Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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Yes, yes.
And elsewhere, when you walk in the mountain, tiny little shelter caves and you find the
feathers and the bones.
Yes, interesting.
Same way at Hualälai.
Ahh. You know there’s interesting, in the Boundary Commission proceedings and
particularly in these lands…proceedings, that began in 1866 and then through the 1880s,
the native witnesses at that time were describing coming on to the mountain lands to
hunt ‘ua‘u…
Uh-hmm.
To hunt nënë. They would gather pili or sandalwoods like that also, but ‘ua‘u and nënë
were a big thing for them on the mountain lands. And they evidently…you know when
you were walking on the flats you’d mentioned shelters that people would shelter in on
the mountain
Yes.
Did you ever notice areas out on the field sometimes, that may have looked like people
had modified the stone pukas, so that the ‘ua‘u would nest and that they could…
Yes, particularly at Hualälai. And the thing at Hualälai that was interesting, we found not
very many bones, but plenty feathers. And the feathers apparently trapped in the
recesses of the cave and the gravel, the cinder floor you know. You dig down and find
plenty feathers, but not many bones.
Oh.
And Mauna Kea you found plenty bones.
Yes.
Skulls and breast bones. And I think possibly that on the upper Mauna Kea, the adze
makers ate ‘ua‘u, as food, and whereas the Hualälai gang, they are not adze makers. I
think they harvested the ua‘u to carry them to the lower elevations, and why pack the
feathers
Yes. It’s interesting because by and by, Ulalia should share with papa, Tütü Kihe’s
writings. This old man Kihe who lived at Pu‘u Anahulu and he died in 1929. He was a
prolific native writer of the history of these lands. He describes a couple of places on
Hualälai, ‘Ua‘upo‘o‘ole, and there are a couple of other places where the ‘ua‘u hunters
would actually go and they would catch on the mountain. But, just what you say, they
would bring down to the makai lands.
Yes.
Interesting. So, you had an opportunity in this period, when you were walking all over this
land. You folks were still using the water out of Hopukani or Waihükäne like that
Oh yeah, till today, the pipeline remains there. The army increased the pipes. During the
war you know, they had a big army camp.
Yes.
And they had a problem with water, and increased the wooden tanks. Then later on, the
army built a half a million gallon field tank.
The water flow from that Hopukani like that or Kawaihü, is not enough to fill that tank is
it Or is it
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:319