CLEANED_HPR_Wayfinder_Series_Nainoa_Thompson

Hawai'i Public Radio, Wayfinder Series: Nainoa Thompson


May 2010

...navigate solely with your wits and your fellow crew members to maneuver through whatever hardship was thrown in your path, and to be able to pull up an island in the horizon. That's what he's done. And with that, I want to introduce Nainoa Thompson.

Aloha mai kakou, thank you so much for coming.

Well, thank you for Burt for the introduction.

You know, months ago, Burton called up and said I would help out with the presentation. Of course, I just said okay. Sure. What am I going to help? So. But, you know, busy lives. You're not really know what you're supposed to speak about. Until Burt and I met two days ago.

Don't tell him that. I told him that this was all well. --Heck, I told him February.-- He said, yeah. Just talk about how do you wayfind the future of Hawaii. And I said, I can't do that, and I can't — it's too complex and it's not my career. It's society's. But at the same time, I would just say the beginning was presented at.

It's the most important thing that society does. And I would say that based on the fact that this from my lens is that if there is a future destination that's clearly defined, I don't know anything. And I think what scares me the most about Hawaii is that we don't have the same thing. At least I don't know.

Know.

Every generation is obligated to make sure that and has a responsibility to make sure that the generation that follows — their children — will be better than the one that we have. How do we know? How sure are we that we are going in that path? And so.

Tonight I don't have the answers. I feel wholly inadequate, very nervous to give a presentation like this, need to stay close to what I do know. And in the absence of a destination that I would define for a clearly healthy and safe future Hawaii, in the absence of a path that leadership in Hawaii has carved for us to have optimism and confidence in.

All I know is that maybe the only way to see the future is to fold over the past. And.

So let me give you my impression why I'm so concerned.

From my lens, from my family, from my girls. I was born and raised on this land. And over five decades ago. And.

An extraordinary place and a very fun one. When Niu Valley only had ten homes, and I was a child to the world's best parents. And.

I recall going up the valley and the oceans among the bay were my most important classrooms. When my grandfather had called Blue Mountain for the richness of that forest that was intact. And the streams — no matter what, it may seem trivial to you — but finding spring water, any place that we needed to go, and now you can't find it at all, and the erosion and the drying up of the valley. And growing up on the ocean, with being taken to the ocean at a young age and learning the love of fishing in a place where the bay was half their life, even in shadows.

I fished with generations of fishermen who had never knew how to swim, because they needed to catch everything for the community in two feet of water. That's all changed. So I grew up at a time when I was 16, my schooltime ecology was in a class. I assumed that it wasn't necessary. Sustainability wasn't even worth.

Congratulated, with the assumption that it was extraordinary to be able to go to school and go away. But the expectation that you come home, that you'd come home. And.

And that. So you look at that lens and folding over that trend from my lens. Hawaii isn't in decline ecologically, say socially. I would say when I was a kid in third grade, all those friends we get together, we would walk from the valley to the school because it was safe. Today is a conversation that I've had with my neighbors, who I live in Niu.

Is that locked-in doors? I grew up in a family where dogs and cats were members of the family. They don't know how to open and closed doors even though open. And now it's like it's getting less and less, I think, safe. Having said that, you can understand, even though I don't have navigational skills in the future, of why I am absolutely concerned, and that's why I'm honored to be here with you all.

My assumption is to some degree or to.

Because today what's interesting about the conference put on by the state, the vision for 2050, there was 12 high school students that were asked to participate and the single question was asked: how many of you are going to come home after you finish school? And 100% said they're not going to come back.

That's not a statement of our time. I don't know what it is. If we don't have the ability to bring our children home to their homeland, something's terribly wrong. And the reason is interesting: high cost of living, no opportunity. And Hawaii is not a place that's innovative. So what is it? It's a place where I sense that we're just looking at the notion that sustainability is really maximum sustainable yield, that we're going to just push and push and take and take till we get to the edge.

And instead of maximum sustainable yield being something that grows, that grows on, it grows our power and strengthens us, it's a worrisome time. It's a scary time. But what I will present tonight is, and I hope it has some meaning, is my teachers that are great visionaries, those who were confronted with challenges such as the kind we face. And they were successful. You know, it was an extraordinary time for me. In my world it was the 70s — a time of excitement and optimism, a time when what you were seeing was a very important place on earth. It was like the time when the East-West Center was thriving with the notion of the crossroads bridging west and east. At the time when I remember futurists from around the world, international futurists would come here to get together and see the possibilities and the potential for Hawaii to be something extraordinary to the planet.

And it was a time of optimism, a time of hope. And I don't know what happened to that, but they left, and I don't sense that today like I did back in the 70s.

One of the great challenges in hindsight, I would say this, though, is that in the changing Hawaii, things Hawaiian — in its culture and in its language and its history and heritage — was getting to the point of being so much forgotten that it was moving towards the edge of extinction. Because in Hawaii, I just think that back then again, it wasn't valued. Because things Hawaiian, if they were valued, they would have been taught.

1946 language policy removed from the public schools, and from the first five years of commitment of school in 1987 by the Trustees' Order, you would not speak the language. And needs to.

Something needed to save who we are as a distinct people. And again, it wasn't institutions, it wasn't big business. It was single, visionary, powerful individuals and leaders. And.

I was just kind of the right place at the right time. Back in the 70s when innately, instinctually, I wanted to know who I am by knowing where I come from. And in the absence of things I wanted in schools, I had no idea how the Hawaiians got here. I had no idea what our ancestral homeland is. That was absent because we chose to forget to teach it.

But I was lucky. The two things about seeking my heritage and love of the ocean — two things that I was taught by my family as a young child — never really worked together until I did things like paddle club, and we practiced in Maunalua Bay, and we launched our paddling canoes into a canal and we would go to practice and so forth.

But what happened was when I was like a novice paddler, first year, 1974, there was an extraordinary visionary that lived across the canal in an old house from being torn down. He had a.

