Hoʻokahe Wai Fellows

 A community of practice for stream educators

Through our core program, we work with nearly 3,000 students per year monitoring 20 sites in our home waters of Pālolo, Mānoa, and Makiki. Each year due to our own calendar capacity and limited bus availability and funds for field trips, there remains many barriers to engaging more students in in connection with these and other streams. To preserve a narrow focus and responsibility for the waters we most immediately belong to, we knew it was time for us to think and grow in ways that would improve equitable access to stream monitoring experiences for students across Oʻahu. In talking with dedicated kiaʻi and friends who are already deeply engaged in community-driven stewardship and restoration practices in and around their streams, we came to realize there is a common desire to better understand ʻoʻopu as messengers or indicators of stream health. The group started to form organically and in recognizing a need to fund the endeavor, our Paʻēpaʻē crew decided to apply for a NOAA BWET grant under the following question, “In what ways can collaborating to develop Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences (MWEEs) not only enhance our capacity to collect scientific data for watershed monitoring and restoration but also strengthen the social bonds within a community of practice?”

Read on to learn more about the members and exciting work of this group!

Stream areas under stewardship by our fellows and their communities

Meet the Fellows!

Aside from their desire to learn new methods for surveying fish populations from Coryʻs decade plus of experience, each of our fellows brings their own brilliance, skills, and rich traditions to offer our community of practice. From fish pond management and commercial farming, to uhau humu pōhaku (dry stack rock weaving), native plant restoration, land history research, and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi terminology that best describes stream work… With these strengths as a foundation for collective learning, we are all supported in seeking a greater understanding of our shared sense of place and collective responsibility to grow as educators so we may in turn grow more students rooted in learning on and from the land.

nānā i ke kumu… Look to the source

The name of this cohort is an excerpt from the phrase, “Hoʻokahe wai, hoʻoulu ʻāina”- when the water flows, the land thrives or more actively stated… LET the water flow, LET the land thrive – practical and metaphoric guidance spoken by the influential kalo farmer and healer, kupuna Harry Kunihi Mitchell to a small group of University of Hawaiʻi students in the 1980s who sought his expertise in their reclamation and restoration of a former terraced loʻi that had tragically become a neighborhood dumping site. The resulting Ka Papa Loʻi o Kānewai has now been stewarded by generations of students, teachers, and community members as a kīpuka— a gathering place, a cultural learning space, an ancestral food hub, and a beacon of possibility for the next generation of young students who seek to heal problems they witness in their watershed. We hope bringing forth Uncle Harry’s words will remind us to look back and follow the lead of stewards and kumu who came before us, in order to ready ourselves to nurture the passions of eager students who may call upon us for guidance.

We can look to the systems and structures of the natural world for evidence of how Uncle Harryʻs words ring true and connect us all— humans, kalo, ʻoʻopu, and the land itself. Each benefits from the open flow of water. Just as our bodies are made healthy by the flow of oxygenated blood through open vessels, streams must remain open and free of barriers or blockages to allow kalo to receive nourishment and ʻoʻopu to maintain passage between the mountain and the ocean. And if we look at water as wisdom, our students deserve to thrive in a steady uninterrupted flow of learning. We ultimately hope the act of taking out invasive species in these surveys removes a biological barrier to ʻoʻopu passage, in the same way we hope the fellows program removes barriers to stream relationships and learning for our students and communities.