It was a day of sweat and dust and mud. I stood in a line with hundreds of people — most of them strangers — passing buckets of coral rock hand to hand to hand along the water’s edge. From where I was standing I couldn’t see the end of the line; initially I didn’t even know where the coral was headed. But I knew we were each playing our small part in something big, and that was enough to keep me going.
Sometimes that’s just how life is: Working toward a better future takes time and patience and something like faith. The work might take longer than our lifetime. We might not see all the results of our efforts, but our children will, or our grandchildren. And so we keep going.
For my friend Hiʻilei Kawelo, the work has taken half a lifetime, so far. I recently saw her in Heʻeia, at the 800-year-old fishpond where she has led a massive restoration effort for the past 25 years. That day nearly 2,000 volunteers had gathered at the 88-acre pond, one of the largest traditional Hawaiian aquaculture structures in the islands. The coral rock we were moving was filling in a broken segment of the roughly circular wall that encloses the entire pond. Though it once fed thousands of windward Oʻahu residents, Heʻeia Fishpond had been damaged and untended for decades.
Walled coastal fishponds are known as loko iʻa kuapā. Loko means pond, iʻa means fish, and kuapā is seawall. Like many loko iʻa kuapā, Heʻeia Fishpond was once used to grow baby fish, or pua. Through mesh gates called mākāhā, which we also prepared that day by scraping bark from sticks, the juvenile fish swim into the pond, grow fat on phytoplankton, then are too big to swim out.
It had been 30 years since I’d seen Hiʻilei, not since we graduated from the same high school. When we first met we were just little fish ourselves, 11-year-old keiki paddling on the same canoe club team. Together we caught the 85 Express city bus home over the Pali Highway from town to Kailua after school. But after high school we lost track of each other. I moved away to California for college, and Hiʻilei enrolled at UH Mānoa. She focused on zoology and Hawaiian studies, and started visiting Heʻeia Fishpond with one of her classes.
Loko iʻa were once an essential part of the food-production system of the ahupuaʻa, the traditional Hawaiian land division that stretched from mountain to sea. The walled kuapā ponds were the most common form. They were generally built where freshwater streams met the ocean, where the sediment from kalo loʻi, agricultural terraces, washed into the sea, bringing nutrients that encourage algae and plankton to grow. Baby fish congregate there to feed on that algae and plankton.
There were an estimated 488 loko iʻa functioning in the islands at the time of first contact with Westerners in 1778. During the 19th and 20th centuries, most of those fishponds fell into disrepair as foreign diseases tore through native communities, breaking down traditional systems. Hawaiʻi lands were increasingly bought up by foreigners and corporations, streams were diverted for commercial plantations and development, and watersheds were polluted and destroyed by livestock. A traditional subsistence-based lifestyle became untenable for many Hawaiians as a market-based economy took over. Many left their family homesteads and moved to towns and cities to find jobs.
In its heyday, the Heʻeia Fishpond produced an estimated 44,000 pounds of fish every year, enough to help feed a community of around 6,000 people. The ahupuaʻa of Heʻeia was granted to high chief Abner Paki prior to the Mahele of 1848, when many Hawaiʻi lands were split up and eventually sold to non-Hawaiians. The Heʻeia land then passed to his daughter, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and became part of the Bishop Estate, now called Kamehameha Schools. For many years it was leased to Asian families as a commercial fishery, and the surrounding kalo loʻi were planted with rice. Then in 1965 a major flood broke through the fishpond walls.
When Hiʻilei first encountered the Heʻeia Fishpond in the late 1990s, the wall was broken in several places and it was overgrown with mangrove and invasive seaweed. Fish were being commercially farmed in pens, but the pond structure was damaged — it could no longer hold fish. Hiʻilei and a small group started clearing out the mangrove. First they made pukas in the thicket, then they started connecting the dots. Initially they weren’t even thinking they would restore the entire pond, but they kept going. Once the mangrove was under control they started looking into repairing the walls.
“People thought we were crazy,” she said. “There was no manual to tell you how to do it.” They got some guidance from “some OGs from Molokaʻi,” including Uncle Walter Ritte, but Heʻeia was the largest fishpond that anyone had attempted to restore yet, and every fishpond has unique challenges. For example, the available materials are different across the islands, as are the shapes of shorelines and reefs. “You learn by just doing the work,” she said. “Ma ka hana ka ʻike. Through the work is the learning, is the knowing.”