Powerful dream. He was a very quiet dreamer. He knew of the heritage and the history of the voyages and the navigators and the great privilege. He had his dream, and it was an old one that he had started contemplating in the mid-60s. So it was almost nine years old, and yet he was very quiet about it.

But what he had was these two 22-foot surfing hulls lashed together with 4x4 posts and a hobie cat sailboat. Then he'd come to the club to go get volunteers to paddle him outside the reef among the bay so he could sail. You could do so. He'd come over and I just wanted to learn anything I could about the ocean.

So every time he came out, I'd go. And now Palolo. I was playing on the ocean, catching the wind and having no idea what this symbolized. The dismantling of what historian, arguably by many, in modern times was one of history's great dreamers. He had that canoe and he was testing his dream. And it was a late spring evening he came over to the club and he was recruiting for his dream.

And he went and got — he was hunting down the finest watermen, the best in the ocean. And we had two great ones, the two head coaches — one called off from Kale, and you don't know him, but I would say knowing him, probably the most talented ocean man that we had in Hawaii at the time — and then Billy Mitchell, who was a graduate.

And then I guess I never, ever asked why, but I think because I went so many times. You know, young novice father don't know nothing. He invited me to go over to his house, have dinner in his old beat-up wooden house on the other side of the stream. And, you know, he went inside his house.

And it's those kind of single moments, through connections of things, your whole world changes.

Around the wall, I counted 19 paintings of voyaging canoes around the study. Had no idea what. He had no idea what it symbolized or what it meant to my heritage. And it was that dinner where he starts to talk about this crazy idea: building a voyager, standing, bringing that pride and dignity to the ancestral. And I listened. But it was when I got pulled into his dream that was after dinner, when we went outside in the yard and he took my sight and imagination to these stars, these random dots of light going by my head every single night.

Chaos. And you start to make order on the North Star. He went through the Eastern horizon all the way down to the Southern Cross. And he says, these are the stars that were used to navigate the canoes of our heritage. And it was that single moment that, in hindsight, I looked at — the power of the mental shift that would change everything — and it was like I instinctually knew that I was a part of the foundation of a journey of learning, and that I was going to embark on a journey that would be a place on this earth.

I had the ability, in hindsight, to take all that rage as a native Hawaiian. I'm born on this land, and why do I have to feel second-rate in its place? You could take all that anger and all that rage that comes with that sense of poor self-esteem and put it on the deck and do something positive.

And I knew that I was going to be a part of something extraordinarily special. It changes your way of thinking completely. Pacific Ocean. Largest single feature on planet Earth. One fifth of the total surface of the planet. The Polynesian triangle defined by Hawaii in the north.

And New Zealand in the southwest, and Easter Island in the east. 10,000,000 square miles of ocean. Largest nation on Earth. And even though Polynesia is bigger than three times the size of the continental states, you could fit all those islands into one third of the state of New York. 600 times more water than land, and it was explored and colonized starting 3000 years ago.

So here's a new perception of who we are. Such as: we come from an ancestry that were the greatest explorers of humankind in their time, and it starts to shift everything. From genetic studies now, two independent studies. We know that there are connections between identities halfway across the world. The root language of the people of Madagascar is the same as the one across the Pacific.

In so many ways, they were global. They were. It starts to shift how we see our history, therefore shift how we see ourselves. That's the power of the mentor and the dreamer. From here, we generally know where the migrations came. This trust in archeology, botany, linguistics, overwhelming scientific information, and from all the additions that came out of the West.

Next, the big question Herb was raising by building a new Hokule'a: the question of how did they do it? That simple question — how in the world did they make this exploration? How did they build big, deep-sea voyaging canoes with limited resources on small islands, then sail an ocean with more than 2,500 miles? Next. And they had enough.

How did they know where they were going in just infinite tracts of open ocean? Herb was creating a challenge more than I think anyone currently understood, and the outcomes of that challenge were more than he envisioned. Also, one of the real great challenges is in trying to figure out how they did it. The problem with forgetting — in a culture that kept everything orally — was we didn't have the blueprints.

We didn't know how to train. We didn't know the spiritual protocols. We didn't know how they made the sails. We don't know how they preserved enough food to make the long voyages. We don't know how they trained. We were starting from ground zero because we were willing to forget.

The old slides. The day before she was launched on March 8th, 1975, was sacred and beautiful. I was there. Life-changing. I grew up and I characterize my family as very Hawaiian, but my family — my grandmother, pure Hawaiian — and my father was born in 1924. He was the first generation of maybe 100 that she chose not to teach language, not to teach culture, not to teach protocol.

My grandparents are the most loving grandparents on earth. She did that out of love. Someone suggests that the obvious well, that Hawaiian stuff didn't have value in this world. But in many ways, I think she did that to protect her children because it hurt them. And ultimately that's why I'm saying it was very close to extinction, because that's not the only family.

It was really a crossroads of time in that period. And now all of a sudden you have this symbol: 62 feet long, 24 feet wide, and fully loaded, 24,000 pounds.

Powerful on the beach. And it was the first time I was ever an officer. It's the first time that I saw them do chanting and protocol, only in Hawaiian. It was confusing to all of us and it was all brand new, and this was shifting everything. What Kawika Kapahulehua was doing with his thing, it was bringing talented people from around the state together around something that was special — brilliant people from all over, just to build the engineering and the designing and the calculations, and the cultural specialists that came in and the watermen like Billy Mitchell.

It was just thousands of people coming together around a vision that was supposed to shift and change. And so in many ways, Herb was the architect of change, and he was bringing together a community that could carry it out. Back in 1969, his dream was all of this — and he was the only man known of Polynesian descent that could navigate.

This is six years before Hokule'a was launched.

Herb sent a team of people from Hawaii down to his contacts in Santa Cruz — it was actually Micronesia, prompted by his Polynesian outlets — and sent them to find this man by the name of the last known navigator. He was elderly. The group wanted to talk to him about coming in and navigating. And.

