The Value of Hawaii 2: Ancestral Roots, Oceanic Visions

Fishponds, Food, and the Future in Our Past

FISHPONDS, FOOD, AND THE FUTURE IN OUR PAST HI‘ILEI KAWELO Our nonprofit, Paepae o He‘eia, has been around since 2001. We have a vision and mission you can find on our website.1 But we like to let the place speak for itself. This pond is massive: 88 acres of water space, completely surrounded by a wall that is 7,000 linear feet long, about 1.3 miles. Our küpuna built this pond in about two years time. It’s estimated that He‘eia Fishpond is about 800 years old and fed a community of about 2,000 people. The low estimate is that this pond was able to produce 200 lbs of fish per acre, per year. The higher estimate is 500 lbs of fish per acre per year. Photograph by Manuel Mejia of The Nature Conservancy, Hawai‘i (appears by permission of the photographer). 164 LOKO I‘A Paepae o He‘eia is answering a challenge that our küpuna presented us. In the past twelve years, we have been able to complete 3,000 feet of the 7,000 foot linear wall. What we’ve been doing is working to restore the pond for continued use. In essence, we are not just restoring the pond itself, we are revitalizing fishpond practitioners. A lot of times, people come down here and automatically ask, “Oh, where’s your fish?” I always try to explain to them that this is part of the process. Right now, we don’t have a lot of fish to sell; we have a lot of smaller fish. But we are training practitioners, and this in itself is a process. In order to commit to a mahi i‘a lifestyle, we have to shift our mindset. Fishpond work is dictated by the tide, which in turn is controlled by the moon. When we think about work or professions these days, it’s all about the sun; the workday begins with the rising of the sun and ends when the sun sets. For fishpond hana, it’s all about the tide. What the tide is doing dictates what we can do. Is it low, allowing us to cut mangrove, reset the foundational niho stones, or rebuild the wall? Or is it high, not allowing us to work on the wall but rather to transport material out onto the wall in preparation for wall work. Recently we’ve been committing to practice building the wall at night. During the winter months, our low tides are at night, while in the summer, low tides occur in the light of day. Building wall at night allows us to get a lot more work done in a given year. Prior to building wall at night, we were able to restore about 150 ft of wall in a year. With this shift, we are now are able to restore 300–350 feet of wall per year. Like I said, it’s all about the process of shifting our minds and our hana. Wall work isn’t the only work at the fishpond. On any given day, you can often find the pond bustling with learners of all ages. The present-day iteration of the fishpond practitioner is one that takes on the challenge of education . Education is a must—to change the mindset of all residents of Hawai‘i first and then to extend globally beyond our shores. People are like fish. Yes, they need the bare essentials in order to survive, but with a little bit of nurturing , they will hopefully not only survive, but grow. We are looking to grow a nation of island-minded fishpond advocates, ones who will support our efforts and other sustainability efforts throughout the state. Support means recognizing that fishponds are not just relics of the past, but, in their potential to feed a community, they are very much functional and relevant today. Just like the fish in the pond, we are still in the infancy stages of self-determination . You cannot be a sovereign people if you cannot feed yourself. Those of us who do fishpond work are not very vocal, but we try to lead by example. Sort of a soft-spoken kind of activism, I guess. I never took to politics or what we normally view as “activism,” because that is typically seen as negative. Fishpond restoration is based upon a very positive outlook, and Kawelo...