To mark Earth Month and also Native Hawaiian Plant Month, we're bringing you another one of our collaborations with the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
We're focusing on our natural world and rare habitats in Hawaiʻi — and some of the people who have cared for them at Haleakalā National Park. UH ethnic studies professor Ty Kāwika Tengan introduces Eric Andersen and Patti Welton. The interviews were conducted in early 2021.
Eric Andersen, born and raised in Waialua, Oʻahu, visited Haleakalā with his family when he was 2 years old and again at 7 and then went there almost every year. He volunteered and then worked in the park from 1985 through 1999, helping to build fences and protect the park’s natural habitats for rare Hawaiian species.
ANDERSEN: I had the opportunity to work in the Kīpahulu district and Kīpahulu Valley. It's a closed scientific research reserve. This is the '80s, the '80s and into the early '90s. To be able to go into those areas and be some of the first modern human beings to be responsible for that area, knowing that, you know, there were places that I would step and there hadn't been anybody else, any other human beings in that area for at least 100 hundred years, if not, if not ever. I don't know Hawaiian habitation of Kīpahulu district or Kīpahulu Valley but it was not very many people. These were pristine rainforests where all of the plants, all of the birds, many of the insects, everything you saw was native to Hawaiʻi — native sometimes specifically to Kīpahulu Valley — found nowhere else on the planet. It made you reflect and think upon your own time, you know, this short time we have on the planet and what effect we might have on the landscape and what we leave for future generations.
Patti Welton was a botanist with Haleakalā National Park. She shares the process for the restoration of the native ecosystem in the Kaupō area of the park and the sense of accomplishment she feels when she now visits this special area that once again has a diversity of native plants.
WELTON: The Kaupō area is one of my favorite places. We did a lot of work in the 1990s restoring the east side of Kaupō where the Kaupō trail goes from Palikū down the gap. We removed just the mat-forming kikuyu grass. We collected seed and we raised aʻaliʻi and māmane and koa in our nursery up at the park and then we planted them, but we found that if we just removed the mat-forming grass, there was so much seed bank in the soil that the natural regeneration in the seed we could restore the area, and then we just collected the rarer plants. We expanded their distribution like the koleas were more in the middle part of the gap and papala-kepaus were in a couple areas, we grew those out, the pouterias, we did a lot of those. And of course, we had to have a maile patch here and there. So, we planted a lot of mailes. So now going in that area, that's one of my favorite achievements. Now we have māmane's, and pilos and even sedges and ferns that are filling in that understory. So that is a really beautiful place.
———
This oral history project is supported by the SHARP initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Council of Learned Societies.