Listening to them, as true elders when pressed, he basically said what you see. The group went on without a commitment. About six months later, Herb received a letter from his granddaughter. He had a small sailing canoe, an old canoe, and one day he got up, said goodbye to his family, went out to sea by himself, and never came back.

And that — I was in awe, and I never met him. But someone that was so committed, knowing the love of the ocean. I've always been inspired by someone that was chosen to be taught the power of navigation, and he chose his life to go to sea the way the navigators would. And that is the true ocean spirit, to me. And the.

But at the same time, the flip side of that inspiration is really the notion of extinction. There are no more.

That was crushing through the.

Functional leadership was considering trying to do it on its own, just in Hawaii. Let's just figure it out on our own. And on this kind of journey of going down — about not knowing how much you don't know. So it's very dangerous. If you're someone who worked by name, like before, it happened to be in one of those leadership debates about how we're going to navigate the Hokule'a home, and lucky Michael said, you know, if you want a navigator, because there's one right down the road, about five miles away. He's living on a ship called Townsend Cromwell, a University research vessel, teaching scientists how to catch tuna with traditional methods.

His name is.

From a tiny island called the.

Extraordinary man. He, at the time in the 70s, was considered one of six of the great masters still left on Earth. And the youngest. Micronesia certainly is not exempt and immune from change from the Western world.

Might do now. But they asked him if he would navigate to Tahiti. Now know that the longest voyage he made was only 400 miles. They asked him to do it — six times the distance — and he's never crossed beneath the southern stars. And yet Mau said yes. Almost as if you do it. And many say that Mau did that because of his courage, and he wanted the challenge.

But I would say, knowing him, I think many of his levels of being a genius — he understood the question really wasn't about finding the island. The question was about helping Native Hawaiians find themselves.

So he said yes. He comes from Satawal, in the Central Carolines, Micronesia. Mile long, half mile wide. The highest point, eight feet above sea level.

The colonizing nations of Spain and Germany and Japan and the US really had no interest — no signal, no military purpose. And so this island stayed intact. 3,000 years of school, or maybe a thousand members, still trading. Next slide. The challenge now: they were going to leave Honolulu off Maui up there and find Tahiti, 2,500 miles away, crossing.

The world's two biggest wind systems. And where they collide in the finest way, they call it the doldrums, the place of the earth called the Golden — an extraordinary journey.

Sail plan. No instruments. A voyage that had not been done in 600 years. To put the challenge in discussion and to really relate it to maybe where we are today. Now this genius knew that something was wrong when they were preparing, and I was there the day they were leaving. May 1st, 1976. Mau brought an interpreter and they could speak through him.

It was two crews: the crew going down to Tahiti and the crew that would come back.

From that. And he got up and he said just a few things. But he said to the crew going down today: you go to sea, and today the ocean becomes your mother. You take care of her, it'll take care of you. And today I become a father. Listen to my words. You see the animals and heed my words.

If you have anything of a problem, if something is wrong on the land today, you leave it on the land. Today you're going to sea as good brothers. Because Mau knew something was wrong. The problem was that crew were good sailors, but they were not necessarily good brothers. Because there were two communities that never found some common ground of vision and values that they would agree upon to put their differences aside.

One community was the science community that was there to research and document the greatness of the great navigators. And rightly so. What an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime voyage that Mau would take them on. And the other was a Hawaiian community that, after decades and centuries — two centuries of seeing things being taken away — felt that this was their heritage and they didn't want that taken away.

There was never the ability, in hindsight looking at this, to get these two communities to figure out what they shared so much of and valued so dearly, to agree on that so they could put the rest aside. And that's what I was saying. The next slide: now 17 people on board, 14 the crew and three National Geographic. Three days out.

Probably about 26,000 pounds. First time in 600 years. Next slide. Make a long story short, that's the arrival. Probably 31 days later.

Extraordinary. It was amazing. It was interesting. You know, I was on the second crew — luckily somehow made the crew coming down. I remember that. We were kind of way in the bushes back there. Overwhelmed. Because they estimated 17,000 people came down. That's one half the population, native people speaking their native language. And these are our kin.

This is our sailing. And to see them and to see through the lens they saw this through — this wasn't just Hawaii. This was definitely their connection because they had maintained the orations. They had maintained their genealogies. They know of the great canoes. They know the great navigators, the saints that they want to be proud of. And in the decades of change and forgetting, it becomes less and less reasonable and more mythical.

So the arrival was both innate and real. The reality of the arrival was very spiritual. And it was giving momentum to their belief of trying to hold on to who they are, in a way in which they can identify themselves and be proud. Because if you can't, it's over. And the next slide. So many people said.

So many children eventually couldn't hold back the enthusiasm. Jump in the back and try the steering.

And we politely guided them off in English so we could take care of our home and get back home. It was overwhelming. It was changing — people coming together. And who does this? One man, one man, bringing talent around the power of a dream.

Most of the success. There were rough times. I would never come here and tell you only one side of the story.

There is a certain code of behavior on the sea that he demands. I never saw him at the. He was taken into hiding.

He was secretly put on a plane and flown to Fiji. He worked a number of ships back to his island. He left us a cassette tape. Eight track. You know, all that. It was a message to us, to the second crew. And I'll tell you this in all respect and great.

Dignity for the first crew who was extraordinary just to make it to Tahiti. To me they were great sailors. They did what they were supposed to do, but they didn't do one thing for him. That's paramount. So the behavior was not acceptable. He goes home. He leaves this cassette tape. And this is what he said. He said.

The second.

The first crew is no good.

But it's not a joke. It's a serious issue. And it's painful to us that we were less than good enough. He said maybe you're no good too. And he said, Kimo, who is living with his wife, said, my clothes are home on my island. Nobody can look for me and never find me. So it was powerful. It was all. I was the youngest and probably the one who held the most fear.

The most feared of all the members of the group.

I needed to go on this canoe and have someone hold my fear. And it had to be leadership that I trusted. And it went home. So being young and not careful about your word.

