Aloha and welcome.
We're happy to have you join us today for this webinar entitled Hanalei Ahupua'a
management in contemporary times.
Hold on let me just do a technical thing. Cindy can you see the screen ?
Yep you're good. Okay great thanks.
You are among over 400 folks who have registered for this webinar and whether you are nearby or a
little further away we appreciate the opportunity to connect with you. This webinar series is hosted
by the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and is a great way to learn about some of the
exploration, research and discoveries occurring across our Sanctuary system and about some of our
partnerships with those in the community that are doing community based programming.
During the presentation all attendees will be in listen-only mode. You're welcome to type questions
for the presenter into the question box located in the bottom of the control panel on the right hand
side of your screen. You may use the question box to let us know if you have any technical issues
and we will be monitoring the question box and respond as soon as possible. We are recording
this session and we'll share the archive webinar with registered participants via the sanctuaries
website. Okay I seem to having some problems advancing,
hold on a second.
Excuse me, Cindy
Yes, if you click away from the control P or click your actual powerpoint slide and
then you should have regained control of the chat. Switching slides. Okay very good, thank you.
I'm Jean Souza, your host for the webinar and I'm the Program Specialist with the Hawaiian
Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary based at Kauai Ocean Discovery
in Lihue on the island of Kauai. I'm joined today by Cindy Among-Serrao, who is based on
the island of Oahu and by Superintendent Allen Tom who is based in a headquarters
on the island of Maui. This webinar is also part of the Kauai Ocean Discovery Speaker Series.
NOAA manages a system of marine and fresh water protected areas called National Marine Sanctuaries
and Marine National Monuments that are found throughout the coastal U.S. and Territories. These
special ocean and Great Lakes areas have been set aside by Congress to better understand and protect
these underwater treasures for current and future generations. The National Marine
Sanctuary system consists of 14 National Marine Sanctuaries and two marine National Monuments
they encompass more than six hundred thousand square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters
that stretch from Washington state to the Florida Keys and from Lake Huron to American Samoa.
The National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments seek to preserve the
beauty and biodiversity of these special areas. Some of the nations most significant cultural
and maritime heritage resources are located within their boundaries.
Sanctuaries and Monuments are also known for their research monitoring programs, resource
protection and management initiatives that protect these underwater treasures.
National Marine Sanctuaries serve serves excuse me, National Marine Sanctuaries serve as living
classrooms and places for community stewardship.
Our education outreach programs provide engaging and fun learning opportunities.
The Hawaiian archipelago spans a distance of about 1500 miles and is home to two of these special
places, Papahanamokuakea Marine National Monument in the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian islands
is the largest fully protected area on the planet. In the main Hawaiian islands, the Humpback Whale
National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 1992 and is jointly managed by the NOAA Office of National Marine
Sanctuaries and the State of Hawai'i through its Division of Aquatic Resources.
More than half of the humpback whales in the North Pacific seasonally use the waters around the
Hawaiian Islands as the principal winter breeding and calving grounds. The Sanctuary's mission is to
protect Hawai'i's humpback whales and their habitat through education, research and resource protection
efforts. We work with the community and other partners to fulfill our mission.
The Sanctuary boundaries encompass portions of the near shore waters of off the islands of Kauai
Oahu, Moloka'i, Lanai, Maui and Hawai'i.
Our speaker today is Maka'ala Ka'aumoana of the island of Kauai. Maka'ala is the executive director of the
Hanalei Watershed Hui, which was founded in 1998. She's also the vice chair of the advisory council
for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and she's a member of the Kauai
Ocean Discovery Community Advisory group. Maka'ala, welcome and we will turn the program over to you.
Good morning. Aloha everyone, happy to be here. Welcome to those of you who are around my island
home and those of you who are from far away, other places. I will no doubt be saying some things that
are unfamiliar to you and use some some vocabulary and terms that you may not recognize and
please be sure to ask about that if I do in the question box. I'm happy to provide
further explanation as needed. As is the tradition of this place my name is Maka'ala Kaaumoana
Maka'ala is not a translation of an english word it refers to "maka" which is eyes and path "aala"
path so the word actually means watchful and vigilant for those who know me they figure it fits.
