“Having students with thirty years of experience—that’s the value in the forest I have grown.”
—Nalani Kanaka‘ole

Nalani Kanaka‘ole is a third-generation kumu hula (hula teacher) at one of the oldest hālau hula (hula schools) in Hawai‘i. This summer, she brought her dance troupe to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where they participated in the program Indigenous Voices of the Americas.

During their performances and workshops, her students would chant origin stories while dancing across the wide atrium of the National Museum of the American Indian, kneeling low to rise in an eruption of song. While they twirled and stamped, Kanaka‘ole beat the large ipu hula (gourd drum) in her lap with a constant rhythm, bringing deep resonances from its thick hull. As she played, she would watch the dancers’ spinning skirts, brown and geometrically patterned, and remember her own dancing days. Kanaka‘ole is seventy-eight years old, and for sixty of those years, she has taught hula.

Hālau o Kekuhi is a school of kahiko, an older and more traditional form of hula dating from the tenth century. Following European missionary contact, in 1830, Queen Ka‘ahumanu converted to Christianity and banned all hula, proclaiming it pagan, as it told the stories of gods and goddesses. When dancers started Hālau o Kekuhi, in 1953, hula was still an underground practice.

“It wasn’t legal to show in public,” Kanaka‘ole says. “So they taught hula in their backyards.” They chose to mentor Kanaka‘ole’s grandmother Edith, who was then still a child, but she had to practice the aiha (dance) and oli (chant) in a stuffy garage.

According to Kanaka‘ole, Edith and her fellow students only practiced hula during the day. The learning happened when they were asleep.

“They were never taught physically,” Kanaka‘ole says. “Their teacher came to their dreams and taught them the hula and all of the traditions.” With this method, it took the hālau more than eight years to learn the repertoire.

Nalani Kanaka‘ole, on the other hand, learned physically from her mother and grandmother, alongside her older sister Pualani Kanaka’ole Kanahele. “I literally grew up in hula,” she says. By the time she was fourteen, she was a teacher too. “I was my mom’s body,” she says. Kanaka‘ole modeled movements to other students as if her mother worked through her. “Being a master teacher was hard.”

But after the sweat and struggle of devoting herself to hula, Kanaka‘ole became deeply proud of her identity within the hālau. In 1993, both she and her sister were named National Heritage Fellows by the National Endowment for the Arts, the country’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. She prefers that her students, too, start learning hula from ages four or five to build instinct. “It becomes a lifestyle, a practice,” she says. Hula is about much more than a dance. It is a complex ecosystem of community, cultural heritage, and the Hawaiian environment.

“Hula and the teaching of it is a holistic approach, so you will learn all the art and crafts associated with the art. We are a forest culture, which means everything you will need for hula comes from a healthy forest.”

The green lei (wreath) and haku lei (crown) of the dancers are created from pandanus palm leaves in the forests near Hilo. While the town is known for its boiling hot rock pools, the element that Hālau o Kekuhi embodies is fire. Specifically, lava. The group performs their explosive dances in the volcanic tradition, reenacting the stories of Pele, the lava goddess.

The oldest origin mele (song) Kanaka‘ole sings to her audience tells the origin story of the Hawaiian archipelago. Pele comes from Tahiti, she sings in Hawaiian, and the heavens glow with thunder and lightning. A rainbow emerges from the storm, pushing Pele’s canoe to Hawai‘i, where she coaxes volcanoes to erupt into fertile, lush islands. Mele is sung poetry, and it sustains traditional songs by passing them on through hula.

As Kanaka‘ole explains, the key to a healthy culture is the living preservation of hula. Kumu, students, and Hawai‘i enter a symbiotic relationship, where hula keeps the ancestral memory of the island and its communities alive, while the volcanic land provides the visual imagery of the dance. “We all do our part in keeping the forest maintained for our gathering. Now it is so hard with the invasives, and the chemicals in the atmosphere and in the harvest. Our dances are about our environment and the volcanism involved.”

Hula keeps the traditional culture and stories of Hawai‘i intact, despite the many attempts to outlaw the dance, make it touristy, or destroy it by degrading its environment. Hālau o Kekuhi was invited to perform at the Folklife Festival because they encapsulate the depth of Indigenous Hawaiian history, says Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, associate curator of Native Hawaiian history and culture at the National Museum of the American Indian and a relative of Kanaka‘ole.

“We constantly struggle with the image of Hawai‘i as a paradise for other people,” he says. To truly understand the beauty of Hawai‘i, you must recognize its thousand years of history. “It’s millennia of time to become intimately woven into the landscape and environment you live in. It’s reflected in the hula you’re seeing here today. When we think about those older stories about gods and goddesses, they’re not just mythical, fanciful made-up things, but deeply recorded ancestral observations of the world.”

To Kanaka‘ole, hula transports watchers through time and distance. During Hālau o Kekuhi’s Festival performances, she invited the audience to join in witnessing the continuing stories of Hawai‘i, even if it’s just through tapping their feet along with her drum. “I know hula, when viewed, brings out the primal being in all humans. I see hula having that kind of universal appeal.”

To her students, hula represents a cultural tradition that is important to them. As children, they may have been averse to the idea of learning the Hawaiian language or practicing hula. They might have wanted to surf or swim instead. But now, they are grateful for the chance to invest in their heritage and to continue it with their own lives.

“Pele is still going,” one student says. “She never stopped.”

Eowyn Stewart is a writing intern with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her interests are creative writing, anthropology, and women in their environments.