Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 3 of 10

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: A challenge I faced was finding a controversy in my area. [My place] didn't have development as a controversy. I picked Makiki Stream because I grew up in Maunalaha (Roundtop Drive)... I picked Maunalaha, but as you don't know where it is, you can see how much of an issue it would be to find specific things on that area. It's right at the first hairpin turn when you're taking the Round Top part, Maunalaha Road is right there. The stream would be on your left. So it was kind of difficult to figure out a controversy, so I went to Candace and we sat down and we talked about what could be the controversies. We figured out that channelization could be one of the controversies that I could focus on in my paper, but it was really hard to find statistics on streams in Hawaiʻi and channelization. A lot of my research is about streams in other states because there is no real stream [data]... My grandma and I used to walk up the Makiki Stream and she used to tell me stories about how her and her sister would go down to the stream and wash their clothes. We live currently on the same land that my great grandma lived on... They would pick fish out of the stream... They would pick taro out of the loʻi patches and she would point out the loʻi patches to me and now they're all dried up. And she would tell me about how the stream was so much higher than it currently was and that made me start to think where did the water go? Why is there no water in the Makiki Stream anymore? Why are all the loʻi patches dry? When I started to do my moʻolelo for my place, I found out that it was Kamehameha I's loʻi patch and he loved the sweet potato from Maunalaha from Roundtop. And he used to have his own sweet potato farm there. Clearly it was a place that would produce a lot of sweet potato, so what happened? Diversion of water, the Board of Water Supply [is what happened]. When I was doing my research, even though they said they had returned all of the water they diverted back to the stream... when I went to do my own huakaʻi... right on the nature conservancy board, which is in the back of Maunalaha Valley, [it] tells that they're still diverting water for the population of Honolulu, which totally goes against the ahupuaʻa system... [Native Hawaiians] believe in making that system so that water would be available to the general public and for the general public's use.