CALISTO: I feel strong when I have something
koa in my hand.
My parents had koa furniture
but I think I was the first one to get
addicted to using koa.
Mike Adams was building a canoe
and I was helping him work on that canoe
and I could see the beauty of the koa
that he was taking out of there.
At that time wood was wood
until I realized
how beautiful
koa was.
From that time I started working with Koa.
Until today, forty years later.
Koa is hard to find.
Usually find the koa trees up in the mountains,
the most remote areas of the island.
There’s a lot of disease coming into the island.
The disease is killing out the trees that we have.
Human of course…
of course human bring disease that kills the trees.
The pigs.
They dig them out, they eat the roots.
And they only grow here in Hawaii.
When I look at a Koa tree,
The hairs on my neck stand up.
If the tree is still alive, I won’t use it.
I’m bringing it back alive.
Koa.
It’s so hard to get.
It’s so rare.
I want to save as much as I can.
Using accent tools
pounding pounding.
All that stuff coming out of there is wasted.
Instead of pounding,
you can just cut
and whatever you cut you can use that for something else.
We gotta be conservative here.
We running out of trees, here.
So with the scraps we make earrings,
yoyos, tops, jewelry boxes.
So I need to use the modern tools.
We have our own Hawaiian paddles,
Koa Hawaiian paddles.
We use that till 1978,
and that became obsolete,
because the Tahitians came down with a
teardrop design.
So our Hawaiian paddles went out of circulation.
We can use these paddles if we’re not in competition.
But if we’re in competition, we’ll probably
die out using these paddles.
We need a smaller lighter paddle
because we cannot keep up.
We’re gonna keep our culture going,
we need to use these paddles from way back
in the seventies.
I feel strong when I have something
koa in my hand.
I feel powerful, I feel “yeah.”
The koa trees is where we get our mana from.
Our mana is our power.
The mana from those paddles
the mana that the paddle is putting into the body.
It’s like it’s talking to me.
I love this wood and the koa tree are sacred.