I started to create a verbal alibi so I could go home and avoid the risk. So I started talking about quitting, but making it not my fault — everybody else's. And one of our elders, Walter Ritte, who came down to fix damage and then sailed the canoe back from that. What is so extraordinary? He was the first of two people that surfed Waimea in modern times — surfed with no scale.

Extraordinary, well-respected elder that I needed to respect. He finds me in the youth hostel. He hears me talking about quitting. Because my shirt pulls tight to the space. Crying. And says, boy, you don't talk about quitting. He says, you get on the canoe, you kick it home. Shoves me away and goes, because it's your time.

I got on. I had no choice. 12, 13 young people just wanted to learn, just wanted to go for it, you know? And I was strengthened by the leadership, brought on professional guidance from guys who could get instruments on top of the sailing. And this part of the journey brought us back home. Next slide. It only took us 23 days. It was an extraordinary trip.

The one issue about this trip: we were never tested. We never got the storm, which would prove to be.

Very powerfully changing. Sometimes we get home. Huge achievement, at least from our perspective. Purpose there. As powerful as Herb's visit, the visionary. His initial vision was only to sail.

Once, making the way back. The problem with that, because that had been down the path of our ancestors, had been there. And knowing that that was our bridge to everything that is Hawaiian, and to our ancestors and to our home and the Pacific. It was going down the road where we find out who we are and we could be proud.

If we're not going to do that, then we become empty again. So we needed to go, but we didn't know how. Not at home. And.

We in hindsight, I would say we had no clear plan. Second voyage. We did not prepare in the way that she deserves. We trained in the way that felt hard, but it's about the challenge that we're at today.

We set off on a second voyage in 1978, on March 16th. Not ready. At sunset. Although come out, thousands of people there.

It was stormy weather.

The ship got off and someone talked to the thousand people and just said, you know.

We're not taking an escort vessel. We only have one form of communications back to land. Old single-sideband radio. We haven't tested it, but it's okay. If you don't hear from us, we'll call you by landline in a month. And.

I don't have to be compromised.

And let go of the essence of what you're responsible for. You left that afternoon in stormy weather, and it turned to gale and was called the channel between the one with the bone — the color of the whiteness of the breaking waves.

That big night it turned to gale and the seas were typically 12 feet. But when they stacked — when the faster, bigger wave gets on top of the slower smaller wave — it can get to 18 feet. And we couldn't keep the water out of the hull. We got caught in one of those stacking waves and the whole layout inside its hydraulic cycle, and we were upside down.

The only thing at sea level was one hull. And you had a crew of 14. And nobody who ever was. And the expectation called it said this.

We were in crisis. Dangerous crisis. And yet again.

In every crisis you have to hold on to hope and optimism to stay strong.

And we had the most extraordinary human being as a crewman.

And I say that because in the short time I knew him, how much everybody loved this quiet man. Powerful. He was considered one who could surf the world's biggest waves internationally, around the world. He was considered the oldest top lifeguard and was the first ever to be stationed at Waimea for women. He went into the waves because of his competence and his desire to help those who find out how unforgiving the ocean is when you're unprepared.

And his name is Eddie.

But his mother wasn't so much even in the ocean. And that was one of — it was more important. It was what was so important about Eddie. Everybody loved him. Crossed racial barriers, crossed geography. It crossed age. Eddie. And how he lived his life was the true hero, especially to children who need to have real heroes, not the fabricated ones that we make up.

If you see he's sitting on his white circle and.

In the yellow channel, about two hours were left. Somebody could do it. He asked the captain, can I put the circle over there? I want to surf through the hull. The captain said okay. But hopefully I went over. There was a leadership choice. You let him go away. You know the bumper sticker said that he would go. That he was compelled to go.

And the obvious would be: you've got 30 other people on this hull that cannot save themselves. I've got to go save them. Every cell in his body was driven by saving those who can't save themselves. But.

More than that.

Two weeks before we left on the voyage, we had one of our medical checkups on the fourth floor, getting our exams to see if we were healthy enough for the voyage. About 89 people. Kind of walking out of the examination room into the elevator. You know how elevators close with that stationary still edge when it closes on the elevator doors. And Eddie was happy — that door with his head.

And I was with him, watching him. He's my hero. He was just in his own world. Silently. Not.

He's the captain. And he's not with me someplace else. He's thinking very deeply. So we get out of the elevator. We're walking in the lobby. He turns and he goes: you know, Nainoa, I need to go down. I need to go down the wake of my ancestors. I need to go pull the Hokule'a out of the sea. We need to bring dignity and honor back to our ancestors and give it to our children.

He didn't go just to save us. He went to save the future of the people. When I say this, he made a promise to his children. And he was there. And he was there to create the tool of healing. He gave everything, all of that. We were rescued — all in the night — pumped out of the sea.

That we searched for. We gave up and couldn't find him.

I've never experienced more pain on earth.

Or trauma in my homeland.

And the moment the beginning is missing. And the moment he gave up.

Sometimes the hurt is equal to the love. And that's true. And you can imagine that that was the most traumatic time that I know. And we were broken.

All the dreams down the road. Your family. Crossed the sea. Seven months in the wake of the south. We split.

We need to be broken in half like lightning. He had the heart of the community saying hopefully it's worth it. Pull it from the water. Put it in a long-distance museum and make sure nobody gets hurt.

In the same way to do that. How many generations need to go by so we can forget? That the legacy of Hokule'a was tragedy. And the most tragic issue of that statement was that it was expected because of Hawaii.

What do you want to put it all together? Go back down the road and run the same with somebody else. We were broken in the.

I did, and being broken, I did what I naturally do when I'm scared. And that is to hide. So I would hide all the pain and the issues and the trauma and the issues of guilt, all that stuff and perhaps great loss. The one that hurt the most — the machine could have failed.

And there was no resolution. I would go in the ocean by myself during the day because that was my best friend. I'd go watch the stars at night on the shore because they would catch.