In the early years of restoration, Hiʻilei was also working a day job doing aquaculture at the Oceanic Institute in Waimānalo. She said she learned a lot, but it was aquaculture in tanks and it was “devoid of community,” she said. Working on the Heʻeia Fishpond just felt different. “It was built by the community for the community, for the ahupuaʻa of Heʻeia.”
The initial group of friends formed a nonprofit called Paepae o Heʻeia. They worked for free for several years, doing the work on the side of regular day jobs, then eventually got funding from Kamehameha Schools to continue. For more than two decades, Hiʻilei and her colleagues have been showing up here at the shore in Heʻeia, getting muddy, cutting their knuckles on coral, pulling weeds, doing the work with help from thousands of volunteers and learners — close to 150,000 over the years. By the community, for the community. Someday, Hiʻilei hopes this fishpond will once again be a significant food source for this community.
When I told a friend I was going to volunteer at the Heʻeia Fishpond, he was like Oh, that’s nice. There’s so much nostalgia for the past. That statement gave me pause. In a state where nearly 90% of our food is imported, this is not just about nostalgia, a feel-good project that looks back to history. Hawaiʻi has an immediate need to build food security and sustainability so we can weather changes in climate, global conflicts, economic instability, and whatever else may come. When I mentioned this to Hiʻilei later, she agreed: “It’s learning from the ingenuity of our ancestors to address our current crises.”
Heʻeia Fishpond is part of a growing network of more than 60 traditional loko iʻa currently being restored on all the major Hawaiian Islands. Hiʻilei is involved in that island-wide network, as well, called the Hui Mālama Loko Iʻa. These fishponds practicing traditional Hawaiian aquaculture methods are helping to meet these existential challenges — for all of us. This effort is not just about looking back, it’s also very much about looking forward, toward the future.
Even then, with the wall being completed, Hiʻilei was already looking to the future and what’s next for Heʻeia. “Everyone wants you to be done. But it’s never-ending,” she explained. This is not a static project that is completed and you just walk away. It’s more like a living organism that constantly needs care. There’s invasive seaweed that needs to be cleared, swarms of jellyfish that need to be netted. And because of sea level rise, all of the fishpond walls will eventually need to be built higher.
The stream that connects to the pond, providing the freshwater needed for the brackish mix to grow the phytoplankton that young fish eat, was initially diverted in the 1940s for sugar plantations and other development. It’s still being diverted for homes in windward Oʻahu, to water four golf courses, and for Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kāneʻohe — which is the single largest water user on Oʻahu. “Now we turn to the management of the ecological space,” Hiʻilei said. “How do we even get close to what our kūpuna were able to cultivate from this fishpond if we only have half the freshwater?”
After several hours of pulling weeds in the mud of the kalo loʻi, planting native succulents to help stabilize the shoreline, clearing debris from the ʻauwai that brings in freshwater, and passing buckets of coral rock down the human chain, the last load of coral was packed into the fishpond’s inner wall. For the first time in decades, the 1.3-mile circle was complete. There were shouts of excitement from the volunteers, and traditional mele and oli were performed to mark this monumental feat.
My muscles were sore, my legs and arms splattered with mud. I thought about what Hiʻilei had said: Ma ka hana ka ʻike. Through the work is the learning, is the knowing. Learning with the body is different than learning only with the mind. The knowledge moves through different channels, is imprinted on you in different ways. “How do we teach our people and the next generation of Hawaiʻi residents that Hawaiʻi is unique and the resources are very much finite?” Hiʻilei mused. “You bring them to places like this and they get to experience it firsthand.”
The sun climbed overhead to midday. We sat on the grass and Heʻeia Fishpond fed nearly 2,000 of us — a meal of fish, kalo, cassava and ʻulu, all of it harvested from the pond and the surrounding shoreline. Give to the land and sea and the land and sea give back to you. I sat next to a large extended family from Waimānalo and several canoe clubs and groups from local businesses were clustered around us. Keiki splashed in the mud and people brought meals to elder kūpuna sitting in the shade. That day I felt like a fish that had finally swum home. The circle felt complete.
Learn more about the Heʻeia Fishpond restoration project and volunteer events organized by Paepae o Heʻeia and the all-island fishpond restoration organization Hui Mālama Loko Iʻa. Mahalo to Hiʻilei Kawelo and Amelia Borofsky for showing me the way back home.
