Aloha, I’m Kalaʻi Miller.

Welcome to Home is Here.

In this series, we travel across Hawaiʻi to connect with the people, cultures, history and places that make our island home so special.

For our first story, we visit a Kakaʻako shopping center to learn what the Royal Hawaiian Band, acrylic manufacturing, legendary local musician Ohta San, and miniature ʻukulele have in common.

Our story of you know, how KoAloha started making ʻukulele it's kind of interesting or unique in that, dad is actually a musician by trade.

So, you know, he, he went through a bunch of things and, and came full circle and came back to making instruments and you know, back to music.

So, you know, first memories was dad teaching oboe at our house.

And I remember we used to go watch him perform.

He used to play in the Royal Hawaiian band, and then dad decided he didn't want to do music anymore.

And so, the logical choice was, um, he started an acrylic fabrication business out of the garage of our house with no experience.

He stuck with that from about 1981 til 1995.

And in 1995, he got a visit from his old boss, so one of the legendary ʻukulele players Ohta San was what he was known as in Waikīkī.

I was into, well into plexiglass, inventing all these Spam musubi makers, the dish drain, and then one day, my son tells me that we, we have to close and I said, “What do you mean close?

We're busy.” He says, “You don't understand, you know, you don't pay the bills,” and all that.

And so I said, “Oh, wow.” One day, there's a knock on the door.

And then low and behold, it’s my former boss.

I opened the door.

Hey, Herb what's up?

So he comes inside.

And then we talk about old times, you know, the nightclub days, after our talk, I'm escorting him to the door.

And he turns around, he looks at me, his final parting words were, “Yeah, you should make miniature ʻukulele.

You goin’ make plenty money, Bye.” And he just left.

Dad just couldn't shake the thought of, “I need to make an ‘ukulele.” And, you know, no matter what he did, you know, he would try to just not think about it.

He just kept having this recurring thought.

He decided to make a miniature which was fully to scale fully playable, but like this big.

So, it was just under five inches from the top of the headstock to the bottom of the body.

And so, dad started stressing out because he's like, “Well, I already don't know how to make an ‘ukulele.

But I know I need to make this mini one.

But I have no idea where to get the parts to get the tools.” He came into work, he, he you know, just needed a quiet space to think and it was on the weekend.

And as he was kind of thinking and pondering and you know, things, thoughts were stewing in his brain, this guy, out of the blue comes to knock on the door.

And the funny thing is, my dad usually doesn't get the door like ever, he will, he will hide in the shop and ignore that door.

But he decided to answer the door that day.

That guy turned out to be a jewelry manufacturer's rep selling miniature tools to manufacture jewelry parts, which can also be used to make miniature parts for ‘ukulele.

That's how KoAloha started, the miniature teeny tiny ‘ukulele.

And from that mustard seed, if you will, came the regular sized.

You can label it serendipity, you can name it, whatever.

I call it, a miracle.

So, one of the things we're known for is our sound and our sound and playability.

And, you know, a large part of that is due to dad, being a musician.

I knew absolutely nothing, nada, zero, about how to build an ‘ukulele.

So, when he started building ‘ukulele, having no experience was almost an advantage.

He didn't really formally study and the way that he approached it was he actually took some other old ‘ukulele, cut them in half with a bandsaw, looked at them, measured them, figured it out, and almost like reverse engineered it as, as the base tool to how we started.

So, when I asked him, I said, “Hey, Dad, how come?

You know, why didn't you just take a class, it would have been so much easier, you know, they would have taught you not only the process, but the tools that you need, sourcing materials, etc.” And he’s like, “Nah.

you know, if I if I did it that way, I would have been locked into a certain thinking that it has to be done this way.

You know, it's been done this way for this long.

And this is why we do it this way.” And so, he wanted to just figure it out because he wouldn't have been bound by precedent and you know, things that have come before us.

Yeah.

So, I love to invent, too.

So, my goal was in building an ‘ukulele that was equal to the world famous Kamaka Ukulele and I even went as far as saying, “if I can go one up, you know, even better.

I'm going to go for it,” you know?

So, I used all of my background in reed making the oboe reeds you know, to, to play, because that has to do with you can make your own sound, this type of stuff, employed those principles to the internals of the ‘ukulele and all that.

And low and behold, one day I, I was totally satisfied said, “this is the unique KoAloha sound.

And KoAloha is basically famous for its sound, you know, you want to hear it?