Yeah somehow my Auntie knew that it was the right name for me when it was given to me
traditionally at the age of one. Before I begin I apologize for anything I might say
that causes offense to anyone, it is unintentional and I seek to make that right if if needed.
I'm going to go directly to my slide and welcome all of you. I'm so excited to do this
this is the interestingly enough the slide is perfect for what we're talking about today because
this picture shows a watershed. So for those of you in other parts of the world or on continents this
would be a typical watershed, with a mountain on the right and a mountain on the left and and then
the base the valley basin. However in our tradition this picture actually shows four ahupua'a. All four
of those ahupua'a are also the name of the streams that bound them. So our ahupua'a and this situation
are designated by the streams on their boundaries so this is one watershed, four ahupua'a.
Making sure I go to the right thing here. I want to tell you that that oli, that chant is done by
Devin Kamealoha Forrest who is now a a well-known kumu, a teacher of hula
in Hawai'i at the time he was a young student and he is from this ahupua'a, this
area his family has been for many generations in this place and he speaks of his, of his homeland
of the rains, of the winds, of the places that he knows and loves and of the things of
the things that are treasured there, the medicines, the flowers, the activities, the paddling, etc.
So I need to get out of my screen there we go okay this is a map of Kauai with the ahupua'a. Lots right ? So when you think of an ahupua'a
it is often thought of as a translation for a watershed and you can tell from this map that in
many situations it is, just like the first slide I showed you but in some situations it is not.
Traditionally the boundaries were based on having the necessary essential things that
humans needed to live there, not all the things they needed there would be some trading going
on but essentially the things they needed and each ahupua'a may have one person who oversaw all of
the activities what we call a konohiki or there may be several there may be one who knew fishing.
There may be one who knew farming, there may be one who was connected somehow to the
local chief and of course politics always played a role. They didn't always get along.
Obviously man has found a way to have friction about resource management since man began paying
attention to resources, so yes occasionally they fought over water, yes occasionally they fought
over land. But these are the ahupua'a of one island. So you can see that it's not a it's not a
small subject that we're trying to tackle here today and therefore I'm focusing on just a few
and these ahupua'a there are a few of these that are still recognized today but for the most
part unless you see it on a map like this you would not you would not know that they are there.
The definition of ahupua'a comes from an ahu,
it's a stone structure some would call it a shrine, some would call it a thing but it's
it's a place where different special activities would occur
and in this case the pua'a is a pig a very valuable commodity, fed a lot of people and was often used
to pay the land tax to whoever the alii or the chief was of that area and most of the
time they would place the payment, in this case a pig on top of the ahu and that's where we get ahupua'a.
Now an ahu can be for many other purposes it might be a place where fishermen stand to see the fish,
watch the ocean, it might be a place where people pray, it might be a place where people gather for
other purposes, agricultural kinds of activities etc. but the word ahupua'a we think comes from this.
I know that these words are blurred and that's half intentional.
I just want you to see how complex the inside of the ahupua'a can be. This is from mauka to makai, mauka - ma uka
toward the mountain, and makai toward the sea. Kai the sea, so I just wanted you to
have a sense of all the different places and things and spaces are within an ahupua'a.
This is a an artist's rendition of a typical Kauai ahupua's this one is supposed to depict
Limahuli and actually it does a pretty good job if you look at the actual geography of of that ahupua'a.
This is a picture of what it may well have looked like and you can see all of the activity.
These were not passive places man was an active participant, he was a partner of the land.
The Hawaiian perspective is not that he was particularly a steward because man was not in
charge of, man was a partner too or kin, brethren of of the land and so you can see where people
lived and where they farmed and where they fished. It would include fishponds and
taro lo'i, or terraces as well. It was also important that they have access to the very high
mountain areas where many of the important plants medicines etc existed as well as the realm of the
gods, the spirit world the spiritual heavens were part of the ahupua'a. They were not separate from. So an ahupua'a
literally ran from the spirit world, the realm of the gods, down to the deep blue sea.
In modern times we talk about it as extending to the fringing reef but the way my kupuna taught
me it goes to what they use the color to describe the depth right so it was to the deep blue sea.
