TRANSCRIPT
(bright music) (Aliah speaking indistinctly) (Aliah and Kehau chanting and singing indistinctly) – [Narrator] Aliah Irvine and Kehau Kapua’a are cultural practitioners and two of very few women active in Hawaii’s hale building practice.
Their mentor is Kumu Francis Sinenci, who is known for revitalizing the lost practice of hale building.
– A hale is a house.
Most valuable facet of Hawaiian life.
Without the hale, you houseless.
The hale provided rest for the weary bodies, shelter from the elements, and from the kapus and procreation.
(Aliah and Kehau singing indistinctly) (Aliah and Kehau clapping) – All right.
– Okay.
We go harvest, and it’s hard work.
We are chainsawing.
We’re debarking.
We’re carrying big wood.
Sometimes the wood, we’re like, wow, we don’t know how we’re gonna lift it, but it’s like our kupunas take over.. and like, they’re helping us lift the pohakus, lift the la’au, you know?
And so you can feel our kupuna running through our veins, every time.
You’re just in a different realm when we’re doing that kind of work.
Because we don’t get it from Home Depot, it’s harder to find.
But I think within the search of finding the r.. we find who we are.
When you talk about culture, you talk about spirituality, you’re talking about identity, all those things are powerful.
– [Kehau] There’s a lot of practices that have been lost to us and then we’re just piecing them together now to create something whole that can be shared and taught and perpetuated.
We’re building a cultural foundation so it can’t be taken away again.
(bright music) – [Narrator] Western missionaries arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1820.
With the settlers, came devaluation of Hawaiian life and the banning of many cultural practices.
Just a generation later in 1893, the children of those missionaries overthrew Hawaii’s queen, banned the Hawaiian language, and dispossessed the people of their lands.
(bright music) (people singing indistinctly) -…