by Leilehua Yuen
At the bottom of this article is a list of wahi pana. More will be added as I have time to write more posts.
Hawaiʻ i is renowned for its many storied places. Moʻ olelo and kaʻ ao, traditional stories, preserve the history and heritage of our island home. These special places often awaken in us feelings of wanting to be a part of the place. We want to engage with it, and leave our mark. How can we do so respectfully?
In the words of the late Edward Kanahele, professor of history and esteemed Hawaiian cultural expert, “If the visitor feels spiritually compelled to connect. . . then one should offer a hoʻ okupu. One of the hoʻ okupu of highest value in the native Hawaiian culture is not an offering of vegetables or foliage; neither is it an offering of a fish or a whale’s tooth or a family heirloom; rather it is one’s word!. . . One’s word is the hoʻ okupu of choice!”
Please leave an offering of your word, your promise, to cherish and protect the wahi pana so that those who come after you may experience the same precious sense of connection you did.
Coral/Rock “Graffiti” – disrespectful and illegal
While it is tempting to “make one’s mark” by writing “Aloha!” or something in white coral on the black lava, it is disrespectful to the land and an unsightly defacing of the natural beauty of the islands. Also, within the national park boundaries, it is prohibited under Federal Law and considered a form of vandalism.
Moving/removing coral material from one place to another to make the coral graffiti (or for any other purpose) is unlawful everywhere in Hawaiʻi. While it may look like dead rock that is just sitting around useless, the piles of coral near the shoreline are a critical part of our ecosystem. Each winter, the heavy surf grinds the coral up and gradually replenishes our beaches. At other times of the year, small and microscopic animals use the coral for homes and breeding sites.
In some areas, removing the coral material also has damaged some archeological sites, and rearranging the landscape to create the graffiti also has damaged archeological sites and some natural features.
A couple of decades ago, when the coral graffiti fad was at its height, some of our small beaches actually began to disappear due to the removal of so much coral, and the Queen Kaʻ ahumanu Highway was lined with personal graffiti and commercial advertisements for miles. As the near-highway areas were covered, graffitists moved farther from the road, creating mile after mile of graffiti in once-pristine landscape, and tracking in seeds of invasive plants.
Now that “influencers” are posting videos of themselves engaging in this practice, it seems to be having a resurgence. When you see such videos, please kindly explain to the influencers that it is not appropriate, and ask them to post something that is respectful to the place they are visiting.
Cairns / Stacking Rocks
In Hawaiʻi, we have a long tradition of building ahu (rock cairns) for uses ranging from the sacred to the secular. We build altars and temples from rock. And we build trail markers from rock.
Sometimes, when people see an ahu or cairn by the side of the road, they think it is ok to build more. It is not. The older ahu often are important trail markers. In the vast lava plains with their rolling hillocks, a trail is easily lost. The ahu are built to stand up tall enough that a someone traveling can see the next ahu and not get lost in the rough terrain and be injured or worse. If additional ahu are built, it can cause the traveler to go off the correct trail, leading to disastrous results.
The people who regularly use the trails are often descendants of those who built them, or they have a long-standing connection. They know how to maintain and repair the trails to cause the least damage to the surrounding landscape. It is interesting that, over time, each of the ahu becomes a micro-environment of its own, with a leeward and windward side and tiny communities, usually of invertebrates and lichens.
Whether they are at the water’s edge or inland, pōhaku (rocks) are an important part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem of Hawaiʻ i is fragile and highly stressed. While it may not seem that those few bugs, mosses, or lichens are important, how do we know? If someone who did not understand cars did not consider a few inches of plastic important, they might toss out a tiny part for your fuel line. Soon, the car would no longer run. Please leave the rocks where you find them.
My only caveat for that is that if you are on a marked trail, and rocks have fallen into the trail, please replace them into the raised edges of the trail so that the next traveler does not trip. If we each maintain the trails as we use them, they will never be in disrepair.