You can see how they were directing the water. Water was running naturally and they were using
it as it went downstream not ever capturing it, not ever depleting it, but using it. The best part of
this story is this ahupua'a still exists intact, it is managed by a single land management scheme and
it is intact. Kauai's North Shore has several ahupua'a that are intact there are many across
Hawai'i but not as many as used to be of course. But Kauai's North shore we still have three,
Limahuli, Lumahai and Waipa are all owned by single land management and so they are all still
intact. This is Kauai's North Shore, the Bay and the center is Hanalei. Princeville is on the far right
and it goes to the end of the road. So for those of you who have never been to Kauai
the road does not go all the way around. It gets to the mountainous
area and it stops, so when you get to the end of the road, you turn around and go back and it is
a place of seven one-lane bridges, it is a narrow two-lane road. This is not a an urban
environment at all but the ahupua'a of this area Haena and Wainiha start at the very end on
your left Haena next to that Wainiha, next to that Lumaha'i, then Waikoko, Waipa, Waioli and Hanalei.
Okay Cindy this is where we put a poll, you have the poll question ready ?
Aloha everyone so we are going to launch a poll question. Let me just pull it up for everyone.
So all attendees are able to vote or choose your best answer for this question. The question is what
is the correct meaning of an ahupua'a ? We have land division usually extending from the uplands to the
sea. Land division located only in the uplands and land division located only in the coastal areas. So
we're going to give some more time for folks to get your votes in we have around 65 percent of attendees
currently voted already so wait a little bit longer but everyone get your votes in.
All right so we're about 75 percent of all attendees voted so we are going to close the poll
and then I will share the results real fast. So excellent job a hundred percent of folks
voted that the correct meaning of an ahupua'a is a land division usually extending from the uplands
to the sea. Thank you everyone for doing this poll. That's great as a retired teacher I'll
tell you that that warms my heart. Thank you so much and thank you for participating. It's
kind of a big deal, it matters right so thank you. Okay we were gifted
a very special gift by one of our elders who came from Haena, he had been taught the names of all the
reefs and he gave them to us to record on a map. Now I will tell you this map does not have all
of them, it was extensive, so some places all over the world but here in Hawai'i some places we still
know somebody still knows the names of these of these reefs and knowing these names is very very
important not just a fisherman, it would be important to beach goers, it would be
important to farmers, it would be important to boaters, because each of these names
provides an instruction, it tells something about that place on this map. There's actually a channel
that's called baby drowned and obviously that's not a place you want your children to be playing.
So it's it's useful in contemporary times to know the names of your places and if you are living
somewhere, where someone is around that might know them please try to retrieve them and record them.
Just sticking them on a map like this is very very useful in this case the people of Haena
still exist, the families are still there many of them are still working the land and fishing
the ocean and so we're very very fortunate that we still have these these names. Do you know
the names in your place ? I think most of us know the local stream, we know the local mountain,
it's a great start and those names if they weren't changed in recent times provide really
critical information for how to take care of that place and what that place was used for.
So today we're going to talk about the ahupua'a of Hanalei because that's where I work.
My husband was born in Hanalei, I was not. I was born on the Windward side of Oahu
but the weather's a lot like where I came from it's wet and it's green and there's a lot of
water flowing all over the place and Hanalei is known for its rains. There are many names
for the rains in Hanalei, the mist that comes from this direction or the pouring thundering
rains that come from that direction or this rain that happens at this time of year. So there are
many many names and all of those names matter they tell you about that, about that thing. So this the ahupua'a
of Hanalei and when I showed you the first picture we were looking in the other direction.
So this these are the ahupua'a that that you saw what wasn't in that picture is the one at the very
top which is Waileia and so in fact if you really look at the entire watershed in the western
sense of watershed there would be five ahupua'a, little Waileia's is just you know little bitty bitty ahupua'a that is there
and most people don't even know that it exists but it has a stream and so it is an ahupua'a.
Okay we have another poll question.
All right aloha everyone we're gonna pull up our second poll question.
