for Aaron, the human desire for connection with the natural world is the driving force behind Living Buildings, and what will ultimately inspire others to live more sustainably. “Solar panels don’t inspire humans,” he says. “Humans are inspired by nature, and they respond positively—mentally, spiritually, physically—to an enhanced relationship with nature. This is the utopic feeling people get when they experience a building like this.”

REAL SIMPLE

While the Living Building Challenge is quite an undertaking, Aaron Ackerman insists there are easy ways any homeowner can go green.

Certified woods

“When possible, support sustainable forestry practices by purchasing Forest Stewardship Council certified wood, which is now stocked by suppliers such

as Home Depot.” Worth noting is that FSC certification is third-party validated, whereas Sustainable Forestry Institute certification is internally validated.

LEDs

Look into LED lighting retrofits at your local hardware box store. “They are becoming more accessible with varied product selection and are a short-term return on investment.”

Reenergized Power Agreements

“Many solar providers offer PPA, or Solar Power Purchase Agreements, where a solar provider designs, permits, finances, installs, and maintains the solar energy system on a customer’s property at little to no cost to the homeowner.” Electricity bills are paid by the customer to the solar provider at a comparable cost to the local utility rate, but the setup allows the homeowner to operate on renewable energy versus fossil fuel.

 The interior of the home is designed to echo the surrounding nature with natural ventilation and biomorphic forms.

 Golden Hawaii Barbershop in Kaimukī. Image by Kainoa Reponte.

EXPLORE

“We are in dire need of a digital detox.”—Lindsay Arakawa

The Steady Pulse of Kaimukī

As large-scale development creeps into Honolulu’s residential neighborhoods, can Kaimukī retain its current charms? Local shopkeepers hope so.

TEXT BY KATHLEEN WONG

IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK & CHRIS ROHRER

Sometimes it feels like Kaimukī is frozen in time. Dry and sunny, the neighborhood extends from the entrance to Pālolo Valley to Diamond Head just east of Waikīkī. There are no fancy gated mansions like in Kāhala or Kaka‘ako-esque high-rise buildings in sight. Instead, homes and establishments date back to the early 20th century, a period of charming Hawai‘i plantation-style architecture.

The pulse of Kaimukī starts at its heart: Wai‘alae Avenue. Beginning at Kapahulu Avenue and tapering off near Kahala Mall, Wai‘alae runs right through Kaimukī. Lined with local businesses, the avenue doesn’t feel crowded or hurried, but rather inviting and leisurely.

“It’s always been a really cool neighborhood, I’ve

 Wai‘alae Avenue is a mix of Old Hawai‘i, buzzy eateries, and new boutiques that stock locally made goods.

always loved it, I’ve always thought that this is home,” said Liz Schwartz, owner of Coffee Talk, a bustling coffee shop on the corner of Wai‘alae Avenue and 12th Avenue. “It’s a real neighborhood where real people live and work.”

From her veteran post on Wai‘alae, Schwartz, who is a Kaimukī resident, has noted a recent revitalization of the neighborhood. “I feel like there’s new energy breathing into Kaimukī, and it’s a great feeling,” she said. “Everyone is so into what they’re doing, and they don’t want to be in a mall. They’re very proud of where they are.”

Over the past few decades, some establishments have left, like JJ French Pastry and Bistro; some have opened, like Kaimuki Superette; and others, like the Crack Seed Store, have remained strong. The Public Pet, Kaimuki Superette, Brew’d, and Golden Hawaii Barbershop

 The warm spirit of Wai‘alae and the diversity of its small businesses is what makes the neighborhood so authentic and charming.

have all arrived on the avenue since 2014. Although these specialty businesses are undeniably Instagrammable, they’re also quintessentially, and proudly, local. Stocked with locally made brands or products, these businesses want to be in Kaimukī not for tourists or foot traffic, but because their owners love the neighborhood, and Hawai‘i.

“Kaimukī is still a family neighborhood,” said Grant Fukuda, owner of Golden Hawaii Barbershop. Fukuda grew up near Wai‘alae Avenue in Pālolo and remembers his childhood days noshing on saimin at Tanouye’s and catching the latest surf films at now-defunct Queen’s Theater.

“We love that on a Friday night you can see three generations of a family going out for a mellow dinner,” he said. “We wanted a neighborhood barbershop for the local community, where young students to our Pālolo grandpas could feel comfortable. Our shop pays homage to the old Hawai‘i we love, so to be in a neighborhood that still has elements of old Hawai‘i was important to us.”