And we needed new leadership. We needed a new vision. We needed leadership with real courage. And we needed the peace that was missing, that we never did commit to. And that was a commitment to earn the voyage.

And we needed someone that could unite us, that could bring it together. It was about two weeks after we gave up looking for Eddie. I was hiding in my yard at this small.

Of my time, one of the greatest of all navigators came to tell me something about him. To understand why he was my greatest example. Not as a father, but it is not guilt. He was born in Hawaii, who I know from this land. Portland.

With mom and dad taking in children that came out of youth correctional facilities and those that were orphans and didn't have homes. Then what is the measurement of our time? Back then, homelessness didn't exist and children did not go hungry. They didn't need to go to someplace down the road to get food. They were taken in by the nature of our culture from our families.

And so a father of all the youngest of them, mom, and then having all these adopted children — you don't even know the names in the household. He doesn't talk about the time, but I know. Finally it impacted him when his older brother would say, yeah, we come home, and he would say, yeah, we come home. And so many kids ready to eat all the food. And then watch Mom and Dad just drink water together.

But it's better, better to drink the water, let the kids, you know. And.

That time, the poor children deeply impacted him. And the other piece of changing and shifting — the one that set the course of his life. December 7th, 1941. Junior in high school, football game on Maui. Having flown back to war, who was given a machine gun and told to stay on these beaches outside of a position to protect the beach from a Japanese invasion they feared was coming.

Paul said, you need to go and fight for your soil, your land. And his father said, don't come home if you don't bring change. The way everybody knew everybody about them — the population is less than half of what it is now. Too young to get into the military. Here, when he tried to enlist because he knew it was so, I was told by his best friend that he fudged his birth certificate and got help from Washington state, and he enlisted in the Army.

They thought his Native American Indian heritage made him first scout.

Scouts, first in front of the front lines. And he landed in Normandy, D-Day, European invasion. Watched many go down on that beach and fought on. On average for scouts, last about two minutes in battle. But he fought for miles across the fence, loyal Hawaiian soil. And then, in the wintertime, in green fatigues, a German sniper in a tree shot him in the head.

The bullet went through his skull. His temple. Took out that line and came out.

He doesn't talk about that time, but his friend spoke up. He said, yeah, the father — man of great courage. They had piles of the wounded. One pile of those who were less severely wounded, and there'd be one pile that was severely wounded. And they gave limited medical supplies to the ones that had the best chance of surviving.

So the Hawaiian man and another man I never knew.

Carried him out behind the lines. The other man stepped on a land mine and was killed. My dad's body had never been moved. Close to internal organs. And two years crystallized that vision into two things. One was: you come home to your name.

You take care of the children that need it the most — those who serve, who receive the least.

No.

He said his course, his sail plan for service. With school named as the Masters in Social Work and worked tirelessly for the betterment of native Hawaiians through education, social welfare, and help. You make what we have here, you know, just go on the way.

In modern times and see what he's done, what he knew, his course. So he comes and finds me. And we were the poor children, the ones that needed the help the most because we were broken. And he puts his hand on my left shoulder that night, looking at the stars without bolt. Doesn't look in my eyes because he knows those eyes are full of shame, and just says: you know, me and mom have been talking and we know you need to go. So we'll be there.

When you let go the lines and be there when you arrive. And he said, if you don't know how to do this, you get your leadership in one room. Tomorrow I want to meet with you.

The other members in the biomedical building at the university. We all came in and couldn't even talk to each other. My father — the reason why I say he's the greatest. He navigated us. 45 minutes. The mentor shifts all of us.

You want to go to Tahiti?

My dad knew we had to go. The consequence of failure of the crewman was there, in similar numbers to the profit. But he knew we needed to succeed. You want to go to Tahiti? Know the power of vision. Be crystal clear of what your destination looks like and know the road to get there. But most importantly, on that road, know who you serve. The voyage is not about you.

And he said, you as leaders have got to break through and come together. You have to come up with a set of core values that you all believe in that are core to the mission, and don't ever, ever compromise them the way they did before.

And he said.

You need to take that vision and you need to take a set of values and you need to talk to your people. He said, if your community is not with you, you'll do nothing. And he said, take your vision and values and he believes they'll come. But he said, make sure that the community that you define as yours is not defined by the limitations of racial barriers or geographical boundaries.

You talk to people as they are human beings. But they come because they want to learn, come. They want to work, and come. They want to give back. Build your community around those values. So he said, you folks as leaders and you as community must unify. That is the hardest part. You need to earn the journey.

He said 95% of the success of the voyage will not be when you leave and get to Tahiti. It'll be in the training. So don't talk about a departure date. Talk about what it takes for you to do every single step. Map it out so you earn the voyage. And then he said, you articulate and write down all the steps.

You give it to me and I'll hold you to that. And then when your training is called complete, when you have done everything that you can do and you've prepared as well as you possibly can, you've got just one question to answer that you need to answer. Is this ready? And he said, if it is, this is to me interactive. He said then you should go.

That is the power of the love of the father and the son. You go annoyingly up and back, but he has to go.

Because he talked about issues from being in social work. When he was a Salvation Army caseworker, he had a case of a boy called Sam. He was 11 years old. I remember. The same age as me. I come up from school, fooling around in a room, and his window into the kitchen — my mom's in the kitchen.

My dad comes home. He's crying. First time I see my father cry.

Comes in, my mom says: Sam killed himself. To me. I put two young children in close. The man who had been done to.

That is a product of what we're talking about. We taught him that. We taught rage. We taught pain. We taught him to feel less than human. You'll do inhumane things. And his father, in social work, watched millions of dollars go to social welfare and said something about it just ain't enough. And there's something more underlying, more foundational and more grounding. And that is the notion of being — feeling that you are worth it because you have a strong sense of self-worth.

And that comes from culture, that comes from heritage, it comes from who you are. So my dad understood that he had to carry the dignity and identity of culture. But he also said a very interesting thing. He said, but watch out, you're on the razor's edge. As you start to bring your sense of the strength of your identity, make sure that you do it in a way that does not diminish any other culture for doing the same.