And it is just launched. So this is do you know what ahupua'a you live in ? So it's a yes or no
question. Just want to see if folks are familiar with the ahupua'a that they live in currently.
So as we wait for attendees to vote.
We will give you a few more times so far 60 percent of attendees have voted.
All right and a few more seconds for folks to get their votes in.
All right so we are going to close the poll.
And now we will share it. All right so do you know what ahupua'a you live in? So 68 percent of you have voted
yes and then 32 percent of you have voted no and back to you Maka'ala. That's great thank you so much that
so I wonder if you live in a place where you don't call it an ahupua'a but maybe you call it something
else maybe you should yeah you might you might think about that maybe you call it something else.
Okay this is the source of all the water in the Hanalei River. This is the
mountain in the middle of our island this is Wai'aleale and it is one of the wettest places on earth
and all of the water that enters the Hanalei River enters from this point.
This is a seldom seen view of the upland of the Hanalei. The Hanalei is 16 miles long
eight miles of it is darn near vertical and there is an old trail that goes up here but it's not
well used anymore. What I do want you to notice in this picture that lighter plant there is kukui.
There are not very many natives in this picture.
Between past hurricanes and fires most of the native plants have been outdone by invasives.
The river runs naturally there's no impediment none of the Hanalei is hardened or channelized
or directed in any um in any way. It's not a um it's not an unnatural stream it gets to
run where it wants to run. In our world and in I've been studying some of the Japanese
information and history about their their streams and rivers and they're teaching me that the forest
and the sea are lovers. So if the forest is not all native and not healthy then neither is the sea.
So in 1998, the Hanalei river was designated an American heritage river one of 14 in the United
States it is the only tropical river and it is the only river west of the West Coast. The next nearest
one is the Willamette and when that occurred the community was charged with developing a watershed
action plan which we did and that is why you have me to listen to today the community at that point
elected a program coordinator and that is me. And so I was in fact elected to this position
and they've just never held another election, so I'm still here. This is the Hanalei and
quite a bit of the Hanalei community for those that have never been to Kauai this would be a
place that you could see from an overlook on the highway. In this program of the American
Heritage River, the advantage is not funding, the advantage is not more rules, the advantage is an
open relationship, a partnership with many federal agencies and so beginning in 2000 ,we started
doing a lot of scientific investigation beginning with the mauka land. Studying what was there
and then in 2002 did it conducted a total maximum daily load study to determine what pollutants
existed. The Department of Health did that, the Environmental Protection Agency guided that
and that began a series of further studies and plans to identify and address pollutants in the
Hanalei river and bay. An Environmental Protection Agency targeted watershed initiative grant was
awarded to Hanalei, we were one of the first in the nation to ever get one of those it was a
a two-year program and that was followed by a watershed based plan which used that data so each
each plan, each study, each research project built on the one previous and then we began
to really characterize the watershed and produce strategies to improve the quality of the water.
This folks is my granddaughter and to just tell you how long we've been at this, she is now the
mother of seven. She is holding up a jar because of course I enlisted my grandchildren to
begin the work in the Hanalei that the community said they cared most about. When we asked the
community what they were concerned about, they said we want to know what's in the water.
We want to know if it's fishable and swimmable and some of us said how do you know what the Clean
Water Act said? They didn't but they knew what they cared about and so the focus of the early years of
our program was on water quality. In those days the State singularly was responsible for collecting
water samples, analyzing them and reporting them to the public there weren't any community efforts.
Our response was to find a way for the community to better understand its water
and to look for itself as to what was there and we came across this system and I don't have
stock in this company, this isn't my boogie but this happens to be an I-dex company system
and the reason that I'm going to the trouble of showing it to you is because without this system
the community could not have conducted the work that we did. It's a closed system.
Nobody was exposed to any bacteria or any chemicals. This is this is a very very safe
way for volunteers to collect information and as a result of some of our work
the EPA and the Department of Health both use the results as reportable results. So our community
augmented the Department of Health monitoring which was being done weekly and we did one more
day and two more days a week sometimes and then we quickly chilled them and drove them down to the
Department of Health for their analysis and their reporting. And then periodically
we did snapshot sampling at 30 sites and plus across the watershed. Volunteers would fan out
to 30 different sites, collect water all at the same time and then we would analyze it
using this I-dex system. It's a very very volunteer friendly system with with minimal training and
minimal equipment. A community can see for itself what's going on and help itself
to make things better and not depend on on government or a corporation to do it for them.