At the same time, that old Hawai‘i is fading. Real estate in the islands is more precious than ever. Already, large-scale property development has made its way to residential O‘ahu neighborhoods like Kailua and Kāhala. There is a buzz around the endangerment of Kaimukī’s own downto-earth, local vibe.

“Two words: monster homes,” said Jordan Lee, owner of The Public Pet. Like a contagious disease, O‘ahu has seen a rapid influx of gigantic, squareshaped houses containing as many as 20 bedrooms springing up at alarming rates in neighborhoods like Kalihi, Kapahulu, and Kaimukī. Sticking out like boxy sore thumbs, these unsightly houses potentially raise property taxes.

“There is absolutely a fear of gentrification,” Fukuda said. “Once the original buildings have been torn down, the families pushed out, the neighborhood will never be the same.” When he and co-owner Jennifer Fukuda were designing the barbershop, they were nervous about bringing unwanted attention to the

 Kaimukī businesses, like Public Pet, are quintessentially, and proudly, local.

MA

On behalf of beat 2019 Co Hashimoto, Stryker Weiner & Yokota Public Relations, Inc., and Ashley Short, Bank of Hawaii, mahalo to the beat Event Leadership Team members for making beat 2019 success!

Event Leadership Team

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neighborhood. But they wanted to give friends and the local community something different and pay homage to their Hawai‘i upbringing, culture, and history.

Fukuda isn’t alone in this sentiment. He joins a growing group of local businesses and folks who have pure love for the neighborhood and have created a force as unique as Kaimukī out of it. You may know this force as Keep It Kaimuki, a movement Lee started on Instagram in 2017.

“The inspiration for Keep It Kaimuki was to really pump up the neighborhood and celebrate this new wave of small-business owners establishing themselves,” he said. “I saw what was happening in neighborhoods like Chinatown, Kailua, and Kaka‘ako, each with its own vibe. I knew that Kaimukī was unique

with its laid-back energy, charming details, and urban connections.”

Now you see the phrase on T-shirts, tote bags, and stickers in storefront windows. Keep It Kaimuki organizes neighborhood events—such as streetart painting and Small Business Saturdays—to bring exposure to local businesses, strengthening their ties to the community.

Many of these events take place on Wai‘alae Avenue, which Lee calls “the drumbeat of the Kaimukī area.”

Business owners like Schwartz love Keep It Kaimuki for bringing the neighborhood together.

“It’s so inclusive, and no one is threatened by anyone else,” she said. “Everyone is like, ‘We’re all a part of it, we’re as supportive as we can be of our neighbors.’”

The warm spirit of Wai‘alae Avenue is

 “Kaimukī is still a family neighborhood,” said Grant Fukuda, owner of Golden Hawaii Barbershop. “We love that on a Friday night you can see three generations of a family going out for a mellow dinner.”

palpable. You can feel it in the restaurants and stores at almost any time of day. There’s the cozy patio of Brew’d, which is lit by charming string lights, and right across the street is Mud Hen Water, with its romantic, bistro vibes. On the opposite end of Wai‘alae is Coffee Talk, where you can feel the buzzing energy radiate off the tall ceilings, and Pipeline Bakeshop and Creamery, a local malasada and dessert joint washed in a babyblue hue. Patronizing Wai‘alae is more than just running a few errands, it’s an experience only a neighborhood that truly is proud of itself can offer.

 Keep It Kaimuki organizes neighborhood events to bring exposure to local businesses, strengthening their ties to the community.

Tokyo Drifting

In a perfect reality, how often should we really be logging in to check out our online selves? A full-time social media strategist reevaluates the role that online social networks play in her life.

TEXT AND IMAGES BY LINDSAY ARAKAWA

The first thing I do every morning is grab my phone to look at all the notifications I received overnight. Having moved to Tokyo in October 2018 where I now work as a freelancer, one of the best ways to keep in touch with my friends is through the internet.

This might be obvious, but moving to another country is hard. Maybe it’s because I’m entering the last year of my twenties and all I want is comfort and familiarity, but I’ve never felt more like a fish out of water. It’s a funny thing, growing up in Hawai’i where being a Japanese American feels so natural. You’re surrounded by people who look like you, sound like you, and will understand and accept you even if they don’t.

Having lived in Japan for almost a year now, I explain to my family and friends that it feels like I’m learning how to be an adult again. Without a full-time job, I’ve had a lot more free time—free time to travel, to learn how to speak more natural Japanese, to spend money I don’t have, to kind of just live in a way that I haven’t allowed myself to ever since I set out on paving my career path. With all of this free time, I’m able to observe, think, and maybe be more present in day-to-day activities. become aware of the social media consumption habits I developed over the past few years.

