Ka Waihona A Ke Aloha: ka papahana ho'oheno mele: An interactive resource center for the promotion, preservation and perpetuation of mele and mele practitioners

Abstract

Through mele our küpuna were able to express themselves spiritually, physically and emotionally. Mele served as a way to memorialize and preserve the thoughts and feelings of the haku mele and were perpetuated and maintained by the stewardship and performance of the ho'opa'a. Although there were many different kinds of mele, the role they played and the reason why they were composed seemed to be for the sole purpose of transmitting information. As a result, haku mele, mele, and ho'opa'a played an important role in a highly sophisticated oral society. They were, if you will, a "Holy Trinity" of successful orality, separately having their own significances and benefits, however, very much interrelated and depended on one another. With the illegal overthrow of our kingdom in 1893, we lost political control of our home and as result, our küpuna became subjects to a foreign imperialistic authority and were then forced to assimilate into a foreign culture with foreign spiritual beliefs and foreign ways of thinking and doing. This assimilation prompted the near demise of our language and subsequently affected every aspect of our people's well--being. Today in order to contribute to present Hawaiian language revitalization and restoration efforts it is important that attention is given to the importance of mele and those responsible for the composition and performance thereof. For this reason Ka Waihona A Ke Aloha, the Mele Institute of Kawaihuelani was created. Ka Waihona A Ke Aloha was born solely out of the realization that if our generation did not begin to recover old documentations of mele and mele practitioners and put them in a format that would be more accessible for today, we would begin to lose a good amount of cultural knowledge, poetic language usage, native expressions, place names, rain names, and so forth. Furthermore, if we do not create venues through which we are able to document mele and mele practitioners today, we may not have information about their personal stories that highlight our present time for future generations to come.