Kevin Fujii’s gorgeous, evocative photo essay in Civil Beat tells it all. The dramatic, successful restoration of the Heʻeia fishpond is complete. What an accomplishment!

That success is also a problem. It’s misleading because the restoration is so compelling that it’s easy to see it as the way cultural change takes place in Hawaiʻi.

It’s not. Heʻeia fishpond is exceptional, an extreme case.

The project had well-defined goals, a clear visible path to get there, and the necessary resources to do it. Restoration with a capital R.

Heʻeia’s twin, Kuapā Pond, an equally historic fishpond in Hawaiʻi Kai, went the other way. It was erased for good. Erasure with a capital E. That’s also not typical.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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It’s important that our eyes don’t glaze over with pride or despair and miss the ways that culture usually changes in Hawaiʻi, which is not the overwhelming positive way Heʻeia fishpond has come back, nor the overwhelmingly destructive way that Kuapā Pond disappeared.

In Hawaiʻi most cultural change is not about the happy drama of restoration or the tragic drama of erasure.

Change takes place by repurposing and reinventing, a little here a little there, where the goals are vague and where modern times and tradition mix in complex ways.

Typically, restoring the old ways are not feasible. Full restoration is impossible. But you want to do something to save it from erasure — keeping something traditional alive through adaptation, making adjustments, necessary compromises, risking loss of authenticity in order to maintain at least some cultural integrity.

Improv, really, rather than master plan. Preservation along with innovation. Modern along with traditional.

So, let’s look at how this kind of change is coming about in Alliance, an historical farm community in New Jersey. Sometimes you learn most about your culture by looking at a place that’s totally different. The comparison highlights things.

Then we’ll consider a developing cultural issue in Honolulu, the new show to replace the old commercial lū‘au in Ko ‘Olina.

Restoring The Heʻeia Fishpond

After many years of work, the ancient wall framing the largest remaining Hawaiian fishpond has been fully restored, thanks to the 2,000 volunteers who worked together on the final push. The project took years, repairing miles of the old still-standing wall, using traditional methods and materials to do it.

“This is more than just building the wall and moving coral,” Paepae O He‘eia, the group in charge of the project, posted.

“With your help, we are closing the final gap in the wall of He‘eia Fishpond, completing the kuapā and forming a full circle, weaving together past and present, ancestors and ‘āina.”

Weaving together the past and present by coming full circle, that’s about as restoratives as it gets. 

Erasing The Fishpond In Hawaiʻi Kai

Like Heʻeia, Kuapā, one the largest fishponds on Oahu, has a long history. There are plenty of photos that show Kuapā history, but they’re not recent like those of Heʻeia. They’re old and relegated to archives. 

It’s hard to photograph what’s no longer there. All that is left on site are a few small pieces of the wall plus a tiny and out of the way sign next to a fire-damaged Vietnamese sandwich shop at the far end of Hawaiʻi Kai Shopping Center. 

The photo on that sign doesn’t even show what the old Kuapā Pond looked like then. It shows what the pond, which is now a wide, dredged expanse of recreational waters, looks like now.

That’s not a symbol. It’s an afterthought.

You want the prime example of urbanization destroying Hawaiian infrastructure? Then Kuapā’s your pond.

Henry Kaiser, who developed Hawaiʻi Kai, did not see Kuapā as something to be maintained but something to be developed and improved and put to better use. That better use was housing.

He had the organization, resources and permission to erase.

Alliance: Reinventing And Repurposing

Alliance Colony was America’s first Jewish farm, started in the early 1880s by a small group of Jewish immigrants who had never farmed before. Traditionally, Jews were not farmers. This group of settlers set out to change that. 

For many years, Alliance flourished. The crops succeeded, so did the community itself, with shops, synagogues and a growing population.

Over time, like small communities and small farms everywhere, it began to diminish and disappear. Crops were no longer planted, the population shrunk. 

Though not erased, Alliance became a shell with some of its markers, like a cemetery and a synagogue, still standing but with fallow lands and almost no permanent residents.

Until Malya and William Levin, a lawyer and an animator, decided to try to bring Alliance back. William‘s great-grandfather had been one of the original settlers.

The Levin’s were confirmed city people with a mission of figuring out how to save a place that was over a hundred miles away. They loved Brooklyn and had no intention of moving. But they scraped together money to buy the 85 acres that was Alliance about 120 miles from the 350-square foot Brooklyn apartment where they live with their four children.

They know that Alliance can never be the same kind of flourishing place it had been.

“We aren’t just trying to save the land,” Mayla Levin said in a story published in Forward, a Jewish news outlet “We are trying to save the story.”

The Levin’s tried all sorts of things, including growing crops. None of them worked until the idea of saving the story took over.

Today Alliance is nothing like the early farm community. It’s now a foothold, a gathering place and living museum — a place to connect with past 

There’s an AirBnB that follows Jewish dietary laws. Families come over for the weekend to celebrate holidays.

Sometimes there are tours, other times lectures, it’s all still pretty ad hoc. But it has become a venue that ignites memory, imagination and connection. 

One observer described Alliance this way: “Continuity in a time and place where nothing stays rooted for long.”

A Lūʻau Replacement In Ko ‘Olina

After 47 years the commercial lūʻau next to the Ko ‘Olina Resorts has closed. It was pretty touristy. The food was Hawaiian and local with an exotic but tourist-palate twist. The hula show was much more the upbeat, crowd-pleasing Tahitian style.

There is a new replacement show in the works, what Ko ‘Olina calls “a major transformation in cultural offerings … a new era for Hawaiian tourism. With an exciting range of cultural programs” with “a deeper focus on native Hawaiian heritage, with new initiatives led by the Native-led organization, Hawaiian Council.”

It’s too soon to know what this will be like, but we can predict a few things.

The show won’t be an unambiguous restoration like Heʻeia. It’s not like kupuna gathered at the homes of their friends or children sharing manaʻo about Hawaiian culture. 

It’s a commercial venture that needs to present cultural heritage, which itself is subject to different meanings, in ways that please the audiences.

It’s entertainment, education, tradition and the transience of modern life all wrapped into an effort to preserve the stories.

If you could be a fly on the wall watching this show develop, you’d learn more about how culture commonly changes in Hawaiʻi than either Heʻeia or Kuapā can possibly teach.