We did obtain some funding to help pay for this process it's not terribly expensive but
everything costs and community donations supported that effort as well.
As a result of this work we did determine that the main cause of bacterial pollution in
the Hanalei River water was Enterococcus caused by or sourced from
both pigs and birds in the mauka lands and people in the valley.
When I asked the scientists "well what is it more of?" and they'd say it's pretty much half half. So
no matter what we do in Hanalei to address the bacterial pollution it is important
for people to understand that if we replaced every one of the 200 cesspools that still remain
in the Hanalei valley we would never get pure pure clean water because we can't control the
birds and the pigs and their contribution shall we say to the to the pollutants.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try and we did we were funded to provide support for houses to
replace their cesspools with state-of-the-art septic systems that provided treatment,
real treatment they were tertiary systems, aerobic and anaerobic with a UV disinfectant.
There was a cost involved we got funding to defray some of that cost for the homeowner
and it did require a small electrical service to run the pumps and fans and it did require
by federal statute, an annual inspection to make sure the unit was functioning.
We didn't get any takers. Nobody wanted somebody coming on their property once a year to check
the system and people were very nervous about the cost of the monthly fee. It was interesting
they weren't so concerned about their share of the installation cost, they were more concerned
about an ongoing cost of electricity which would have amounted to about thirty dollars a month.
So we didn't get any takers. Some people are replacing their cesspools voluntarily now
but until 2050, 2050, there's no law forcing them to do that.
There's a lot of reasons that we should be trying to do our very best to take care of the Hanalei.
One of the reasons it was designated in American Heritage is that it has all five of the native
gobi, the o'opu. These are these are way cool fish they're very niche oriented. One
variety stays in its own little part of the river and one of them can climb a thousand
foot waterfall because its belly fin has morphed into a sucker and there are times at night
if you get yourself up high enough in the mountain next to a waterfall
you can actually see the movement it looks like the rocks are moving but it's
the o'opu climbing the waterfall. It's an amazing thing and so we had enough natives in the stream
to make it worthwhile doing our very very best to try and improve the quality of the river.
This is an example of one of the threats of the o'opu.
This fellow actually stole a chain-link fence from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge
and created this trap and it is specifically to trap o'opu because o'opu are treasured
by many but specifically treasured by the Filipino community who
loved them in their own homeland but also really liked them here and there was a law
in Hawai'i that they could not even possess the fish so it became a very valuable commodity
and this fellow traps the o'opu and trades them to others for crystal methamphetamine
and I think it's still going on. These are fishermen along the Hanalei
these folks are probably not fishing for o'opu they are probably fishing for tilapia.
It's not a fish that I'm used to eating I understand that it's that it's good fish to
eat these fishermen love the tilapia. The local people, local Hawaiians in
Hanalei probably would not find that fish that tasty but these folks certainly did
and I use this image to demonstrate how important fishing is in this river.
These gentlemen and their little granddaughter drive over an hour to get to the Hanalei to
throw net from this boat and the reason they do that, when I ask them they no more fish their home.
So because the Hanalei has, the Hanalei gets this kind of attention. I don't
see this very often but these fellows are there quite regularly
and of course we have the Hanalei pier.
Fishing from this historic pier which was once used to deliver products grown in the
Hanalei valley such as rice, oranges, cotton and taro for export it's now a recreational pier
and used every single day for people to catch dinner.
We love our Hanelei pier, and on that the state national historic register as well.
The valley is also home to our protected water birds, our endangered water
birds threatened and endangered. There is a Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge
in the center of the of the valley, in the river and the river runs through it and taro grows there
and these birds and and that taro live together in that environment. The threats
to these birds are disease and also feral cats. So although they are in a protected Refuge
it is not a fenced Refuge, it's not contained and avian botulism and feral cats are a problem.