Because my father was clear, crystal clear, that any success that we will do as a society has to be in a way that we embrace all. We just cannot embrace a select few. It's not for you or the children not born if it's meaningful. You sail this voyage, you capture the story, and you share it because your story is meant to empower.

My father kept saying, it's not about you, it's about them. And 45 minutes. Meaning nothing. We're engaged. We're talking to each other, hopeful and prepared to train. All I wanted to do is one thing: train. So I walk out the door. My dad pulls me aside. He goes down. I know you want an advocate. Who's your teacher?

You know you don't come from. Remember? Don't come look to your own finding. Well. No choice. You don't come. We don't go. Mau. Micronesia. Found him. Not really. He left behind a small settlement, driftwood, large white sand beach. Of all things, this great man's power is the sense of human compassion. He knew about our story. He was very sad. It was done.

And I simply told my mom, we need you not to fight to heal yourself for us, but help us to find it for ourselves.

Not like this thing. Just debating whether he wants to come back to Hawaii. Because it wasn't a place he wanted to be.

Said. Thank you. Two months later, I come home. No commitment. Come on. I get a phone call from my son. Henry inside then and now. Beach house tomorrow. I was a commercial fisherman. Never washed anything. How? I had any food and lived in a small room down in the place I was renting. So Mau came and he lasted in my house about three days.

He moved in. My mom and dad had his own bedroom. Ate three times a day. He was like.

And then he took all of us. Not just me. All of my children.

Published a window into the powerful magic. Keep in mind, I'm no navigator. I'm a student of him. He is it. And he's the only one you know. In the crisis, there were crucial decisions. One of them was native Hawaiians saying, you know, this is a Hawaiian canoe for Hawaiian hands and Hawaiian eyes only. And, you know, to me, fair.

It's a debate you need to respect because it is the world being taken away.

Learning from Mau. You need to remember: Mau was trained at one year old. He was at sea at age five with his grandfather. You would even get seasick on top of the waves on the voyager, because grandfather placed his hands together with a rope and thrown overboard and dragged along the canoe. You do that over here, you would be in jail. But it's not child abuse.

When a canoe makes you sick, my grandfather put me in the ocean because it's the ocean that makes me sick. So he makes me go inside the wave so that as navigator, I become the wave. So that training we never had, and we didn't have the time to go back to age one. So the question was, should we go back to other sources of learning? And Mau said, for yourself and your best friends.

He was a geologist at the university, was at the Bishop Museum of Natural History, and he took our guys in to see the skies — we could go any time of day, any day. And we did it for 300, 400, and 500 sessions, remapping the open sky with the guidance of Mau. So that whole integration, I would say again in hindsight, of heritage and tradition and culture — the old ways — with science and technology was crucial to success.

Crucial. Not arguable. That's a factor we deal with today. And we trained. We trained 3,000 miles, two and a half years. No departure date. Extraordinary.

The interesting thing about that commitment that my father forced on us: you go from being a crew member, a part of the crew, to being a part of the family. And when your voyage is governed by family values, everyone will be careful. I sailed 900 days. I've never been alone. I've never heard anybody raise their voice because it's about not violating those values.

And then the overlap shifted from voyaging to our school. Our school was our powerful school. It's where we learned strength. We learned courage. We learned leadership. We learned family, we learned values. And we sailed. We sailed out in 1980. That's what we found. It came back, found a powerful voice. Mau on board. Make sure we didn't make big mistakes, but it was led by people from Hawaii.

We needed to do it. He understood. We had to do it for ourselves. You know, my teachers invest in the world, shift the world, change it. Not the big institutions, not government. It's a powerful thing — the power to do. Make my own Mau. Go back home for the voyage. He was packing his bag to go home. And.

That's the first time he went home in 25 months. Because of the greatness of our teachers. What they did was to stay with us for that. Make sure they stay with you the whole time. And Mau had a night when I started the day with my goal: ask him. I want to know: how come you said you didn't want to come back to Hawaii when you came back to teach, and I know it.

And Mau said, yeah. When you came to my commission, I looked at his eyes. I know he's going to go if I don't come take him. He died.

If you're going to look at hope, look at optimism. There are the people in this community that have that vision and have that commitment and that person. We are. We've sailed 34 years now, 126,000 miles. But all in all, in the Pacific on their equal to six times around the planet. Because we know, we know how they teach us, trained us.

The next point we're embarking on is going around the one island that we all share. Nothing on earth will have us heading west, returning in about 3 or 4 years, and we'll keep going.

For about 37 months and $31,000 a month until we're right back home. We have many senses of purpose for why we should do this. It's all geared to making sure that our voyaging family makes a contribution in our time. Only in our time. And they have the time to protect what's special about this place, and we'll do it through education.

I don't want to do anything of significance, but I know I can. I want to do what I can't. I was in the journey of being able to do that.

And I'll be strengthened in the ability to be the best I can be. Many times when you look at our future and why we should never stop trying to look at what it's supposed to be in Hawaii — because you can't get there easily — that's exactly why we should make the attempt. Do what you can't. Next.

One more teacher I'm going to share with you. My best friend I know.

Because I think as we transition from the crisis — the extinction of native Hawaiian culture, and Herb and Mau and the cows and the local leaders and the late Myron Thompson — to lead us to rejuvenate, the renewal, to strengthen the response to the same question: if it's not about the Hawaiian culture, what about the culture of Hawaii? What about the question you raised of wayfinding in the future?

I don't know, but let me tell you a story about him. Born and raised on this land.

Graduated high school from here, became a fighter pilot in Vietnam. Second day, shot down into a stream river and didn't die.

Lieutenant Colonel Lacy Veach, second astronaut from Hawaii to go into space.

