The following program is sponsored by Ke Kula o Kamehameha, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Hawaiʻi Community Foundation and Hawaiian Native Corporation.

(Instrumental music) Kawika Lauriano: Every time I’m here, you feel something, there’s magic, it’s almost hard to describe, I feel like that’s the kūpuna accepting you, accepting you in a place, you know and that’s the magic of the way I feel it.

Narrator: Before there was a Hawaiʻi – The first families came ashore at what is now known as Kalaeloa in West Oʻahu.

Once rich with an abundance of water and plants, the now barren land is home to a priceless gem.

Kawika Lauriano: A lot of  people don’t know we exist.

Narrator: Kalaeloa Heritage Park — a  living testament of one man’s passion, determination and pure aloha for his people, his community  and future generations.

Uncle Shad  Kane’s legacy ensures that the history and culture of Kalaeloa and beyond live on for  generations.

Kawika Lauriano: This is Uncle.

Everything you see, everything you walk by is something  he shared, something he was involved with.

He was the Kalaeloa Heritage Park.

(Instrumental music) (Oli Palehua written by Kumu John Kaimikaua) Kaulana Palehua i kaʻiu  ʻiu o Kauwena ʻula He wahi ʻihi o na aliʻi a Oʻahu.

ʻO ka paepae a mākou I pilina ai.

Auamo ke aka o Honoʻuliʻuli ma ke kua.

A pae ke kula O Ko Olina A hui pu me na ʻoiwi O Haloa.

Aloha e. Aloha e.

(Instrumental music) Eric Matanane: It's like a village caught back in time.

Kawika Lauriano: You won't see  these sites anywhere on Oʻahu.

Eric Matanane: You have these ancient trails,  they have archeological sinkholes.

It's like  a snapshot of a community that was once here.

Kawika Lauriano: Historically, the carbon date for this area is from the 1300s to the 1400s.

Prior to that, this whole place was underwater.

You're gonna find  shells no matter where you walk.

This one I just believe it to be a conch shell turning to coral.

Then water receded, time goes on,  people inhabited this area.

Through what research,  we believe it to be Tahitians that had the first settlements here, of the people of Oʻahu.

Eric Matanane: Kalaeloa Heritage  Park is significant because the evidence of kanaka in this area, maybe about, in this specific area, about 20,000 Hawaiians that actually lived day to day in this area, yeah.

They traded with the mauka Hawaiians that did kalo and the fishing came out of Kualakaʻi in this area, so there  was a lot of trading going on.

So it's evidence of daily life of Hawaiians being in this area.

Kawika Lauriano:  We had people come from Tahiti, the southern parts, traveling along the Waiʻanae coast, coming into this area, Kualakaʻi, all  the way into Pu‘uloa, Pearl Harbor.

And the one thing to remember  with ʻEwa Moku, when we’re talking historical landscape, all rivers went to Pearl Harbor.

For here, where we're sitting right now,  all the water flowed underground through a series of sinkholes and that’s water coming from the higher elevations to the lower elevations and then they develop their ways of agriculture here.

What you have here is a hale site, yeah.

It’s small.

It's not big because you got to remember this all started with one family.

It's built in what we know as a Tahitian manner of building.

You have upright stones filled with rubble in the  middle.

So that right there is the modern version built in the 2000s replicating the ancient version, yeah.

The ancient trail here shows that evidence of the time of people being here and evolving and adapting to this landscape.

In 1825, they mapped this trail, and that map is called the Malden’s Map of 1825, where there was a house site,  he drew a house site, where there was a trail, he drew a trail and one of those trails is this trail right here, the Kualakaʻi Trail.

This is kind of one of the last pieces of that trail.

This trail went to the ocean line,  which is the name Kualakaʻi, all the way up to Palehua and towards Waipahu and towards Nānākuli.

For the Heritage Park, we feel like this is one of  our important cultural sites for the main reason  of marking that time when people had relationships and working with one another.

Narrator: For generations, these relationships thrived and fresh water shaped the land and life of ʻEwa Moku.

During Hawaiʻi's plantation era, that balance shifted as streams were redirected to irrigate  sugar and pineapple fields, changing the landscape and the communities that depended on it.

Kawika Lauriano: No water,  no people when you're displacing people, they have to get out of this area.

There goes the history.

It was in the 1930s when they built the Barbers Point Naval Air Station and was completed in the 1940s.

Narrator: The military occupation brought major changes to the area, but it also unintentionally helped preserve some of its cultural sites.

The area where Kalaeloa Heritage Park  now sits, once was an ammunition loading zone.

Because of the military’s security restrictions, access to the area was limited, leaving the land largely shielded from outside development.

Eric Matanane: When Barbers Point  stopped being a military base, they had to look at state organizations or other organizations to take  care of the archeological sites that they found in here.

So they went to the Kapolei Hawaiian Civic  Club and in the Kapolei Hawaiian Civic Club was Uncle Shad Kane, so with Uncle Shad Kane, he kind of wanted a group Kapolei of Hawaiian Civic Club members to take a part of his,  take a part and take care of this site because we knew there was a lot of archeological sites  in there and from there, that's what we started.

We started taking care of the park from there.

Kawika Lauriano: He had that  magic and I saw it every time he spoke or engaged or, or did anything with anyone and bottom line, he did it all from his heart.

Uncle was number one, a family man, a hardworking man, a devoted man, and a man that possessed the  mana to gather people and connect to you for you to understand the roots of life, you know.

Eric Matanane: He's like a mentor.

He's like a teacher.

He's like a kahu.

He's the cultural consultant for everybody in the last 20 years that's been doing things in the Kapolei Kalaeloa area.

For an older guy, 20 years older than me, he acted like he was 20 years younger than me with the amount of energy that he did and I'm not even lying.

[Laughs].

Kawika Lauriano: Uncle.

If you, if you were to really go into his life, he did so many  things.

So like this, it's for me.

It's safe to say that this is Uncle.

Everything you see,  everything you walk by is something he shared to someone about, or something he was involved with,  like building or constructing, or like he was the Kalaeloa Heritage Park.