In the second half of 2018, I left my 9-to-5 job as a social media strategist in New York City at my dream job. The decision came a lot easier than I ever thought it would. For three years, I worked my ass off in an industry where being on-call for timely events that needed coverage during early mornings, late evenings, and over the weekend was expected. At after-work drinks, friends and coworkers would ask why I was still working at 9 p.m. and

I’d answer with my standard reply: “It’s an optimized time to post on Instagram.”

These habits are the topic of constant conversation among my circle of friends—how we are in dire need of a digital detox, how social media has ruined dating, how we’re so glad it wasn’t as prevalent when we were in middle school, how there’s less of a need to reach out to friends you haven’t seen in a while because of Instagram Stories. I had a friend say to me once, “See you on Instagram!” when we were saying our goodbyes.

Social media has grown into something we can’t live with but also can’t seem to ditch. It’s become so ingrained in how we operate that it takes a conscious effort to realize just how dependent we’ve become.

Lines have always been a little blurry for me when it comes to my relationship with social media. For the past decade, my career has been to advise clients how to best optimize their Instagram accounts for better engagement. Being an Instagram consultant means knowing and understanding the ins and outs of the platform, which means that I need to be logging into the app day and night.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and thoroughly enjoy applying strategic thinking to creative ideas. (I’m a Virgo.) But when I’m able to separate work from pleasure, I’m finding that being more conscious about how and when I spend time on social media has become integral to my well-being. I decided to track my social media usage to get a sense of where I could improve, and kept a 4-day journal.

 Like most relationships, the one you keep with social media is not always going to be perfect.

MONDAY

 08:30 Wake up and check emails.

 11:10 Go to a katsudon place in Yoyogi-Uehara based on a restaurant I saw a couple friends tag on Instagram.

 11:45 Take a pic of the katsudon (it was fire) and post to my Instagram Stories. Decide not to add a geotag. Instagram makes places incredibly accessible; I feel like it’s starting to change places that felt like a special experience to me. (I know I’m being selfish, sorry!). I probably shouldn’t be posting the photo in the first place if I don’t want people to ask where it is, but this compromise gives me more control over the exposure? IDK, still trying to navigate these situations and feelings.

 12:15 Catch up on some personal and freelance work, which requires me to be on social media, at a new cafe in Aoyama (even though it’s technically my day off).

 16:30–18:30 Post some art I drew on my iPad to my Instagram feed. Spend the next couple of hours checking in on their performance.

 A reminder: Validation doesn’t always come in the form of Instagram engagement.

 19:00 Check Finsta. Post two images in a photo carousel of my boyfriend photobombing a really nice picture I took of Tokyo Tower. A lot of my friends on Instagram use this app as a second account to post content that’s less curated and meant for a close circle of family and friends. I mainly use my account as a photo diary of recent memories and for posting memes that make me laugh.

 01:00 Scroll through Instagram one last time before bed. Watch some Instagram Stories. Check up on Twitter. For eyesight purposes, I’m trying to get better about not staring at a small bright rectangular screen in complete darkness. Maybe I need to leave my phone charging in another room of my apartment. I spent a lot of time on my phone today.

Recap: Today I was very aware of how I used my phone with it being the first day of tracking my habits. I mostly wanted to make sure that if I tapped into certain apps, that I was productive with my time and didn’t get caught up in any distractions. After I posted my artwork on my Instagram feed I spent a couple hours checking in on its performance. I’ve developed a habit of constantly watching the notifications roll through. There’s something satisfying about it. I didn’t always feel this way, but overtime I started to realize that validation doesn’t always come in the form of Instagram engagement.

TUESDAY

 07:55 Wake up to my phone’s alarm for a call with a client I have in New York City. Check Instagram DMs before I even sit upright. Nothing interesting.

 08:00 Dial into a client call to chat about an Instagram strategy. Log into their account to update theirInstagram Stories. Analyze previous posts to discuss performance and a plan for the month of June.

 10:30 Repeat the same song on Spotify three times in a row. I’m working out of a client’s office just a 10-minute walk from my house. Make an effort to look at my phone less during my commute.

 17:30 Watch hella YouTube alien explainers and puppy videos and nap on my couch. Back home after work, this is how I chill tf out.

