Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 11, Number 5, 1 May 1994 — E Hōʻihi I Ka Ulu Lāʻau [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

E Hōʻihi I Ka Ulu Lāʻau

Lei-maker Marie McDonald urges respect for the forest

by Deborah L. Ward Moloka' i-born anā raised homesteader Marie McDonald and her husband Bill, a former aircraft meehanie, have lived in Waimea for 21 years. While in their 40s they made the big move from O'ahu to the Big Island in search of a more rural setting to live in and raise their family. She is retired from teaching art and Hawaiian studies at Kohala High School and is currently a member of the Hawaiian Home Lands Trust Claims Review Panel. They live on Hawaiian Home Lands on a 10-acre farm, Honopua, with their daughter Roen and her husband Ken Hufford, and daughter Susan Mill and her children Kaoha and Amy.

How would you describe your operation here? This is a family operated farm. To me this is very mueh like what family would be like in old Hawai'i. We live together, we produce together and we all share in the work and in the fruits of our production. Even with our extended family we share. Ken and Roen grow the vegetables. Susan keeps the books. We have living on this farm three generations. What kind of vegetables do you

grow? We grow several kinds of lettuce and salad vegetables. Things like kale, whieh you see very seldom in markets, even in Honolulu. Yet kale is one of the healthiest vegetables because of ealeium and Vitamin A. We have a lot of different cabbages, eole crops. This area is noted for eole crops. We do arugula, whieh is a salad, radicchio, carrots, beets and radishes. We do Chinese parsley, curly parsley, Italian parsley too.

I have a little taro patch right now for our family use. I grow lehua and 'āpi'i and Pololū in lo'i. It's upland taro. We started out with six huli from my nephew and we got a lot of keiki from there, so we made the patch bigger. Then with the third planting it got a litle bit bigger. We also grow a little bit of sweet potato. The vegetables grown here by my daughter and her husband are organically grown. They don't use any ehemieal pesticides on any of their vegetables. Right now they produce under a stamp of pesticide-free. (In order to carry a label that says organic we have to have a team of agriculturists eome in and examine our operation and then they will give you certificatio%) They've created a big following pf people

who love salads. They're always at the market early to make sure that they get three different kinds of lettuce.

Where do you sell your produce? Besides our individual accounts, we have a farmers' market and we sell a lot of our produce there. The whole reason for starting the farmers' market was to have an outlet for produce for those of us homesteaders who were farming and actually producing. The majority of us also have customers elsewhere. But we felt this was a inueh needed thing for the farmers here, because we kept hearing that the reason a lot of people didn't farm was becāuse they didn't have outlets.

They felt that they couldn't do large-scale farming, forty acres right off the bat, because of the cost of starting up. Even though they wanted to do this, they had problems because they couldn't at the beginning take care of their families, pay the bUls, buy their equipment. If they could have started on a limited basis and have an outlet for whatever they produced ... That's how we were, that's how we started. We were just two guys, husband and wife producing just a little bit. Pretty, soon we got kind of big, though we're really very small compared to farms in this

area. But then we had to hire somebody to help us, to get out our produce. So this market was really a needed thing. Also it meant that we could seU, faim-direct, whieh would brihg down the cost to the

consumer, and we could sell ungraded produce. When you go to a wholesaler, your produce has to be graded and that's a whole new step to grade your produce. That costs money to do that. This would give newcomers a plaee to start and to increase produce and to become a more self-sufficient farmer. What is this farmers' market called and where and when ean people eome? It's called the Waimea Hawaiian Homestead Farmers' Market. We operate on the

grounds of their West Hawai'i office (in Waimea), Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 12 noon. Eaeh of the vendors pays dues towards our rent and insurance. It's been tough to get reasonable insuranee, it's tripled this last year. Anyone ean eome, but vendors are only Hawaiian homesteaders right now. We'd like to keep it like that and even customers want us to keep it like that. It's such a niee project, a plus thing for Hawaiians to see Hawaiians continued next page

"Mahalo no ka maile o Puna," original blockprint by Marie A. McDonald. As in the days of old, today's dancers offer a prayer of thanks before they gather the maile, 'ie'ie and ferns of the upland forest. They promise to take great care while gathering what they know is the kino lau (another form) of their patron. It is one of a series on hula and the lei.

Marie McDonald demonstrates the lei-making art at the 1990 Smithsonian Folklife Festival-Hawai'i, held at Magic lsland. Photos by Deborah Ward

Harvesting lettuce at the family farm in Waimea.

Lei-maker McDonald

from page 1 1 being entrepreneurs and doing well, and serving up some niee produce and other things. We make leis and flower bouquets. We have some people producing coffee from Hāmākua. Some vendors will piek up extra vegetables from other growers, such as seconds from tomatoes. We don't grow tomatoes here. And they'll piek up papayas from a grower and sell it at the market. ... What we sorely miss is taro, any kind. We can't get enough taro, lū'au.

