On a Friday morning in late September, the students in Naʻau ʻŌiwi gathered in Māhukona on the North Kohala Coast of Hawai’i Island to build beehive boxes. 

The apiary they are building will produce honey for their secret recipe plans for the statewide Kalo Challenge, which is the culmination of their nine-month program that centers the ancestral practice of cultivating the Hawaiian staple crop kalo (taro), and serves as a competition where they do presentations on their cultural education, as well as present innovative recipes for competition. 

Naʻau ʻŌiwi, which means “native gut,” is in its third year at Kohala High School, as part of the Hawai’i Department of Education’s Alternative Learning Programs, which partners with 33 schools across the islands and trades the conventional classroom for ʻāina (land)-based cultural education, where students can earn the same credits for graduation.

The students of Naʻau ʻŌiwi like to call this AlterNATIVE Learning and follow the ‘ōlelo no’eau, or Hawai’ian proverb “A’ohe pau ka ‘ike ka hālau ho’okahi,” meaning not all knowledge is taught in one school.  

Three years ago, the program started with only two students; now there are 12. They spend each day at a different farm, ranch, or cultural learning program area throughout rural Kohala with various organizations. At each location, they have plots with different varieties of kalo.

The first year, they won with kalo pizza. Last year, they presented them with “kalo-min”—which was a creative take on saimin—a side dish of hō’i’o (fiddle-head fern) salad, and deep-fried panko-breaded kulolo, a kalo-based dessert, that was accompanied by coconut ice cream and a haupia drizzle.

Even more impressive is that through their partnership with Hawai’i Land Trust, they harvested a kiawe tree log at Mãhukona and made stunning trays on which to serve the food, and chopsticks for the judge’s utensils. 

In Māhukona, they built beehives under the tutelage of instructors from Ho’ōla Honey, a Native Hawai’ian-owned beekeeping business and rescue. There, their partner organization is Hawai’i Land Trust (HILT), which recently acquired the coastal lands to protect and conserve the area, that much like the rest of Hawai’i, has deep cultural significance to many generational families, and is also a historic training area for traditional Hawai’ian navigators who traveled by wa’a, or canoe.

According to Keone Emiliano, the land steward and educator for Māhukona with HILT, when the students aren’t building beehive boxes, they have been planting native plants, like the kukui nut tree, along with tending their kalo patch.

“It’s not just about what they tell us to do [with planting], it’s learning about the place, about its history, the people that used to be there, what they did, the way they lived and what they used it for, the tools and canoes, and cultivating the land,” says Alex Faisca, who is in his second year with Naʻau ʻŌiwi.

Faisca adds that his parents say he is very lucky that he and the other students have this program, because they never had anything like it growing up. 

In fact, when their lead teacher Aoloa Patao was growing up, the only thing he learned about being Native Hawai’ian was what he saw in the Adam Sandler film 50 First Dates, and he wouldn’t learn more until college. He then had to learn on his own afterwards. 

Many were in this boat. Due to colonial influences in the late 1800s, Hawai’ian cultural education in public schools was suppressed for many years, until the cultural renaissance of the 1970s, when there was more demand for the reinstitution of this kind of education in schools and colleges. Despite the state’s constitution being amended to mandate it, instruction was limited; however, more initiatives started happening over the years, particularly after the establishment of the Office of Hawai’ian Education in 2015 alongside the development of the Nā Hopena A’o framework. 

Nā Hopena A’o is a department-wide framework to help guide the public education system based on Hawaiian values, culture, history, and language, as well as aiming to develop skills and behaviors that honor the qualities and values of the indigenous language and culture of Hawaiʻi.​ 

Patao is happy to be part of remedying that issue for the students. “It makes me feel good about their potential and the future of our community, and that they are in a better position to know who they are and not have to try to figure it out on their own,” says Patao.

Other partner organizations are the voyaging nonprofit Nā Kālai Wa`a—where the students learn to connect the relationships between traditional sailing and kalo—LT Ranch, which prioritizes cultural learning for Native Hawai’ian youth, and ‘Iole Hawai’i, a new Indigenous learning lab on 2,400 acres, that combines ancient wisdom and modern technology for sustainability solutions. 

“All this stuff, it helps in life. It’s not about what you are doing, but how you are doing it, with patience, perseverance, and problem-solving skills.”

“All this stuff, it helps in life. It’s not about what you are doing, but how you are doing it, with patience, perseverance, and problem-solving skills,” says fellow senior Daylan Kaitoku, adding that it’s almost like a college setting, because he gets to learn about weather stations, pH testers and soil testers. “And on top of that, there’s a cultural aspect to it,” he says. 

Each year, the students have also created an educational component for the area’s elementary kids.

In the first year, the first two students had never heard the origin story of kalo until they were juniors in high school, so to make sure the younger generation didn’t have to go as long as they did to connect to it, they made a children’s book about the backstory, which is the Native Hawai’ian mo`olelo (story) of Hāloa, which involves the birth of the Hawai’ian people and the connection Hawai’ians have to kalo, not just as a food source but as an ancestor. 

They passed the book on to the elementary school children, with the Department of Education backing them by printing 200 copies. The following year, the students developed a card game called Go Kalo, inspired by the classic game Go Fish, featuring all 22 parts of the kalo plant.

“It was a good idea, because instead of just matching the cards [like in Go Fish], you can learn,” says student Ihilani Leong, who did a lot of the design. Each card tells what part it is, its location on the plant, and what it looks like. 

Much like the plans for this year’s Kalo Challenge, what they are doing for the youth is still being formulated. However, out of all the things they are doing with the program, Kaitoku hopes “that the seed that’s planted grows into wisdom, knowledge, and hope for the next generation.”