 18:45 Check Instagram. The amount of times I check the app is almost routine, and a part of me is trying not to fight it but instead be more conscious of what I’m tapping into. I want to engage with a purpose in mind.

 01:00 Watch a new Korean drama on Netflix on my iPad. Another screen-friendly habit I’ve developed is having a program on as background noise when I fall asleep. Don’t check my Instagram because I’m too tired to care.

Recap: I’m finding that opting into time spent scrolling through social media apps has become sort of an escape for me from work or other stressful situations. I think my relationship with social media will be less about decreasing my browsing time and more about how I choose to use each app and what positive satisfaction I want to get out of each opt-in experience.

WEDNESDAY

 09:00 Wake up to my alarm in a panic. Check emails.

 11:10 Check in on a creative project I’ve been working on that went live today. Notice my Instagram handle wasn’t tagged in the copy of the post. Get a little annoyed, as any exposure to build awareness of my creative work has been semi-crucial when working with brands that have bigger followings. I try not to let it bother me, so I set down my phone and cook eggs for breakfast.

 13:00 Turn on Screen Time. Social media makes it so easy to click from one post to the next, and before you know it two hours have passed and you haven’t moved.

 20:20 Research different Instagram accounts and trends for new social media strategy projects I have in the works. Save Instagram posts in a scheduler. Ignore the Screen Time limit I set for myself.

 23:25 Download apps that will help me with productivity and mindfulness like Headspace, a meditation app. Go to bed while listening to a Sleepcast.

Recap: Today there was less downtime for me to get bored. I noticed that every time I picked up my phone, it was to get a task done. I don’t want to get to a place where I end up thinking of my phone as a source of stress.

THURSDAY

 08:10 Wake up and check email notifications. Go back to sleep.

 08:30 Wake up again and my boyfriend tells me he doesn’t know what Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century is. Open YouTube to get him up to speed with a couple videos.

 08:45 Log onto my Finsta to check up on close friends

 09:05 Watch a YouTube video about baby beavers and my favorite drag queen program, The Trixie & Katya Show , while eating oatmeal to start the day on a positive note. It’s easy to identify social media content that makes you

 Social media has grown into something so ingrained in society that it takes a conscious effort to realize dependency to it.

feel bad about yourself, so instead it’s been refreshing to find what type of content excites and inspires me.

 09:30 Look through Instagram accounts via the desktop app for another client. Evaluate different captions for Instagram feed posts.

 14:05 Browse through the Instagram feed of an eyewear brand that wants to gift me some glasses. I choose a pair in a color called “matcha green.”

 16:15 Don’t look at my phone because I am focused on packing for a flight to Seoul for vacation.

 18:30 Switch my phone to Airplane mode. While waiting to take off, I start to get separation anxiety from my phone. I realize my relationship to it has become one of extreme dependence. Beyond using it as a communication tool, my phone also helps me navigate from point A to point B, answers all my burning questions, and more. It’s a little personal assistant I might have a hard time living without. I try not to think about disconnecting.

 22:05 Land in Seoul. Pick up a SIM card at the airport. Arrive to my Airbnb and pass out before I can check my phone again.

Recap: Because so much of my work revolves around me being on my phone, it’s been interesting to navigate my feelings toward this dependency. It used to really upset me, and I would start to question my chosen career path and get down on myself. But after a conversation with a close friend, I felt that instead of fighting that dependency I needed to accept the roles that social media and my phone play in my life. Like most relationships, the one I keep with social media is not always going to be perfect. There will be days where I’ll feel like I’ve got a hold on things and other days where the best solution is to take a break. The habits I’ve developed with and around social media have become so routine that it could be helpful for me to continue to apply positive intention to my habits and that social media can only become as unhealthy as I allow it to.

 Being more aware about how and when one spends time on social media is becoming more integral to an individual’s well-being.

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Reframing Space

In recent years, museums across the nation have wrestled with decolonizing their institutions. Three Hawai‘i institutions and a new grassroots tour are making efforts to represent familiar narratives and artifacts in reclaimed contexts.

TEXT BY M. A. CHAVEZ

IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK

Museums offer a place where people can reach beyond the boundaries of their own experiences to find something new in something old. Moving through a space with cultural artworks and objects can help bring them to life. But if museums aren’t careful, they can also perpetuate harm upon the cultures whose resources they present.

The San Diego Museum of Man is a glaring example. It displayed ancestral remains and cultural resources from the Kumeyaay Nation for more than a century, refusing to repatriate the remains despite decades of requests from the tribe. This shifted in 2014, when the museum began an active process of decolonization by increasing representation of Kumeyaay peoples’

work, acknowledging the museum’s role in colonization, returning remains and objects to the tribe, and uplifting Kumeyaay perspectives through inclusion in decision-making.