The cats are fed by people up on the hill and then fed cats hunt
and they come down the hill and eat the native birds so there is a trapping effort going on
but feral cats are the threat to all of our native birds, so in this picture on
the very bottom right is the native koloa maoli, the native duck which is quite rare
with that duck is our nene, our Hawaiian goose and then our stilt and our alae keokeo and our alae ula
Hanalei is known for having known and understood and written its history and for protecting as much
of it as it can and an example is before the bridge this was how you got across the river
there are some wonderful stories about the the old chinaman that ran the barge he didn't
charge a lot but sometimes he just didn't want to go and you had to wait until he wanted to go
and then the bridge came and protecting the bridge became a concerted effort of the community
and one of the first focuses of its historic attention so it's on the State and National
Historic Register but so is the whole road. So from the top of the hill to the end of the road at Ke'e,
in Haena it's all on the State and National Historic Register as a historic corridor.
So this is one of the seven bridges in this picture it looks pretty bad it does look a
little better than that today but it's still the maintenance of it is still a challenge.
One of the pollutants of the Hanalei river is the sediment and the bacteria attaches itself to the
sediment and is carried downstream, so the sediment and the bacteria combine to make a a pollutant
and this kind of sloughing or sliding occurs often along the Hanalei and in the valley
because those are not native plants and they don't have the root systems to hold
the dirt that's one reason. The other is that Kauai is a sloughing volcanic
rock, so the island is aging it is the oldest of the Hawaiian islands and as it ages it slides.
A rainy day in Hanalei is a rainy day in Hanalei valley and probably going to close the road.
I have seen the road close from flooding when there wasn't a drop of rain in Hanalei when all
the water came from just the mountain but most often when we get the heavy rains the valley
fills up like a bathtub and the road is inundated and the road closes. It's closed for as many as
several days sometimes but most often it closes until there's a tide shift, so six or seven hours.
When the rains come this is what this river looks like we call it running chocolate pay
attention to out in the bay look how far out that that mud goes it's pretty incredible
the the term chocolate make it makes it kind of sound like it's an okay thing it's it's not an
okay thing all rivers do this I understand and in many places this is why the deltas are so fertile
but in this case it's going out to sea and it's impacting
our near shore coral reefs which we depend on for our resources, for a
fishery but we certainly depend on them too for safety from storm sea storms and also
you know different kinds of impacts that the reef protects us it also provides you know the
the sand and the reef provides some of the world's most famous surfing. So this is a side view
of the watershed that I showed you in the first slide but this is the one that shows all of the
all of the mud and this is not a rare thing this happens three or four times a year.
In March of 2018 we had a famous flood 50 plus inches fell in Hanalei and what
some folks call a rain bomb and this is a picture of some of the damage that occurred
in Hanalei at the at Blackpot park it destroyed buildings and obviously didn't do
much for these cars and did an extraordinary amount of damage, an unusual amount of damage
and taught many lessons I'm hoping that some of them will be remembered
and we've made some adjustments in in the planning etc of of our program and and of Hanalei
itself. The Hanalei Watershed Hui is working now on flood mitigation
studies and we'll be implementing some of the results of that work to try and reduce the
impacts of some of this kind of flooding. This kind of a flood teaches you a lot. The main thing it
teaches you is how powerless you are and how some good plans don't necessarily help you but we we
went to school we're hoping that we can learn from this this 50 inches of rain just overwhelmed us.
This is a sunny day. Bring you back to a more positive picture.
This is the iconic Hanalei with all of the the taro lo'i, the taro field you see them in
a variety of stages of production there and this valley the scene here and the
extended valley of all of Hanalei produces well over 75 percent of Hawai'i's taro. It is a
it is the view you see of Hanalei as you come down come down the hill and enter
the valley it's don't think i don't think anybody goes that doesn't take a picture of this.
And this is a closer up picture for those of you not in Hawai'i of the taro this happens to
be right behind my office. I get no sympathy when I say to people oh I gotta go to my office today
if they've been there and they know that this is what I'm looking at yeah
so sad right? It's it's magnificent and all of those water birds and and you can
see a little stilt in the front there and all these these this taro is an amazing plant.