Extraordinary man. He was my hero, even though I never met him. 11 years older than me because I was going to elementary school at the time. There is a giant six-foot poster of him floating in space. I asked children: who is this? Their hero. Hawaii's greatest explorer. Correct. And then I was lucky. And we got a chance for me to meet my hero.

It had this 150-year anniversary celebration. Not the way he showed up in 1991. And so they invited all the alumni to get up on stage and say how good they are and how great it is because of the.

Pretty.

But he does the keynote address. So I go to the show and I sneak behind, as you can, but that parking lot is crowded with the wings. I waited in the wings for him to come and sure enough, he shows up in this really, really long white car. Then the doors in five doors and only him get him out in his white tuxedo and his black tie, fighter pilot, type-A, high-powered. And gets up and just say — intense guy — kind of walked right by me.

Wow. These are of my hero. Just shows a video of him in Columbia going around the earth in 90 minutes. Standing ovation.

He probably walked up, right? Finally jumped into the white limo. Off he goes. Never see him again. That was a Friday night. I don't know how you know.

Next morning, a phone call from the Governor's chief of staff in the morning says: Lacy Veach wants to sail with you today. I had no idea how he knew that we were training for a voyage. But I was smart enough to tell him: coming at 9:00, because I knew the crew was coming today.

And the reason why my crew is just my crew. Just average. All told. So I said, guys, just clean up today, put something on your feet, t-shirt, and speak good English.

My hero's coming and the whole world will see what it takes to be respectable. Two-story Lacy shows up. Not in the white limo, but in his mother's old rusty car, and gets out. Four ripped shirts. Nobody.

Gets on. Everybody is so stunned. What do you do? You know what to do? And he starts to run the rail.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for letting me come sail with you today. Today I'll understand the definition and the power of inspiration. And I knew that this would be different. And sure enough, I met the world's most optimistic man. Next slide. By coincidence, just by chance, we were going to be connected on November 5th, 92, one time.

And he's been in Columbia at the same time. So he kind of hatched a plan, sends me to Houston to meet with the education guys, to do a two-way communication with the shuttle and local air, and then send it to Hawaii school kids. The education guy — it's the first time I ever saw Lacy get angry. It's when anybody tells him no. He stands up, pounds the table: because you know what, you guys?

Because you're not going to do it anyway. And the story I was told: he basically commandeered a $60,000 radio out of his spacecraft and some engineer put it in the shuttle. And then we had this old single-sideband radio that we were linking to in Honolulu, and then they were going to set up the Honolulu.

He would send his signal to Pasadena, and then they would telephone the signal over the phone line, making it go to Houston and back. And the power of technology. And what's interesting was we couldn't get hold of one. Similarly, the five-minute window. We're traveling five miles an hour across the ocean, 30 days to get back to my hotel.

He's going five miles a second. Five minutes to see our antennas, and we couldn't get on. We go back to the rotunda. It's a true story. A typhoon in Canada was on the ground. We called them as a backup. And the signal was crystal clear. So we sent it. They mixed it. They brought in 30,000 school kids in Hawaii, and I listened to Lacy ignite imagination, hope, strength, and children and believing, and the ability for the human being to explore for the right reasons. And Lacy goes.

And I got to present to you.

Bring it back to space. That's the item that, you know, was a cockpit window from Columbia. I don't know why, but this is an artifact that was given to him by his grandfather. It came from a place called Palau, arguably the second best known for the green and the glass, and tell of how they shaped and built the technology of its time.

And let's go. And then you've got to imagine again, how do you manifest and get someone to agree to bring up hard, heavy, sharp objects in zero gravity.

But you know, he still the other way to.

It. In the window it says, because Lacy is a dreamer too. He loves this earth. And he says he knows the issues and the problems that we have here, not of institutions. That represents the 500 years. We must understand about the history and the knowledge and the lessons of our ancestors. The cockpit window really represents the power of technology.

And where do we end? He repeated at that point. Lacy always believed two more flights in the shuttle would help teach children to want to learn. And he says, but the main thing is that technology by itself is only a tool. It's who navigates technology and for what reason. So he makes this slide, sends it down, and distances his path and his vision to work toward the future.

But it wasn't enough. Something's still wrong. Next slide.

Every year we would take out our calendar book that covers my life. You scratch out except one day and say, I'll see you here. So where we're at, we just didn't read the stars. And then we would drive up to the Saddle Road and find the blackest spot where the black absorbs light, and we would take bags and food and would spend one night in the lava rock looking at the stars to get close to them.

And that night we had two tasks. One task was to report back on what our dream from the whole last year was. And the whole thing was to come up with what we believe would be the best thing we could do for our children. Take his dream, take mine, put it together and go do it.

And then the other was to go back up there and just talk and to enjoy friendship.

Because you know what? I know you have no idea how strongly beautiful you'll have been supporting. Let it go into this very chronic, painful.

I fought over the fires of Kuwait. I would say I've seen the forests in South America. I was in the nighttime shadow of the earth in the shuttle at night and saw the collection. Knowing the inertial navigation system — these small cities, the fishing boats — it's not going to work. A seventh grader in the city could figure out exponential population growth, figure out human need, figure out consumption, and multiply it against the amount the Earth can give.

And that great astronaut in that great exploration — he went to work. When he went down that path, the world's most optimistic human being went down that path of the math not working out. You find something there and get something physically angry. And then on the second flight in Columbia, he flew with his mission specialist. One would work, and he was the leader.

Sheperd became the commander of the International Space Station. The space station became operational for the first time. They sat with different regiments, so one worked in one seat, and still knew that Hawaii was going to come up in the golden light of shuttle dawn, and he knew how much this place he loved. So Lacy breaks protocol, scrapes himself off the wall, floats into the cockpit window.

He sees Hawaii in the golden dawn of the shuttle. And Lacy tells me in the most quiet, calm voice, just said.

That's the answer. All we need to do is find out how, for all of us, to dwell on these islands. And then we have the most important thing to give to the world. That is a story of peace. And they saw this place as a school and a laboratory of hope. And it takes you back to the 70s when you had that optimism.