Do you grow flowers for your leimaking? We grow protea and 95 percent of the flowers that we use in our lei-making on this farm. We buy roses and sometimes we need to go piek extra for lehua, but we do have lehua on the farm. We don't have a constant supply of leis. There is a period from Christmas to right after Kamehameha Day when we do lots of leis. We do 'ākulikuli (iee plant) in red, pink and orange, klkā and the lei wih, whieh is all mixed up material whieh comes from the farm. Every week we have to turn out so many leis for Big Island customers, Honolulu too and the Mainland because loeal people want it shipped there. What is your specialty? ls it the akulikuli? My specialty is lei wili, mixed

leis. The 'ākulikuli represents this areā and is known as the Waimea lei. It's not easy to string that lei. I finally mastered that technique, kui poepoe. Now it's only hapa poepoe, half-poe-poe, half-round. It takes a a lot of time to get it down, to stay together. Normally the novice would break flowers. But the skilled lei-maker ean look down the lei and all the flowers are lined up exactly.

How did you learn lei-making? Traditionally. You watch your parents. I watched my mother. When you asked questions it was 'Don't nlele, just watch.' And we watched and that's how we leamed. To me that's a great way of teaching. ... and I think that's the way a lot of our Hawaiian children learn. That's how we learned, we watched, and then we did our own. Then when they were done well, Mama would say, 'Ho, that's u'i.' It was not until after I grew up that I became curious about leis different from the ones we made. Then at the first City and County lei contest I saw all these different leis from the different islands. Now you don't see so many leis from neighbor islands. Yet the means of getting them here is there, it's quicker, its eonvenient, where in the early days you had to put them on the boat. Some of those leis that eame to that contest from Waimea to that

lei contest, whoa, they fascinated me and everybody else that worked at the staging of these exhibits. Then I had to leam how to make leis other ways. When did you begin teaching leimaking? When I was with the City and County of Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation for a number of years, and I became the arts specialist. We taught playground directors how to do it. I really believe it was because of their eagemess to leam how to do those leis and set up classes on the playgrounds, they were the people that got other people interested. Up until that time people were interested in the leis but they never knew how to put them together. Instead of just one person (me) doing it, or Mrs. 'Āina Keawe, who was Hawaiiana specialist, we had 15 or 20 people doing it, so you reached more people. That's when Oahu became noted for lei wili, whieh people incorrectly eall lei haku.

You are knownfor talking about what we ean all do to help take care ofour lei-making resources, particularly the native plants whieh grow in theforests. I'm one of those people who believe we should take greater care in protecting our sources of supply. And by protecting I don't just mean keeping it so we ean

stand back and look at them and not use them. The protection I am for is making sure that we always have materials so we ean always make leis. I think this becomes a responsibility of all of us, not only for leimakers but everybody else in Hawai'i. If you want our artisans to continue to create works of art, and I'm not just talking about leis, I'm talking about our forests for wood, our supply of wonderful woods to work, our supply of hau trees for niee cordage, that kind of stuff, just take care of our source of supply.

The responsibility is not just the people's responsibility, it's also govemment's responsibility. I want to make a point about that. We do have so mueh of our lands in forest reserve. In many parts of the island we are not allowed to piek in the forest reserve. I ean understand that, but I would like to see some of those areas opened up a little more so that they will become places where we ean gather materials, with care. I'd like the responsibility for those areas to become not only the state's responsibility but also the responsibility of the artists who do use those sources, that they take on some of the responsibility to make sure that those areas are used properly. That they're not over-used, or overharvested, or overpicked.

In ancient times Hawaiians designated areas as kapu for a certain amount of time until the chief felt that area was restocked. I don't see why we can't do more of that today. That's the kind of protection that I'm talking about. We save things, allow them to eome back. I feel that we should protect those species that are endangered. But I think we should do more about propagating that material, informing more people that these are endangered and encouraging people to grow more of it (themselves). Maybe they have to regulate it up to a certain

point. But I don't ever want to eome to the point where we are not allowed to take that material and to bring it back to life again where we have plenty of it. What do you think that would mean, if we weren't able to do that? It would "make" (die out). Those plants would die for sure, if we were not allowed to grow them again.

Just recently I did a presentation and one of the women in that group said I shouldn't have praised the leis of native materials, saying, 'People will just tear up the forest looking for these plants and you will be part of the cause for ruining the forest and for these materials diminishing.' I don't think that. I think just the opposite. The more people appreciate these things, find out how beautiful they are and what wonderful things you ean do with them, then they will take care of them. For example, the lehua. At first people would walk by that plant. Now you have people buying that plant to put in their gardens. The same with palai fern. They're looking in the nurseries for a pot of palai. They ean have that material right there available to them. That's what exposure to the material does. It creates an appreciation and a need to take care of it and to use it more wisely, to gather it more wisely, to protect it. They develop a greater respect for those materials.

If you keep it a deep dark secret, it works the other way. It's more positive to make them aware. That's what I mean about propagating it, showing people, teaching people that these are wonderful things and you ean grow them. They ean add beauty to your lives if you have them close at hand. On the cover: Marie McDonald tends her protea bushes at her Waimea farm.

Marie A. McDonald: "The lei survives because we need it, because of what it represents. It says what we want to tell eaeh other, 'We love you and honor you and respect you.'" Photo courtesy Marie A. McDonald