It is the ultimate sustainable crop I took these pictures myself right behind my office this is a
family with some paid help harvesting taro and I like this series because it demonstrates how
sustainable this crop is. Every part is used so for those of you that are not familiar,
in the bucket on the bottom right in the bin those will all be replanted.
The corms will be eaten, the leaves will be eaten and the remaining part will be replanted for
next year's crop. This crop used to be taro used to be probably a little over a year in the growing
and now that it's pushed pretty fast because it's in such demand this is a very very healthy crop
it requires moving water, cannot grow in stagnant or still water it requires cool cool moving water.
Okay we have a poll question Cindy?
All right aloha everyone for our third and final poll of this webinar.
Place names are often derived from a story, an instruction, a warning,
a resource or all of the above? So as we wait for folks to get their votes in
you might remember Maka'ala talked about some place names earlier, so now we are just kind of testing
your memory. So we have 60 percent of attendees voted so definitely get your votes in an I will
close it in a few more seconds and if you guys have any more questions. There's a lot
of great questions coming in feel free to send them in through the question box.
All right so around 72 percent of attendees have voted so I am going to close the poll
and now I will show the results all right so 96 percent of you have got it correct. So place
names are often derived from all of the above, a story, an instruction, a warning, and a resource.
All right and back to Maka'ala. Thank you Cindy. One of the things that happened in Hanalei was the
conversion of our community to a resort. Nobody did it on purpose, it wasn't a thought or a plan
it happened because Hanalei is so gorgeous because it has good surf and because it's a great
place to play and because it's a friendly little village and so people want to come there, they want
to stay there, they don't want to stay in a hotel someplace else and so many of the houses were
were converted from residences to vacations to vacation rentals at that point the community
said "Whoa we think that we are not as resilient, we are not as capable of taking care of ourselves, we
are not as smart as we once were and so we began developing a community disaster resilience plan.
This plan includes listening to the elders, talking to the business folk, doing a lot of
planning, you can see the you know we all know the famous post-it routine and where are those
things that are important to us, where are those things that are at risk, what are what are those
things that can help us if we have a disaster, during the disaster, right after the disaster,
how can we learn to recover better and it's a community process that continues to this day.
We were just funded for the next phase of that process and and we will be conducting it
very soon. This is an example of the conversion I'm talking about, so these two little houses on the
top still exist getting a little bit squeezed out by the kind of structures at the bottom.
People want bigger houses, they want gates, I don't know why, you really don't know why,
they fell in love with Hanalei that they saw up on the top and then they came and
they changed it to that that you see on the bottom I don't have a way to explain that.
This is Hanalei. This picture was taken by a friend of mine who is a surfer and she
looks at this all the time and i she's always appreciating what she's seeing.
Good heavens look at that, I mean she's on her board and this is what she's looking at, so
some of the most active volunteers and committed folk we have are our surfers. They care about
the water obviously but they also care about the place they have a penchant for renaming things
which is I find annoying but that's what they do they name places, you know for the kind of surf
that's there or whatever their experience was or for some famous person. I of course would rather
they'd use the place names that place had but nonetheless it gives them a connection to those
places and this is true all over where surfers play, where surfers work, where surfers are surfers
and this is this is one of the most famous surfing locations in the world.
One of the pieces of work we're so proud of is
the longest benthic ecosystem study in Hawai'i began in 1992 runs to the present and
this is Alan Friedlander and Eric Brown's work. 21 monitoring sites have been in place since 1992
to study the coral larval production recruitment and settlement. So this is the coral larval
settlement plate and this is our very fancy laboratory that's my garage
and they're sorted and then packaged and then they are analyzed in a in a
a real a real laboratory but this is how we dry them.
Community can. We're also very proud to have hosted the coral
reef assessment monitoring program from 1997 to present
I want to point out that in 1995 Hanalei bay had the highest coral larval recruitment
rate in the world and we don't know why.