The decolonization process does not have a clear-cut path—each instance of colonization is unique to its historical and cultural context. In Hawai‘i, this includes the overthrow of a sovereign kingdom and the ongoing colonization of its people by the United States. Museums working to address their roles in colonization in the islands are making efforts to ensure the perspectives of the cultures they represent are uplifted, seen, and heard. This includes diversifying narratives, increasing accessibility, and honoring non-Western worldviews.

 Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, along South King Street, consists of three former houses of Protestant families.

HAWAIIAN MISSION HOUSES HISTORIC SITE AND ARCHIVES

At Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, which consists of three former houses of Protestant families and a printing press used to generate Hawaiianlanguage Bibles, the public can access an archive of 12,000 printed volumes and thousands of pages of missionary journals and letters—pages dominated by Western thoughts and values. Lisa Chow, the museum’s assistant development director, recalls one excerpt from a journal that describes the “multitudes of cases of laziness and love of sin” among Native Hawaiians.

 For more information, visit missionhouses.org.

“But at the same time, my grandmother, greatgrandmother, and greatgreat-grandmother all saw something valuable in this place,” Chow says.

Chow’s ancestors, who were Native Hawaiian, taught students and were baptized into the Protestant faith at what is now Hawaiian Mission Houses. To her, this familial connection to the houses feels like a sign to develop tours in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) for the museum, one way to reckon with the juxtaposition between the stories that it has uplifted and those it has left out. She is also working to incorporate mo‘olelo (stories) into the tours to highlight the experiences of Native Hawaiians from the 1820s to 1920s, when the houses were active. Until these tours are piloted, the nonprofit is conducting workshops to discuss the proper stewardship of history and curating special exhibitions that represent Native Hawaiians and items from their culture.

 Museums are working to address their roles in colonization on the island, which includes diversifying narratives.

HAWAI‘I STATE ART MUSEUM

250 South Hotel Street

Monday–Saturday: 10am–4pm (First Fridays: 6pm–9pm Valet parking on Richards St.)

HiSAM HEAD TO

Top Pick Choice: Walking Tree

By John Koga

Photographed by Paul Kodama

SHANGRI LA MUSEUM OF ISLAMIC ART, CULTURE, AND DESIGN

The Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design is working to honor Doris Duke’s vision for the home by increasing the depth of its focus on the Muslim cultures represented by art in its collection. To move in this direction, it brought on Asad Ali Jafri as its curator of programs. Jafri, who has worked for decades putting together arts festivals and concerts across the globe with the direct involvement of Muslim communities, believes that using the museum’s platform to highlight Muslim voices is one way to shift uneven power dynamics Muslims have faced.

“One of the biggest things we’re doing is we changed the residency model,” Jafri says. “Residencies are more frequent, and they’re more engaged in community in general than they have been in the past.” They also now include events throughout the Hawaiian Islands. For the residencies, Jafri looks for people across disciplines to

offer them a space that encourages public discourse. This helps shift the power from the museum to the communities it represents and supports dismantling negative biases and harmful stereotypes.

In early June, hip-hop duo The Reminders participated in the revamped program. They performed for free at the Hawai‘i State Art Museum and had an intimate concert on the lawn of Shangri La. They also guided a “de-tour,” for which resident artists are given agency to share their interpretations of items in Shangri La’s collection.

BISHOP MUSEUM

“The intention behind why the museum was established is different than most of the Western museums in the world,” says Marques Hanalei Marzan, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum’s cultural advisor. “It was the intention of Pauahi to preserve her family’s collection and treasures in perpetuity for her people.” A princess who lived through a time in the 1800s

 The Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design works to highlight Muslim voices as one way to shift uneven power dynamics Muslims have faced.

of colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, Bishop sought to preserve what she could in order to maintain her culture. Perpetuating the museum’s research and collection since 1889, when it was founded by Charles Reed Bishop in honor of his late wife, has been an ongoing act of resisting colonization.

One way Bishop Museum has suffused the visitor experience with Native Hawaiian ideology is through the reorganization of its Hawaiian Hall, which formerly displayed resources in a Westernized, chronological order. The reoriented approach engulfs museum-goers in a physical iteration of a Hawaiian worldview. Visitors standing on the first floor are surrounded by Kai Ākea, the ocean realm from which all people, spirits, and gods emerged, signifying pre-contact Hawai‘i. The second floor represents Wao Kanaka, where

 The artifacts in Hawaiian Hall at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum were reorganized to reflect a Hawaiian worldview.

