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ROBERT KAHELE THE SHARECROPPER I wouldn’t know how to live outside of Waipi‘o. Like in a big city, everything has to be bought. Most of your needs have to be met with money. Whereas, down here, you don’t need to have that much. All you have to do, probably, is dig down in the soil and you get what you need. At the end of a road that runs through Honoka‘a and Kukuihaele towns is remote Waipi‘o Valley, located on the northwestern coast of the Island of Hawai‘i. Taro, cultivated in the valley for subsistence since at least the 1500s, became a cash crop in the nineteenth century. The recollections and observations of Waipi‘o Valley residents and workers were recorded in 1978 by Vivien Lee and Yukie Yoshinaga in COH’s Waipi‘o: Mäno Wai (Source of Life). One of those interviewed was Robert Kahele, who spent most of his life taro farming in and around Waipi‘o Valley. Born in 1917, Kahele grew up in an extended family, speaking both Hawaiian and English. When he was very young, his family moved from Waimanu to neighboring Waipi‘o, then to Kukuihaele. Kahele left Kukuihaele School after the eighth grade to work for the Honoka‘a Sugar Company. Inducted into the army just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he did his basic training on O‘ahu before being sent to Hilo. On April 1, 1946, shortly after Kahele’s army discharge and return to Waipi‘o, a tsunami struck the island, nearly taking his life. Lee and Yoshinaga interviewed Kahele in Waipi‘o Valley at the taro patch that he sharecropped and at his home. Yoshinaga remembers Kahele’s willingness to share his knowledge with them and with the Caucasian young people who moved into the valley to farm taro in the 1970s. Largely self-taught, Kahele had a special interest in psychic and spiritual learning. He died in 1984. A WAIPI‘O VALLEY CHILDHOOD I stayed in Waimanu until I was about four years old, I think, when we came back to Waipi‘o. [People] had to move out of Waimanu. There came this Kahele, “The Sharecropper” 149 manmade famine. The domestic pigs would get into the taro fields and destroy completely the taro. So the people began to suffer because these tame pigs went loose. People had to go up the side of the cliffs, go look for—you know those elephant ears [‘ape]? Well, they start using that as food. And when that elephant ear thing sort of ran out, they went to wild bananas. After that, it got so bad that didn’t have anything to eat. After that ordeal over there, people had to move out. And so they came over here, came to Waipi‘o, looking around for jobs. Over here [farmers were] still planting rice that time and most of my uncles and my father got into this rice harvesting. The first job I had working down here, I was chasing ricebirds . I wasn’t even going to school, yet. I used to go send the birds [flying] with that tin cans rattling. [Then] the [Honoka‘a Sugar Company] plantation have an opening and my father moved up Kukuihaele. My father was working for the plantation as a luna with couple of workingmen under him. That’s where I started going to school, in Kukuihaele. The kids were well disciplined those days. The teachers made sure that you came, and when you came to school next day, you brought your homework along. Those that were slow, they had time for the slower ones. And we really learned; they were pretty strict. One teacher who really inspired me was John Thomas. Like, I figured, he was Hawaiian and I’m Hawaiian. See, I really wanted to get somewheres like him. In fact, he offered me help financing my way to school. The thing was, they wanted to send me to some school in Honolulu. My parents left the decision up to me. [But] my one thought was, I could help my parents by going out to work at an early age. I think when I was about twelve, he [father] died, and I sort of took it upon myself to be the guy to take my father’s place, because all I had was my sisters and my mother living up at the house. [My brother] was living with my uncle. When my father...

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