The rich but nearly forgotten legacy of Hawaiians who once settled in the Pacific Northwest will be remembered in a celebration of the Kanaka at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Open Space for Arts & Community.
Kanaka is a term used by people of Polynesian descent to describe who they are and where they come from, most often from the Hawaiian islands.
The Open Space for Arts & Community collaborated with Hawaiian native Gloria Napualani Kalamalamakailialoha Fujii Nahalea and her husband Bill Nahalea to celebrate the story of the historical Kanaka migration to the Pacific Northwest. The event will include hula, storytelling, a film preview and music by special guests Charles Brotman and Charlie Recaido from the award-winning group Kohala, visiting from Waimea, Hawaii.
Woven into the cultural cloth of the Pacific Northwest is a vibrant thread — redolent with plumeria blossoms, the murmur of slack-key guitars and ukulele and the sway of hula skirts — that reaches across the Pacific back to the islands of Hawaii. In the late 1700s, the first of the 4,000 Kanaka landed in the ports of the Northwest. They lived and worked in towns like Fort Nisqually, Fort Langley, Lummi, Tulalip and Yakima and began to marry into the Northwest native tribes. For the past 40 years, Nahalea has worked to uncover the forgotten history of the early Kanaka, producing the documentary “The Kanaka Legacy.” A preview of the film will be shown on Sunday.
“When I first started the research, I couldn’t find anything about the Hawaiians in the Northwest,” Nahalea said. “The earliest Hawaiians married local Native Americans, so the blended bloodlines run through many tribal families, but the tribal archives didn’t have anything about them.”
Recognizing the oral tradition of both the Hawaiian and native cultures, Nahalea began to interview members of various tribes. In the old Hawaiian custom of “hanai,” or adoption, Nahelea was befriended and brought into the tribal fold, which allowed her to hear the spoken history of the Kanaka. Like the African proverb that says a whole library is lost when a person dies, Nahalea’s goal has been to record and document the tales of the “Forgotten Hawaiians” before the last holders of that history disappear.
Like the Kanaka, Nahalea grew up in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu and came to the Northwest when her parents moved here. She attended the University of Washington, where she studied Pacific dance arts under the mentorship of Kumu Hula Master George Naope.
Now, along with her Kanaka research, Nahalea teaches, performs and choreographs in the Hawaiian hula, Tahitian dance and New Zealand Maori haka traditions. She has created a curriculum for school districts and other organizations to educate students about the South Pacific Islands, and in 1999, Nahalea received the Washington State Governor’s Heritage Award for her outstanding contribution to the enrichment of the culture of Washington state. The state house of representatives also recognized her work, passing a resolution about the historical impact of the Hawaiians on the Pacific Northwest.
For Sunday’s event, Nahalea said they selected musicians who are today’s current version of the Kanaka legacy. They include her husband Bill, who plays the ukulele in addition to producing TV and radio shows, plus Brotman and Recaido, who play an acoustic fusion of island, folk, blues and jazz music.
Nahalea plans to perform hula, the traditional Hawaiian dance that originally communicated the culture’s history before it evolved into an art form.
“I have missed my islands so much,” Nahalea said. “I wanted to recreate them through hula and ukulele music. So I did the same as our Kanaka forefathers.”
Tickets are $10 for students, $15 in advance for general admission or $18 at the door. Tickets are available now at www.vashonkanaka.brownpapertickets.com and Vashon Bookshop.
