Hula in He‘eia:

Auntie Emma DeFries, a renowned kumu hula and spiritual teacher who passed her traditions to Keola's family.

“I believe that even though there are technically different dialects of Hawaiian language across the Hawaiian archipelago, the art of oli [chant] is universal,” Keola Dalire states. “Even though our hula is a specific style because it came down through our own family teachings, a kaholo is a kaholo—whether it’s here in He‘eia or if it’s out in the Big Island or in Kahului on Maui.

“I like the word ‘unique’ a lot better, because when you say different, my mother used to tell me ‘When you say different, it implies somebody’s wrong—somebody’s right and somebody’s wrong.’ Like, ‘We’re different, so we’re abnormal.’ Honestly, I don’t think anybody is in that category. We try not to categorize like that. What made us unique is we go back—our family—and we have documentation to legitimize our family. And it’s different when you’re chosen by a kumu at a young age to grow up and become the successor. It’s different for us because even if we didn’t want to be successors, and we tried to run away from it, somehow hula keep pulling us back.

“As far as styles in hula, I think at this point there is so much mixing and so much infusion of other things, and I believe competitions are to partially blamed for that. We joke around about cookie-cutter dances, and what our old dances are actually looking like. I would say maybe 25% of your hula nowadays, if you were to take a video of one hālau—hālau that have been around that long—and pull up a video of them in the 1980s, it’s evolved. And some will say its evolved well; some will say we’ve lost things and it’s evolved badly. So what I hope makes me as a representation of He‘eia and my hālau unique is we’ve tried to go back.

“I’ve gone back to those videos from the 1980s, from the 1970s if we can get our hands on it. Or just to the early 90s to try and revive that style where everything wasn’t so precise. Now it’s like, ‘Everyone’s hand has to be here. Everyone’s hand has to be straight up. Everyone’s hand has to be straight out at a 45-degree angle. No, that’s not 45, that’s 60 degrees! And keep your hands flat. It has to be straight.’ Where I always remembered my mother talking about fluidity. Not making people seasick by going the whole time up and down, up and down, up and down the whole time, but we had that graceful flow, that grace and that finesse in our dancing.

“I’ve tried to infuse that back, and it’s really difficult to explain that to kids nowadays because they’re used to hearing and seeing straight lines, straight angle, straight back, straight front, straight up, everything is straight. And to tell them ‘Can you wave your hand,’ it’s like no, no, no, no! You go back to the real basics, as your hand is an extension of your arm, which is an extension of your emotion, and that’s how you tell your story. It takes them a little while, but they started to grasp that concept and get that flow back in the hand. It’s an ongoing task and I don’t know if it’s a another evolution or revitalization, but that’s what it’s come to.

“Besides using videos, I’m fortunate to also my two sisters and a cousin who actually grew up with my mother, it was my mother’s oldest sister’s daughter. So there’s maybe 10 years between them. They grew up together. She also became a kumu hula. She doesn’t teach a hālau but she has that status, and she actually learned from my grandmother. So being able to tap that resource and have her share with me the stories and the gossip from back then, because I wasn’t around, I never got to meet my grandmother. She passed away the year before I was born. Once I was older, I started to tease my mom that that’s the only reason I’m alive was because my grandmother passed away.

Keola Paoa. Photo courtesy of Keola Dalire.

“As I was growing up, they used to say I was a reincarnation of my grandmother, and it was because my mom named me after her. But as I got older, I’m a little more brave to talk to my mom and say things like, ‘Don’t worry mom, I know I’m only alive because granny died.’ And she said, ‘Why do you say that?’ I said, ‘Because I became your new best friend.’ And she’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll give you that point. Because my mom and my grandma, they were close. They had their fallings out like any mother-daughter relationship. . But all in all, it was that connection and that was passed down. So our tree has kind of grown this way, branched a little bit, but it’s still from that same source.

“Sitting here is this man here, this is our Tutu Keola sitting in the chair, Tutu Keola’s last name was Paoa, so he had a couple nieces that danced in the Kalākaua court. One is Nakuea, and the other is Kīhei Pekelo. We have a family mo‘okūauhau, our genealogy. One line is from Komomua. Komomua was from the Big Island, marries a woman I believe from Maui, and they actually migrate here. So that’s where Uncle Frank Hewitt and I are related as well.

“It’s kind of funny when they were making this book, I believe they counted nine major families, all the most prominent families within Kāne‘ohe. Families like the McCabes, the Adams, the Padekens, the Rowans and so there are all these families. And during this whole research, they used to tease my mom that she was the princess because she had the most links to all these families. So to this day I still joke with my uncle and I’m like, ‘you know you are talking to royalty.’ He’s one of few that has the authority from my mother to whack me onside my head when I get out of control.”

Pacific Worlds > He‘eia, O‘ahu > Arrival > Legendary Setting