AT the Waianae High School graduation, there will be seniors wearing maile lei that weren't ordered from a local florist. They know where maile grows wild in the mountains above their campus. It's a difficult place to find, but students in the Hawaiian Studies Program at Waianae High School have made many field trips to the mountains and have learned not only about maile but about the legends and the culture of the early Hawaiians who first settled there. Lessons gleaned
from mountain to seaWaianae High students learn to
appreciate and support native speciesThe program was started two years ago by two Waianae teachers, Lei Aken and Linda Gallano, with advice from Eric Enos. Enos runs the Cultural Learning Center at Kaala at the back of Waianae Valley where in an alternative learning program he is teaching teenagers to grow taro and to perpetuate Hawaiian culture. The Waianae program is a joint effort of the high school, the Queen Liliuokalani Children's Center and the Kaala center.
What it's doing is keeping kids in school, interested and involved in what they are being taught and developing self-confidence. Plus, what they are learning can develop into a job. It's a good deal more practical to know how to cultivate plants than to know that the square of the hypotenuse of a triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. The Pythagorean theorem has never saved the day in most people's lives, but if you can grow bananas and papayas and know about soils and irrigation, you have a marketable skill.
"Our focus is on nature, teaching people how to use their backyards to grow food and medicine and lei flowers," Enos said. One of the earliest projects began with a work day by parents and students at Waianae, when they built a miniature replica of Kaena Point and planted the native vegetation found on the arid westernmost point of Oahu.
They moved sand from other parts of the campus, built a rock wall and planted ohai and pohinahina. Both were cultivated from seed by the Hawaiian Studies class. With long distance advice from the staff of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai, the fledgling nurserymen kept the plants alive.
OHAI was once widespread near Waianae beaches, but is now almost gone. It has silvery leaves and red or orange flowers. The branches and leaves are covered with short dense hairs. The students have discovered that ohai require sandy or porous soil and full sun, but not much water.
Pohinahina still grows on local beaches, and has an aromatic scent somewhat like sage. Its blue-violet flowers grow in clusters at the tips of the branches. It will grow to 2 or 3 feet in height, and unlike ohai, will grow in areas away from the beach. "Landscapers are just becoming interested in pohinahina," said Char Kanamu, an assistant in the program. "It probably grew in profusion all over the plain where Kapolei is now, and would grow there again."
"Hawaiian natives aren't easy to grow, though," said Aken. "They aren't aggressive and they tend to clump rather than to spread. They have their own requirements. We've learned together by trial and error."
Wauke trees grow near the edge of the garden, grown from seedlings of a tree given to Enos by the late Beatrice Krauss 20 years ago. "She was a wonderful woman," Enos said, "really believing in the community here." Bark from the tree is used to make kapa in classes given by Waianae High School students to younger children at Nanaikapono Elementary School.
The Hawaiian Studies class makes regular trips into the Waianae Mountains for both horticulture and archeological tours. The students first studied oral histories of elders in the Waianae community, collected by the Bishop Museum, and have since been taken by archaeologist Aki Sinota on field trips.
One of the goals of the program is to restore to the wild some of the native plants that the students have raised on campus. Enos acknowledged that this is not an easy process because the same thing that wiped the plants out in the first place in all likelihood is still there to do a similar job on the replacements. Wild pigs, rats and other predators are patiently waiting.
"But this time, we'll use a program of resource management, monitoring the restored plants," he added. "We'll go back regularly to check on them. The Waianaes are beautiful, but not what you think of as a tropic forest. It's an arid area, not a rain forest, but where there are wet places there are pockets of native plants thriving where they've always grown. The dry forests have far more variety of species than the rain forest does."
THE horticulture program, Kanamu added, is aimed at teaching the students about stewardship of the land, something that the early Hawaiians practiced with sophisticated skills. "We learn from our kupuna, people who walked this aina before us." But as Enos pointed out, they had more land to walk on. Lualualei Valley is now controlled by the military and the entrance to Makaha Valley is gated.
"One of the things we are trying to teach," he said, "is to use what's here. The students have built rock walls around the planting areas, using coral from the campus instead of hollow tile. We get so used to importing things, so locked into the 'deep prairie soil' thinking of cultivating mainland plants, that we don't use the native plants that were here before we were."
Gardening Calendar in Do It Electric!
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