Hui Mo‘olelo & Lahaina

Hui Mo‘olelo is a collaborative program of Maui Public Art Corps, Hale Hōʻikeʻike at the Bailey House/ Maui Historical Society and the County of Maui that cultivates stories celebrating the history, culture and sense of place of unique sites throughout the County of Maui. Its goals are to A) capture an authentic moment of connection through intergenerational stories; B) connect residents & visitors more deeply with accurate accounts of Maui history and culture; and C) help ensure that local narratives and cultural heritage are recorded and passed down to future generations, fostering a sense of identity and belonging.

At each stage of the Hui Mo‘olelo process, the stories take on a new shape; offering various points of connection for community members to engage:

That process begins with a 3-part storytelling workshop (either in-person or virtual) to sequentially lead participants through the purposes of storytelling, the value of the search for knowledge, and encoding that knowledge in moʻolelo. This workshop is the brain child of artist Leilehua Yuen, kumu hula with Hālau Hula LeiManu in Hilo. Leilehua submitted a proposal in response to a 2019 call for public art projects that deeply involved community members in celebrating Wailuku, Maui sense of place. With the intention of in-person "Edutainment" performances for and with Wailuku community members, the project pivoted to a virtual and in-person hybrid offering of workshops due to the COVID-pandemic. Through additional training with StoryCorps DIY and a wide range of storytelling and oral history consultations, our team further developed the Hui Mo‘olelo process. Leilehua's 3-part storytelling workshop has now enjoyed 2021, 2022 and 2023 cohorts, and has been a transformational force in our work. 

As part of the workshop, participants create a short, self-filmed story submission rooted in a special Maui place. These stories are shared with kūpuna (honored elders) selected by cultural advisor Sissy Lake-Farm (kumu hula, Hālau Makana Aloha O Ka Lauaʻe and executive director, Hale Hōʻikeʻike at the Bailey House/ Maui Historical Society); each of which choose one storyteller with whom to participate in a 40-minute audio-recorded conversation. Pairings are given one directive for their recording session: to capture an authentic moment of connection through stories that are embedded in a Maui sense of place. With the permission of each pairing, audio-recorded stories are shared at mauipublicart.org/hui-moolelo for public access, the Maui Historical Society archives for future place-based research, and at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C as part of our participation with StoryCorps.

From here, Maui Public Art Corps distributes a call for artist proposals to interpret these stories as a public artwork in a discipline of the artist's choosing (e.g. song, dance, animation, mural, theatrical performance, etc). Artists are selected by a community panel with criteria aimed at quality, style, experience in creating communal or public art, significance to place and a proven track record of successful collaboration work. To ensure that each resulting artwork is representative of the people, place and story of its assigned install/ performance site, artists each work with community consultants that review their initial public art proposal and add context. Additionally, each work is tied to a unique proverb from Mary Kawena Pukui’s ‘Ōlelo No‘eau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings to ground the work in its assigned place. Through many hands and many voices, the resulting artworks maximize the public’s opportunity to experience, learn and celebrate art of the highest caliber; connect us more deeply to Maui history and culture; and enrich our island home.

For examples of story-based public artwork that we have facilitated, click on any bullet point following "story excerpt" anywhere you see them at mauipublicart.org/hui-moolelo. (Here is one wonderful example). To date, we have produced more than 20 ​Hui Mo‘olelo-inspired public artworks. 

Following the August 2023 wildfires, several groups and individuals reached out to request the Hui Mo‘olelo workshop and story recording process as a way to process the experience. We crafted a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) tutorial featuring links and excerpts from Leilehua's 3-part workshop series for interested community members. Amongst those that chose to participate in this new way, we were delighted to meet Jennifer Freeland, who asked to interview her father Burt. Burt's grandfather built the Pioneer Inn in 1901 in the Lahaina Historic District. We are honored to share their story HERE. 

In November 2023, we produced the Arts & Resilience event on the Great Lawn of the University of Hawaiʻi-Maui College Campus. Offering resource tables by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement’s Kākoʻo Maui Resource Hub, a pop-in artmaking activity with Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center, shared storytelling on stage, a hands-on mural exercise with UH Faculty Michael Takemoto and Marc Antosch, the event's headline feature was a collaborative performance by Adaptations Dance Theater and musician Stephen Henderson inspired by a Hui Mo‘olelo recording with Aunty Sally Ann Delos Reyes of Lahaina. More than 100 community members participated, many leaving with a complex emotion of refuge, sadness, and hope; in catharsis – an emotional cleansing of the soul. (View 6-min documentary HERE). 

As or team continues to brainstorm on ways to expand public access to Hui Mo‘olelo -- irregardless of resulting stories becoming the foundation for public artworks, but rather as its own means of preserving local narratives and communal values connected to place -- we recognize a deepening call to Lahaina. Can this process help to identify specific areas for preservation as Lahaina rebuilds? Is a collection of intergenerational Lahaina stories a feasible objective? Who are the knowledge keepers, and who will support the expression of their memories?  

What we have found for Wailuku, and increasingly for our developing projects with Kahului, Lānaʻi City and Kahoʻolawe, is that this work positions people, places, memories, and history as the drivers, followed by the art (visual, performance, or other) as a catalyst for deeper investigation; working in a cyclical process that emits values and social identity. These offer a sense of place, and help to guide the way we work with each distinct community. 

During a recent brainstorm session with our new Youth Task Force lead, we drew up a plan to collect Lahaina-based recipes as a potential catalyst for Lahaina-based Hui Mo‘olelo participants. 

As we envisioned the epitome of a family recipe -- handwritten on an index card with torn edges and a food stain or ten, our thoughts zipped to the stories that live therein. Where did you cultivate the ingredients? Who taught you to prepare it? On what occasion do you serve it? Whose favorite is it? In the process of creating a public domain resource of Lahaina recipes, we could very well find our next cohort and the kūpuna that need to be asked: what are the people, places and stories that make Lahaina Lahaina? 

Our intention is to follow the breadcrumbs as they reveal themselves, and to be ready to pivot when a new path is ready. 

​To be continued...