Yeah, it's like: It's so cool, because it started with dad, and my brother and I joined him in the beginning.

And it was like the three Okami boys, right?

And, you know, we fought a lot.

And we really, like, fought a lot in the beginning.

And we, we reached this balance between dad, my brother, and I.

And not a lot of families get to work together, and not hate each other, and really enjoy doing what they do.

So, what's really cool is my brother's kids and my son also work here.

And it's what they chose to do, you know, it wasn't, like, forced upon them where, you know, it's like, “you're gonna take over the business!” And from a very early age, we told them, “if you want to do ‘ukulele, you can do ‘ukulele.

You want to be a garbage man, you can be a garbage man.

You want to be a doctor, you can be a doctor, you do what you want to do, right?

Follow your passion in life.” But you know, ultimately, all three decided, hey, we want to come over here and make ‘ukulele, with with you guys so they're young, they're on fire.

They're just, you know, they have this energy of youth that they bring to the company, right?

So yeah, it's just it's such a cool job, you know, other than I love the craft itself, but I get to work with my family.

It's actually made us closer.

And, and oftentimes business when, when business and family intersect it, it can very easily be a formula to either break apart the business or break apart the family.

You know and, and, it's very hard to kind of separate those things.

But for us, you know, we found a formula, a balance that works and yeah it's truly a family business and we love each other.

We love coming in and it's the greatest thing in the world.

Beautiful, huh?

(laughing) If you bumped into Kauwila Mahi on the street you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he is a rapper, an artist, an activist, and a video game designer.

What might surprise you is that he is also the lead student translator and editor for the Hawaiʻi State Archives.

Whether he is writing a song or researching important historical documents, his mission remains the same: to perpetuate Hawaiian culture and to share vital moʻolelo from the past and present.

Life, that's a game of kōnane, māhū wāhine n kāne.

Kūkulu I pale, kaʻi kūkulu i hale Ke kaikoʻo ka moana, Kūnihi ka mauna ʻo ia nō ʻoe ʻo Waiʻaleʻale.

My name is Kauwila Mahi or Daniel Kauwila Mahi.

Most people call me Wilz, or Mahi.

I work at the Hawaiʻi State Archives.

I was raised in Maunalua.

What is now known as Hawaiʻi Kai or Hawayee Kai?

As some people say.

Being raised by my mom, Lenaʻala Mahi, my grandparents Kauwila Mahi who I’m named after and Linda Mahi.

Those days really shaped who I am as a Kanaka.

As a Hawaiian.

There's this Hawaiian language passage from an article in a newspaper.

They say our nation building starts in the home.

And I really think my mom took that to heart when she was raising me Hawaiian language was almost exclusively the language of the home.

Our family wasn't making enough.

So, we were pretty much forced to move.

When my family left Hawaiʻi, I was seven years old.

I literally cried for five hours on the plane ride to California.

I was being isolated from my culture and language that was all I knew.

I didn't know really enough English to have a full conversation.

I couldn't even order like at McDonald's if I wanted to.

When I got to California I got put into like the English second language classes where I had no way to converse with anybody else.

Because nobody else knew Hawaiian in California.

Where I was it was almost all immigrants from other countries.

And I saw myself as an immigrant because I saw myself as a sovereign Hawaiian subject moving to California.

None of us really had enough or good enough English to have English conversation.

So, one of the things that we would do is share music, specifically hip hop music.

What made me come back to Hawaiʻi was actually my mom.

What I had planned on doing was just playing soccer in the community colleges in San Jose, California.

But my mom said, “no.” She said you're going back to school.

The specific kumu I want you to learn from is Kaleikoa Kaʻeo and Kahele Dukelow.

They had just moved to University of Hawaiʻi at Maui College.

And when I first got to Maui, after a month or so, actually right on my birthday, I ended up becoming houseless.

And eventually I was taken in by my hanai family.

And if they hadn't taken me in, I don't think I would be here where I am today, at all.

I work at the Hawaiʻi State Archives as the head student translator and editor.

In that capacity, translate, I edit, and index and prepare documents to be accessible digitally, to the people all around the world.

I've been a researcher at the Hawaiʻi State Archives for about 10 years now.

And I had always had an affinity for wanting to come here.

When I got into my PhD program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

My training under Dr. Noelani Arista and other kumu helped me to be able to translate to the standard of the state, but also to be able to disseminate it in a way that's appropriate for anybody to learn.

