"Create Abundance Right Here": Interview with Haley Kailiehu and No'eau Peralto

Haley Kailiehu and No'eau Peralto are 'Ōiwi aloha 'āina who serve as Creative Director and Executive Director of Hui Mālama i ke Ala 'Ūlili (huiMAU), a community-based organization founded in 2011 in Hāmākua Hikina (East Hāmākua) on Hawai'i island. Haley and No'eau's leadership of huiMAU reflects the place-based, kūpuna-affirming turn toward 'Ōiwi abundance that similarly informs the movement to protect Maunakea. Mahalo nui loa iā 'olua e Haley and No'eau for showing us the depths of 'onipa'a.

July 7, 2020

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada:

How are things going over there?

Haley Kailiehu:

Good.

No'eau Peralto:

Going good. It's been a whirlwind of changes, but overall it's been good for our hui and I think for all of us, a little change in pace, shifting focus on what we're doing, really feeding people out here. There are a lot of people who lost their jobs, who would commute to the hotels and work. So early on, there was no movement in town. It was really still. But I think it has been a good time to stay close to one another. For a lot of people, it has been reassuring that we have food whenever they need food. It was really hard to see in the beginning how a lot of the kids in the programs that we are running were coming for food and having their parents come and pick up food. But it's good and we're all super close now.

We've gotten to know our people out here more in the last five months than we have in the last eight years.

The farmers that we have been getting food from, and people that just come to donate stuff, and then all the people coming to pick up food.

BKK:

So No'eau, one of the very important parts of your poem that stands out to us is your use of all of the ancestral and place names. Why do you think it is important to invoke the names and the lives of the kūpuna in terms of 'āina kupuna and kanaka kupuna in order to talk about something that is happening today?

NP:

I was inspired to write that poem sitting down at Koholālele, and the picture that I sent with the pali is kind of that vantage point from where I was sitting and writing. It was during that time when there was all of the action going on at Pu'uhuluhulu. And we are kind of located almost exactly on the opposite side of Maunakea. So I think about our kuleana that we carry and that we seek to fulfill here.

I drew upon a pule, a mele, that comes from the mo'olelo of Papa and Wākea, or Wākea and Haumea that Poepoe published in Ka Na'i Aupuni, and it's one of the pule that Haumea does before she goes to save Wākea when he's captured by Kumuhonua mā. She's moving this large pōhaku, so she calls upon all of these kūpuna of hers in that Palikū lineage. In that moment, looking out, I recalled it because I always think about when we look at the pali at Koholālele as like a lot of different metaphors of resilience, strength, foundation, and to me that is one real way of seeing Papa and Haumea in her forms. Because you can see the stratigraphy, the different papa of the 'āina itself that formed the foundation of our island. They are the foundation of the Mauna.

That moment when there's this movement growing and kind of coming to peak, to Wākea, in the sense that the Mauna is the Mauna a Wākea, I wanted to invoke those names in the same way as the pule, to call upon the strength of the foundations of our own mo'okū'auhau and our...