Last Updated on March 18, 2025
Author’s note: What follows are my opening words at the 35th annual Holomua ka Noʻeau, a 2015 concert of Hawaiian music and hula performed by my wife’s hālau hula, Hālau Mōhala ʻIlima. The hula we do, on this day and every day, is not the brand of coconut-bra-ed, sarong-clad wiggles still so often associated with “Hawaiʻi” and “Aloha”. It is the grounded, fierce, stately hula of our grandmothers, and of their grandmother’s grandmothers. The everyday-ness of resurgence requires us ʻōiwi to persist – to continue to do, say, grow, and dance that which our lāhui always has. Its desire for a surge of support and resistance asks that we also, on occasion, reach out and explain why we do what we do. “Hula”, “Aloha”, and the Hawaiian “Lei” have suffered much co-optation and attempted assimilation at the hands of colonizers and capitalists. Our continued survival as kānaka maoli will depend on our youth’s willingness and ability to see through the false reflections of ourselves that the colonizer’s mirror shows us, and on their stubbornness in maintaining our connections with land and lāhui cherished by our people’s true practices and attitudes.
My mom died in February 1987. My dad, my brother, and I took her ashes back to Hōnaunau and scattered them in the ocean at Kapua‘i. I left a lei maile floating over the spot and watched it travel out to sea as we walked back to our car. My memory of that departing lei inspired “He Inoa no Pi‘ilani,” a song that I wrote with Moon Kauakahi. Its third verse asks us to “huli aku nānā i ka lei maile / Lana i ke ala loa o ka wāwae ehu” — “turn and pay attention to the lei maile floating on the path of fading, misty footsteps.”
We were still trying to come to grips with Mom’s death when April arrived and it was time for Merrie Monarch. At about 5 o’clock in the morning of the day of our flight to Hilo, we heard a bang on the door and my brother Kauka called up to me, “Bones … Bones.” Bones is one of my nicknames from small kid time. I went downstairs and found Kauka standing outside, rumpled, crazy-eyed, and carrying a lei maile bunched up in his hands. My brother is the haka in our family; that doesn’t mean he does the haka, heʻs not Maori; it means that he is the “shelf,” the one on whom our guardians sit, the one who sees and hears stuff, the one who gets dream visits. “Bones,” he tells me, “Mom said to give you this lei.”
There was a movie that came out in 2015 called Aloha, and its very “native” cast includes Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel MacAdams, and Bill Murray. Bradley Cooper is especially “authentic” in a segment of the movie’s trailer that looks like a U.S. military welcoming ceremony at Hickam Field: there are Royal Guardsmen standing at attention in their white Kalākaua-period helmets, the American flag is waving, soldiers are saluting, a couple of shirtless brown guys – also standing at attention – look like they might be dressed in malo… and then the camera comes to rest on “Mr. Sexy Pants,” Bradley Cooper who is wearing a vibrant lei maile over his grey T-shirt and flight jacket. I can’t wait to see all of Aloha so that I can learn the story of his lei. I wonder if his crazy brother gave it to him; I wonder if it evokes a mother, a hula guardian, and a mele inoa.
Maile is a plant form, a kinolau, of Laka, the guardian deity of hula. The lei maile makes visible its wearer’s deep connection to Laka; it speaks of an umbilical cord relationship between child, mother, and mothers’ mother, between these kānaka and cloud, rain, forest, leaf, flower, and stream; it is an expression of ke aloha ‘āina, of an abiding love for the living land from which we descend. When I see these lei, my ears ring with: “huli aku nānā i ka lei maile,” and with:
Eia au, e Laka mai uka
E Laka mai kai
O ho‘oulu
O ka maile hihi i ka wao
O Laka ‘oe
O ke akua i ke kuahu nei – lā
E hoʻi, e hoʻi mai a noho i kou kahu.
You will only see two lei maile in tonight’s event. Two maile shared at different times in the program by five, very closely connected hula people: by me, Māpuana, Kahikina, Kapalai, and Puakenamu. When Holomua is over, we’ll take these maile home with us, and tomorrow morning, I will drape them on the stones that watch over the reinterment site of our iwi kupuna, our ancestors, in the parking lot of the new Target Store in Kailua.
A lei of maile ordered from your favorite Maunakea Street florist will cost from $40 to $60. Twenty-five dancers on a Merrie Monarch stage on Friday night, will then be wearing at least a thousand dollars worth of lei maile. More often than not, maile isn’t enough for today’s heaped-up, lei nu‘a look; so we add three strands of lei ‘ilima for fullness and that oh-so-necessary pop of color: three strands at 20-30 dollars a strand times, twenty-five dancers and you’re now looking at a minimum of 1500 more dollars on that MM stage. And we have yet to tally-in the requisite head, wrist, and ankle lei, preferably made of palapalai fern and lehua blossoms; most top shelf lei-makers will charge 100 dollars for the complete set. 25 x 100 = twenty-five hundred dollars. So now we are looking a minimum of 5,000 dollars of lei dancing around the Kanaka‘ole Stadium stage for seven minutes. It can easily be 7,000 dollars, which is a thousand a minute. As Kapalai said when I read this tally sheet to her, “Dad, they’re still naked. You haven’t accounted for the cost of costumes, hair, nails, and make–up.”
