Year One, 2005. The first Lei Day festival we held was in 2005 at the Wailoa Art Center, and instigated by Nona Beamer, who was mentoring me at the time. We had been talking about how the specialized terms in cultural arts were disappearing. For instance, of the kinds of lei you can wear on your head, “lei po`o” would be the general term. Then you have lei wili, lei wili poepoe, lei haku, lei hulu, lei hilo, lei hili, lei kui, and others, any of which can be worn as a lei po`o. On your hat, you generally wear a lei pāpale, and then you can be more descriptive with other terms. But today, the average person will just say, “Oh, what a nice haku,” no matter what the person is wearing on the po`o or on the pāpale. And that really does not mean much. It’s just saying, “Oh, what a nice arrangement,” or “Oh, what a nice braid.”
Many of the traditional lei styles are disappearing. When we lose the words that describe things, we lose the ability to talk about them in detail. When we lose the ability to talk about them, we lose the ability to think about them. When we lose the ability to think about them, then they are gone. If you want to destroy a culture, you take away the language.
Culture is encoded in the language. Every language is a code for a unique way of looking at the world. Every time we lose a language, we lose a window on the world. It’s like living in a house with the windows, one by one, being painted black. Eventually there will be no light. Globally, languages are dying at the rate of about one every 2 weeks.
Fortunately, Hawaiian is no longer in danger of dying. But it is crippled. We want to help it heal. There is also a tendency to think of the lei as only some flowers on a string, or bound to a cord. We felt there was a need to educate people in the broader meanings of the lei as a cultural metaphor. So, Aunty Nona decided that we needed to create an event to provide education in this area. She also felt that I was not getting sufficient recognition as a visual artist. So she approached Cody King, who manages the Wailoa Art Center.
It just happened that the artist for the Fountain Gallery April show was not able to do the show, so there was this opening – just the right size to do a one-woman show, “He Mo`olelo o nā Lei,” in which I used a variety of media to explore the cultural concepts represented in the art of the lei. The show ran through the month of April, and closed on May 1 with a Lei Day festival hosted by Aunty Nona. Keoki Kahumoku was our headliner, and Mo`ikeha Yates brought her hālau’s keiki dancers to perform.
~Leilehua Yuen
