(Re)building the Walls:

Volunteers haul buckets of crushed coral to be used as fill in a section of the wall being rebuilt.

“The group I work for at Paepae is called Kuōkuapā,” Keahi shares, “and that means ‘let the wall rise again.’ That’s the name given to our crew and that’s what we do. And the cool thing is through restoration of the pond, you restore a lot of things within yourself. It took only two years for our kūpuna to build—that was average for fish ponds. And to think that there was over four hundred fish ponds within our pae ‘āina, within Hawai‘i, is pretty mind blowing to me, to the point of like one of the Seven Wonders of the World if you combine them. And then you start to combine heiau and all these other things.”

“There was a mele written at the time of the overthrow of the monarchy and annexation,” Hi‘ilei points out, “called Mele ‘Ai Pohaku and its ‘Kaulana nā pua a‘o Hawai‘i, kūpa‘a ma hope o ka ‘āina.’ But then it talks about ‘Ua lawa mākou i ka pohaku,’ which speaks to ‘the stones are sufficient. The stones are enough.’ That’s all we need. All we need are those stones because if we have those stones we can build our heiau, we can build our hale, we can build these foundations, can build our terraces, and so ‘Ua lawa mākou i ka pohaku.’

“Hawaiians were satisfied with rocks. It’s not the mountains of money you have that we’re satisfied with, it’s literally just rocks. Because our rocks built everything we needed. They housed our fish, they created kuana for our lo‘i, they cooked our food, they were used to pound our food, they were used to mash our medicines. Our rocks did everything for us and they held that mana in them that even on heiau connect us back to our akua. So rocks had a great importance, and through the restoration process you realize how important rocks are.”

“So we treat our stones with that kind of respect, that they’re useful, they’re functional, they feed us, and even though in Western thought they’re inanimate, in traditional thought—I know this is true in multiple cultures throughout the world—rocks are living rock, rocks are breathing. They’re alive. They’re animate. And same for us. So when we teach people to build wall, there is definitely no throwing of rocks. Every pohaku you pass, you pass with intent. You place it with intent. Some people talk to them and it’s not like, ‘Hey rock where you like go?’ Some people talk to rocks like that, sure, but sometimes you just feel the rock. ‘Where does the rock wanna go?’ It’s not verbally communicated.

“Rocks bite! We talk about ‘rocks biting,’ so when people aren’t paying attention, maybe as we’re restoring the wall, they might be talking about some issue they’re having at home or somebody said this, somebody said that, oh! And a finger gets smashed or cut. That’s why we say, ‘Oh don’t forget: the rocks bite!” So we definitely respect our pohaku here.”

With the clearing brought on by the NERR designation, the pond wall is slowly completing its circle.

“But it took some figuring out to know exactly how to build this wall,” Keahi says, “He‘eia fish pond is unique in that it’s the only fish pond that is a complete circle—the wall went in a complete circle totally separate from the land. The river was diverted in both directions against the wall separating the pond from the land, it didn’t semi-circle and connect back. It is actually separated completely by an ‘auwai. And you can see a remnant ‘auwai over there where the kalo is, so you can imagine that thing stretching all the way down and water being there was that little ‘auwai that separated us. As far as we know we’re the only fish pond that was like that.”

“When I was a student at Mānoa,” Hi‘ilei says, “Hawaiian stone mason Billy Fields had come in and done some workshops and so we learn a bit from him and then just over the years you help this community, help that community. I helped my sister at home repair their stone wall—they live on the stream, so that’s like an annual thing that needs to get repaired. So we learned that way. But then you are presented with He‘eia fishpond and there’s a construction style here that’s all its own because your style is dictated by the types of material that are present. You build wall on the Big Island, it’s very different than building wall here. Rocks are different.

“In our restoration, as we dismantle and break down the wall, you’re able to see the style that the kupuna of He‘eia employed to build their wall. And so we try to as much as possible stay true to that style, while simultaneously reinforcing the wall because we don’t want to fix it only a little bit. We want to fix it solid so that it lasts another 800 years. So it becomes a hybrid, but ultimately the real teacher is this place.”

“We utilized the original pōhaku that were here as much as we could,” Keahi states. “We’ve searched these reefs flats for the pōhaku that were here. And I want to say the walls have at least thirty percent original rock, and in some places more. In some places there were nice amounts of rocks there to restore. All this rock is new rock, you can see the difference. Blue rock, these are dyke stone. This is blue stone so this is actually from Ameron company, donated. This one right here is not blue stone but it is dyke rock., This red in this rock means that we didn't get it in any of our loads, so this is the type of rock that's here. So just by looking you can see there's not an abundance of this rock. So you can see how much rock we had to bring out to restore these places.

One of the old coral heads used on the wall.

“Then when you see coral like this, we try to border the edge of our wall. Especially more down on that side you’re going to see big corals. This is finger coral—after being thrown on land the fingers have broken off—but this is the skeleton of what remains and this is from this this bay, and who knows how long it’s been on this wall? You can definitely see the difference from the ones we get today. You know that’s original coral, and again we have the kids touch them, work with them.

“I tell the kids who come here, ‘Go to Bishop Museum and you can see rocks in glass cases.’ But here we actually we passed these, we picked them out of the water and we passed them and we put them back in. They work hand-in-hand with these rocks and that's something amazing.

“Our kūpuna were like, ‘If there’s function to it, use it use it the best you can; use it, don’t just put it in a glass box and never touch it again.’ Definitely some things need to be in the glass box because it’s one of the few left in the world. But over here we want to use it, we want to feel just like our kūpuna did, we want to grab on. I want to know that this is something I hope our kūpuna would be proud of.”

Pacific Worlds > He‘eia, O‘ahu > Onwards > Sea Today