There are a few hālau who refuse to buy into this madness – hālau whose dancers make their own lei, sew their own costumes, do their own primping as best they can in the belief that you aren’t really a dancer, an ‘ōlapa, if you can’t take care of all your kuleana. But these are rarely the top-scoring, trophy-winning hālau, especially in the Miss Hula and wahine divisions of the festival. The MM score-sheet awards a maximum of ten points for the quality and significance of the dancers’ lei, and assigns a max of ten more points for grooming, and ten more for costume. This accounts for thirty points of a possible 125 – about twenty-five percent of the total score in a competition whose winners are often decided by tie-breakers or by margins of one or two points.
If you are just a wee bit cynical, you might conclude that trophy-driven hālau cannot afford to lose points on the look of their dancers; you might conclude that victory is often a matter of budget, that winning scores are often a reflection of how much a hālau is willing and able to spend on florist and lei-maker, on seamstress, hairstylist, manicurist, and make-up artist.
I have a quote. It’s from Auntie Marie MacDonald in her 1978 publication Ka Lei, The Leis of Hawaii. It reminds us of old-school thinking about the relationship between mele, hula dancer, and lei.
Dancers were careful not to over-adorn themselves because the important thing in hula was the telling of the story and the singing of praises with body movement. The words of the story were not muffled by an excessive number of lei. One for the head and one for the neck were sufficient for enhancing the story telling.
In old-school thinking, the dancer’s lei is significant because it is made by the dancer from materials that the dancer has gathered. In old-school thinking the lei of the dancer is dedicated to Laka, the guardian of hula, who then inspires the dancer with understanding, connection, and excellence. We are reminded by old-school thinkers like Auntie Marie and Tutu Kawena Pukui that: “Pu‘upu‘u lei, pali i ka ‘ā‘ī. An imperfect lei is made beautiful by the one who makes, dedicates, and wears it.
We do our best to be-old school in what we make and wear. Yes, we will order lei maile for MM this year, but from someone who knows the value of careful, sustainable picking; from a steward, not a trampler. We will have our ‘auana dresses made by a dress-maker who was Auntie Maiki’s dress-maker, and who is now almost family. But everything else of ours will be very in-house: tops and pā‘ū that we’ve sewn ourselves; lei that we pick ourselves from plants that we ourselves take care of; lei that we make ourselves, pack in coolers ourselves, take to Hilo ourselves, tend-to in Hilo ourselves, put on and take off ourselves. Lei that we will return, ourselves – when the dancing is over – to their home in the land to which we are forever attached.
Tonight’s concert is titled “Ku‘u Pua, Ku‘u Lei Aloha” – My Flower, My Beloved Lei” – and it will feature five oli, eight hula ʻōlapa, and fifteen hula ‘auana, all of them composed for various flowers and the beloved lei into which they are fashioned. My daughters Kahikina and Kapalai came up with this theme and with most of the twenty-eight mele that we’ll share with you in the next three hours. I myself wanted to put on a concert called “E Pāka Kākou” in honor of our Mayor’s new and brilliantly named program for recruiting community volunteers to help fix-up our county parks. The word Pāka is a Hawaiianization of the English word park as in “beach park”; so “E Pāka Kākou” means “Let’s all park” in the same kind of grammatical context as “Let’s all post office,” or “Let’s all mortuary,” or “Let’s all bakery.” The words paka and kapaka, without the initial ā -emphasis, can also mean tobacco, so “E Paka Kākou” translates to “Let’s all tobacco.” I thought that this would surely make for a great and hilarious concert theme: we could dance “Ala Moana Pāka,” “Hale‘iwa Pāka,” “Home Kapaka,” and my favorite “Ho‘ā i ka Paka Lōlō.” I thought this, but I held my tongue, knowing full well that I would get the ix-nay on the aka-pay from our young master minds.
Actually, pua and lei make for a pretty good theme, especially when you look at it from Mary Kawena Pukui’s point of view as expressed in her 1964 essay “Aspects of the Word Lei.” She reminds us that pua are not limited to flower blossoms; pua can include grasses, seaweeds, leaves, fronds, vines, shells, seeds, feathers, children, sweethearts, and the citizens of a nation. She reminds us that grandchildren who wrap their arms lovingly around our necks are called “lei mo‘opuna.” She reminds us that our cherished grandparents are called “lei hulu kūpuna.” She reminds us that a lei can be a chant or song that is given to an esteemed person with or without an accompanying flower lei. When the lei of flowers fades away, the lei of words remains.
Kawena doesn’t say it, but I think that years can also be thought of as pua. Holomua ka No okina eau is, tonight, a lei of thirty-five amazing years. Our return to the Merrie Monarch Festival next month will be a lei strung from the flowers of thirty-seven consecutive years. And Hālau Mōhala ‘Ilima itself is now an unbroken lei of thirty-nine years. In my mind, a lei of years is very much like this other lei that I’m wearing, a lei hala. A lei hala embraces all that is hala – all that is gone but still cherished, all that, like years and memories, is gathered up, strung, and held close.
In my mind, our hālau of blossoming ‘ilima is still thriving after all these years because it is sheltered by hala and maile. I try to be the kahu of what is past but cherished; Mapu is kumu of what is generative and ongoing. Together we have managed stand guard over the place in which our lei ʻāpiki, our beautiful, mischievous ‘ilima can blossom and shine.
Ka hala o kai Maile aʻo uka
Kui aʻe kāua Lawa kuʻu lei.
[note: from Daniel Kaopio’s mele “Ke ‘Ala o ka Rose.”]
Hala of the seaside, maile of the uplands, when we join together, our lei is complete.
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