That vision became mine. Not just passion, but it becomes a compelling necessity for my life to be real, for me to do something, even if it's just to sail.

You know, if you wanted a really good series about him.

But we lost him.

76 or 96.

Quite well.

I know you have come.

They see a little melanoma that the flight surgeon never picked up. You've got a guy that's millions of dollars put in, this flight and fighter training and more — a national treasure with cancer.

Fighting. He used to go in his house. Somber. Multiple people.

Sad. Makes it not their.

It's like I'm seeing him in a wheelchair, retaining too much fluid to get up. Very sick, but optimistic. Laughing. Yeah. Come on, I'm going to get through this, and then we'll go back and see. He said we're getting out of his house. So because it's too depressing for me, I roll him up to the front door and then he goes: no, no, no, no, I don't want to go in. I want to walk.

I'm a small guy. You.

So I get him up on my shoulder while, and we go outside and walked down the sidewalk. And, you know, Lacy's nearly blind.

You know, the sidewalk to get the grass and then the road, right, going down. And just got past his neighbor's house. And Lacy stepped off the cement, slipped and fell. So I try to catch him. It's like him. And he falls on me, and I could barely breathe and he couldn't stop laughing. He thought it was the funniest thing on earth.

From the ground. Almost all in the road. He's laughing his head off and I'm, like, gasping for air. And then he just stops.

Dead.

Here. I can't hear anything. Finally here, this faint noise of a jet engine, and he listens. This gentleman tells me the make of the engine and the aircraft. Then he goes on, and I don't know what's to.

Grab his hand and know he's going to raise it and put it up to the sky. And in the area he thought that Jupiter was.

He goes: yeah, I can see it. I can see it. And he was so joyous. The problem was I could see.

No matter what, the pressure. You are not in a situation like today to do nothing. Then if you don't understand and don't hope, you don't have the ability to get beyond. See further than you can see. Things that you can't let go. You must. And that's what they see. Things today at the crossroads. Hawaii needs to be way more powerful than it is now.

This is an extraordinary place for us to empower ourselves. He would talk about things like he was well-read. Captain Cook's journals coming through Hawaii: 800,000 Native Hawaiians, 100% sustainable. Nothing was brought in, no massive ships. And the people were strong and intelligent. They were powerful. And yet, today, just 1.3 million, not much more than that.

And 95% of what we consume in fuel is brought in. 90% of what we eat, brought in. And we call this land — I know one of great legs that produced so much food, and yet we're buying it from somebody else, and not for the right reasons, he would say. And he would say the economics of the future need to be about the things that empower the beauty and strength of our islands, not diminish them.

Because in his mind, if economics diminish what we have, when we diminish it away, we have nothing, including the economics. And so we need to shift. And the thing about Lacy that was so extraordinary to me was he knows technology. But he had this instinct, this innate understanding of the human condition. He would say, the thing about Hawaii that's so powerful, that many places do not have, is that it has a native culture that is extraordinarily strong, and it has a memory and a story so important to the future.

And at the same time, we have this extraordinary blend of all cultures across the earth, living in the same place. And in what he said is still a culture that holds all the values that Lacy held. It's so important to why he was. That culture of kindness: stay together. Be good human beings to humankind. And I think he's correct.

Next slide.

First on the slide, I'll leave with you. Thank you for coming on an easy one.

But many times when we try to come together as a society about the things that we can agree on, what are they? Complex and different sets of values. My family knows how intense I can be. But I also can be quiet, and we don't know how to help. So they get worried about me. Weeks after my dad's passing, things aren't getting better, so they call my father's own brother and he comes over, takes me outside and says, I want to talk to you.

And he says, I want to tell you a story of my father. So special. When I go way back, when he was young and he was two years old.

My family back then. Poor family.

Financially. But now, in family matters, we'd have to get together. Apparently when he was three years old, there was a luau at his grandfather and father, his grandmother's house in Kailua. And when you still lived on the land?

What was going on? Somebody figured out that my dad was missing. People going to panic. They go outside. They're running around the windows. Rate is Grenfell. Before it was his grandfather, my great. But my father had this small blanket.

That historical blanket that I was told was a source of warmth and a source of security. It was a place that my father could be safe, and he needed to sleep. And my father knew that it was out by the clothesline, by the pit, in the sand, and went out to get it.

The blanket was not strong enough to pull it down from the clothesline. So he pulled enough down and rolled up in the corner and went to sleep. And everybody's running around. Like he came. He's got a father. Father goes outside, finds him, takes the blanket off the line, rolls him up all in the blanket and carries him into the house and to the living room.

Everybody sees my father, two years old. Everyone is relieved and happy except for Isaac Harbottle, grandfather. In an angry voice, I was told that Isaac Harbottle told all the heads of the family: you bring your whole family in this room. I want to talk to all of you. So they all came in the room. They were.

He was angry and he says, everybody holds my father outside speaking. You see this boy? His voice.

This boy is sacred. And every one of you in this family, from now on, are committed to caring for him.

Greatly appreciated the story. Because you don't understand why my father is the way he is and why these words mean so much. Because he's cared for. If Hawaii is absent a vision that you agree upon, then agree on your children. Because that ain't good enough.

It's over.

And it's not just the issue of caring that, to me, is so critically important for just children. But at the same time, it's when we care for them enough to reshape the new Hawaii. Even new schools — are our schools geared for getting our kids intelligent and educated enough to deal with 21st-century issues? But if we cared for them, when we say we care for children, we ask.

We get around them. But the whole society needs to do it in many ways. I think, for me, that is the most compelling issue of hope that I can think of. So in sharing with you, that's what I want to do.

Do what I can and make sure our children are cared for, in a way in which I would know: if we care for them, and they care for home, and become careful of home, and become that place. That may seem pretty, but with that I know it's late. Too much time.

Thank you for having me here. Thank you for all coming. I don't know if there's any sense to you at all about wayfinding for the future, but I'm honored to be allowed to.