Big party today in Laie
honors founding families
With storytelling, song and plenty of kalua pig, Laie will celebrate the 200th anniversary today of the North Shore area's settlement by 112 Hawaiian families.
More than 300 descendants from the original families are expected to attend the potluck event, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Laie Hukilau Beach. The public is welcome.
Throughout the day about 50 families will perform chants and songs composed by their ancestors and deliver oral histories, said Dawn Wasson, co-chairwoman of the Laie-Koolauloa Bi-Centennial Committee. Big Island and Maui families who descended from the original 112 families have joined others in the community for a week-long camp in Laie, she said.
"We (the original families) came with King Kamehameha's army," she said. "We are all interrelated. (The celebration) is a continuation of knowing our place in Hawaiian history and how we fit in this society, to honor the ancestors who kept the land and culture alive and gave us this sense of place," Wasson said.
A volunteer kupuna teacher for seventh-graders at Kahuku Intermediate School, Wasson said the children love to hear about their families' histories.
"I brought documents and pictures of their ancestors. I (brought) stories of who they were. (The) child is a descendant of these great people," she said.
Wasson has made it her mission to record oral histories about how the original families came to settle in Laie.
Now almost 60 years old, Wasson started writing down her elders' stories when she was in the 10th grade. She has filled 70 to 80 notebooks about the nine generations of the original families that settled in Laie after King Kamehameha conquered Oahu in 1795, she said.
Wasson also researched the history of each of the families, finding documents in the Lyman Museum in Hilo, history books and records from the state Bureau of Conveyances.
Wasson said the celebration is also for the general public and non-Hawaiians because "Hawaii is not only for Hawaiians, it is for all of us living in Hawaii."