[Waves lapping]
[Singing: As I travel from place to
place, some familiar...]
-Being a native Hawaiian of a place, to take care
of it, is the most important thing you gotta do.
Being a national park we get a lot of visitors, yeah? So the most important thing is just making sure
that they know how they can take care of the area, you know?
Not leaving their trash, not digging into the sand.
Caring for animals, you know. We have plenty turtles around here. This is like a sancuatry,
for them it provides them with all the seafood they need, all that limu.
[Singing continues]
-The relationship that we have with water is really
kind of a fascinating one too. Basically, water is
your source of life. Everything depends on water so
water itself is revered as very sacred.
-In our language the word for water is wai, and our word for
wealthy is waiwai. So with the idea that when you have plenty water,
that's what makes you a wealthy person. So to Hawaiians fresh water
was like gold. When you're living in a place like Kona, we don't
get much rain around here, so our freshwater ponds are our most
important resource to us. You know, because that's where we get our fresh water from.
[Hawaiian chanting]
-It's a stonebuilt wall, the ones that we have here at Koloko,
that pretty much tries to keep out the Pacific Ocean.
[laughs] That's what it's doing. Which is a tough job, you know?
-This wall takes care of this fishpond, takes care of the fish that's in here.
This was actually, in the olden days,
what I would call- this would be the icebox for the people.
So, everybody here would want to eat. I think the villages along the coast
from a thousand people, gathered all these stones. Coastline-
rolling it down from the coastline or bringing it from the ocean to get
this wall set up for raising fish for the people.
-Water comes in and fish swim into the fish pond
and there's a gate. So then the fish swim to this pond
and they grow and they eat, and eventually they can't get out of the pond.
You know? So whenever you need to catch fish, you know that
those are the fish that are stuck inside there.
[Singing and chanting continues]
Working with the stones- I mean- you're not just moving any kind of stones.
You're moving stones that were here 800 years ago
that our ancestors moved. I mean,
the chiefs moved these stones- some of these stones, Kamehameha moved himself.
[Singing and chanting continues]
-One of the biggest things we can do is retaining the fish ponds-
maintaining the farm lands- because by bringing
in those practices we start to see the hidden meanings behind things.
Some in our language, we call this kauna, and there is kauna in everything.
[Hawaiian chanting]
-In this day and age we've kind of become disconnected
from that kauna, from those meanings and from
that relationship that we once had with the earth, with the environment
but by practicing the language and by actually
practicing these traditions, working on the ponds-
over time we start to reconnect with all these different
aspects of nature. And when we build those connections we improve our understanding.
-Our park has one of the biggest stone walls to our
fish pond, that shows the engineering skills of the
Hawaiian people, you know. The idea of sustainability and how they knew-
We only get one land, and we only get one earth so we gotta take care of it.