Fire roasted Shinsato Farms pork chops

Lemongrass Shrimp

the daily activities of humans unfold, highlighting the interconnections between the land and people. Wao Lani, the upper realm on the third floor, is reserved for the gods and chiefs of Hawai‘i and their connections to Hawaiian history.

NATIVE STORIES

Native Hawaiians have a rich tradition of storytelling. Their mo‘olelo are often associated with specific places and carry mana. But many who visit Hawai‘i, and even those who live here, experience the islands at such a fast pace—fueled by the colonial sense that places exist to extract experiences—that it can be difficult to honor this tradition.

A new nonprofit, Native Stories, is working to decolonize people’s connection to Hawai‘i by making mo‘olelo more accessible. Launched in February 2019, the audio content platform and production house documents and shares stories from

people and places throughout Hawai‘i. Nohea Hirahara, the nonprofit’s president and founder, and her team search out historians and others who have learned the old stories of Hawai‘i and make what they have learned available as podcasts and self-guided tours. The self-guided tour of ‘Iolani Palace provides nearly 20 minutes of information about 17 points of interest throughout the palace grounds.

“We are decolonizing by telling the stories that happened before and during the process of the overthrow, and ancient stories,” Hirahara says. “The whole point is you get to connect to that place, and you get to understand it more because it has context.”

 Bishop Museum was established to preserve Princess Pauahi’s family collection and its treasures in perpetuity for her people. Image courtesy of Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.

Home Sweet Home

A Los Angeles-based illustrator is flooded with nostalgia and a renewed sense of belonging during a visit to her hometown of Honolulu.

TEXT AND ILLUSTRATION BY ASHLEY LUKASHEVSKY

Stepping off the airplane, I walk along the familiar concrete path at the Honolulu airport. I take a breath. The air in Hawai‘i always feels surprisingly dense when it hits my lungs. Within the first day, my body achieves equilibrium with the windy, warm air, reminding me that I’m home.

My dad picks me up from the airport, and as we drive to Pauoa, it crosses my mind that everything is so green. The mountains, the trees, the weeds on the side of the road. When did I stop expecting things to look so alive? Living in Los Angeles can be so intoxicating, I realize, that only when you step away do you grasp how much the noise and traffic and infrastructure had enveloped you.

My Lyft driver to LAX airport, upon finding out that I was from Honolulu, had exclaimed, “You’re so lucky you’re from paradise!” I winced and gave my compulsory response: “It’s not what you think. People struggle there, too.” But I know that a part of me buys into that storyline. I look forward to returning because I also believe that it’s sort of utopic. I feel this sense of utopia most in those moments when Mom helps me with laundry. When I go to a beach that hasn’t been claimed by tourists and listen to grains of sand dancing underwater. When I see old

friends and reminisce about how funny we were when we were small.

But every time I return, I also feel like I’m searching for evidence of some misplaced, simpler version of myself. This girl who takes the bus to Walls from Kalani High School, asks for extra adzuki on her Waiola Shave Ice, believes in the binary of Good™ and Bad™, grabs tightly wrapped musubi from the place that later became Domino’s on Ala Moana Boulevard, comes home after school to watch Gossip Girl , and dreams about what it must be like on The Mainland. She slurps down Uncle Clay’s Icees (before they got healthy), folds plumeria petals back onto themselves to make accessories, and feels grounded and small and magical when she gazes at all the stars in the sky.

Home is where we were raised, where we learn to walk, swim, play. Where our first laughs bubble out of our tiny mouths. It’s where I learned to draw. But home is never perfect. Home, wherever that is for you, is

also where we experience our first loss, our first heartbreak, and the first time we feel like we don’t quite fit in. This version of myself that I remember, she also doesn’t think that she’s ever going to be good enough, or that anyone on this island will understand her.

The thing about utopias is that they don’t exist. They are something to aspire to, or maybe they are merely memories of fleeting joy that tether you to the possibility of finding them again. As much as I try to resolve the difference between this idealized memory of home and the present experience of it, there is a part of me that doesn’t actually want this resolution. I like that I can reach into my back pocket and touch this glimmer of utopia. I close my eyes, roll the window down to feel the warm breeze, and put a piece of li hing on my tongue. The salty sugars remind me of innocence, of a time when things were simpler, if not perfect. Maybe that is just enough.

Beau Flemister