This is a map we use with our community it depicts the different jurisdictions the yellow
highlight shows the special management area, the darker blue in the middle is a mooring area
and this depicts the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, the entire bay
is in the Sanctuary which I guess is why you have me here today. We're very proud of the
fact that we publish a Hanalei moon and tide calendar. This is a connection between the
agencies that want to help and the fishermen and the community. The community loves this calendar
because it's the only one that just has Hanalei tides but the fishermen are the ones that asked for it
it it they wanted that they didn't want to do the math translating the tides from someplace else
and so we're very proud we've published this calendar now for nine years.
We've self-funded it which means Maka'ala passing the hat and this is one of our most
active programs this is the Makai watch program it's the partnership with the State of Hawai'i
in taking care of your own place this is kind of like a neighborhood watch
and it's Makai watch, it's not an enforcement arm, it's it's eyes and ears for enforcement,
helping the the community partner with the agencies so that we work together
to take care of our place and I get to show this one because that's my husband in the boat.
Mahalo I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to be with you today and to share the story
of Hanalei. We have many agency partners. I've highlighted a few here the stars of
the show are the people of Hanalei who hang in there, who are resilient, who are committed to
keeping Hanalei Hanalei and using contemporary methods and science to
take care of their place, we're grateful for this opportunity and for Hanalei.
The story is still being told, the impacts of climate change are unfolding before our eyes.
Will taro still grow in the valley when salt water intrudes? Will coastal flooding force
people in agriculture to higher ground? Will we find the balance that once was the ahupua'a system?
Stay tuned. Mahalo and here is my contact information. Mahalo
Alright, Mahalo Maka'ala, that was a great presentation. So as you folks know we're kind of getting near the
end of our webinar time, so to be mindful of folks times, all you guys questions that you
did submit we will gladly send them to Maka'ala and we will send them out with her
answers via email that you registered with. So thank you guys for all those questions for
but now we are going to kind of finish off our webinar with a few ending slides.
Okay I guess it's my turn so again I want to thank Maka'ala for that great talk.
She is also on our sanctuary advisory council and she always is driving the bus on that Council as
well.I also want to thank Jean and Cindy for doing all the prep work, we still have some
prep work to do we will this video has been recorded we will be closed captioning it not
it available oh by the way I'm Allen Tom I'm the superintendent and I'm the one that Maka'ala
yells at when we don't do enough things that are in Hanalei. Next slide please Cindy. I do want to
let people know that you do get a certificate of attendance. You get one hour of professional
development so this certificate will be emailed to you probably by the end of the week once we
get the complete attendees list put together . Next slide please Cindy. We are always looking
for comments I know many of you have written questions in the chat box we will be sending those
to Maka'ala, but we will also be teasing out any questions, if you have ideas for other
topics, if you're if you're actually a teacher, I know there is a school online who participated
in this talk today, that's good information for us to know how we can best provide new lectures
for everybody. Next slide. So coming up I just want to put a plug in for some great lectures we have
in the works if you go to the ONMS webinar home page you'll see that there's a whole list of talks
coming up not just about Hawai'i but I think there's one on the maritime heritage of North
Carolina of our sanctuary out on the East Coast, we have Papahanamokuakea, Dr. Randy Kosaki,
We have Dr. Barkley talking about sperm whales in next week and then coming up after this slide
I have two more, three more actually I want to talk about we have an actual teacher's workshop
that we're getting going to have in March it's a two-day series it's only two hours each and we
will have educators from the three sanctuaries out here in Hawai'i, the Humpback Whale Sanctuary,
Papahanamokuakea and the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa as well as the Waikiki Aquarium.
So if you're interested in in learning a little bit more about some of the lessons that we do in
our sanctuaries please feel free to register for that talk and the next two speakers are actually
homegrown from Hawai'i. These are ones that we will be hosting from the Humpback Whale Sanctuary side.
We have a talk of again from a a person from Kauai, Dr. Heather Ward, she'll be talking
about octopi, cephalopods or he'e in Hawai'i and I understand I have not heard the talk but I've
heard it's excellent and the next talk after that will be on whale sharks so not the marine mammal
but the fish so we have whale sharks sharks in our sanctuary here and definitely this talk will be of
great interest to many people and again I want to thank everybody I want to thank our speakers and
I want to thank all of you for attending and that concludes our talk for today. Again you will
get a note when the video is ready so again thank you everybody for uh participating today. Mahalo