The Shark God, the giant fish—oh, that's probably a reference to the Milky Way.

So today, one of the things I'm translating from one language to English, his story is related to Red Hill or Kapūkakī.

Like if you're just reading this passage, you wouldn't know Kaiʻanuilālāwalu is one of the traditional names for the Milky Way.

So, if you don't have these contexts, from reading other stories, translation becomes even harder.

Because like just assuming something means giant fish doesn't really give the context into what it's supposed to mean.

I think of my work here as my way of serving the community of Hawaiʻi at large.

And I want to bridge that grammar, that language, and that lexicon so people can have conversations about ways to make Hawaiʻi better but also to make the world better.

I ka wā ma mua, i ka wā ma hope—the past is in the future, but the future is in the past too.

And so archival materials really adjust and orients me to all the work I do.

The work that I do is art based and story based.

But everything that I attempt to do is because I really believe in public education and guerrilla education and giving access for stories to live on without inaccessibility issues.

And so I do multimedia art, I've designed video games in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.

I've done augmented reality applications.

Iʻve 3d printed.

This is Kūikawalaki‘i.

We're looking at the Kuhuelepo which is the weapon and one of the only clubs that's held by a Kiʻi inside of any moʻolelo or story.

I have worked for multiple universities as a head translator, on projects from Hawaiian language newspapers.

I have an album out called Lehua where I talk about ceremony and how to use chants from ceremony in today's context.

Nalukai, he kau auanei i ka lae aʻa, Nalukai ehuehu kai piʻi aʻama And I would say all my work is influenced by the past, and not just archival materials at the Hawaiʻi State Archives, but archives from my own family, from my own genealogy, from influences, from my mother, who was a Hawaiian sovereignty photographer in the 1990s.

My Tūtū Hine, who was actually my great grandmother, who was a lei maker.

And so what I try to do is take my great grandma's method, which is picking feathers from different places, and from the best birds you can and weaving them together into a lei to make stories accessible and to give them out to the public, and to the people I care about and to the future generations.

My goal has always been actually something from a quote that I'm gonna use, which comes from Tupac Shakur, who is my favorite hip hop artist and rapper and activist and organizer and Black Panther.

He says, “I'm not guaranteeing I'll change the world.

But I guarantee I'll spark the mind that does.” And that's something that I carry with me when I try to serve community.

And in particular, here at the Hawaiʻi State Archives, I know that I can make this information that Hawaiʻi needs to know, accessible, and that is my role as a public servant of the Hawaiʻi State Archives and as a student and a scholar.

And so I want to continue to bring that moʻolelo, to bring the stories of not just the traditions of Hawaiʻi that we think of as isolated in the past, but bring forth these traditions so that we can know exactly what we need to do to create a better future.

Creating a community where people and wildlife coexist.

That’s the vision for a first of its kind facility that exclusively cares for injured native bird and bat populations.

Located on the northern tip of Hawaiʻi Island, this rehabilitation center nurses our winged neighbors back to health, with the hope of helping each species survive.

Good afternoon thank you for calling Hawaiʻi Wildlife Center.

We get hundreds of calls, seven days a week for wildlife in need.

We’re going to leave her covered up except for the right wing.

We’re doing physical therapy on this bird to stretch that area so it doesn’t contract as it heals.

The Hawaiʻi Wildlife Center is a rehabilitation hospital for our native wildlife in Hawaiʻi, and also an emergency response facility for, for larger events like oil spills.

So we treat over 70 plus species and subspecies of native birds.

And our only land mammal, which is the ʻōpeʻapeʻa, the Hawaiian hoary bat.

I graduated high school on Oʻahu and I knew I had a passion for wildlife.

And I ended up doing several oil spill responses here in Hawaiʻi.

And I was surprised that we didn't have a wildlife rehabilitation center.

So it really handicapped our ability to properly respond.

It became my mission to help develop this resource and get it built so that we are able to do both the day to day response to our threatened and endangered species, getting them back out into the wild, and also be available for those larger events.

The work that we do here at the Hawaiʻi Wildlife Center involves primarily rehabilitation of native and endangered species, but it does branch out to more than that.

We provide care to the individual animals that need medical attention, physical therapy.

But by doing so, we involve the community, both the local community and the international community about the work that we do, the species that we work on, and at the same time, letting them know, essentially, their stories.

We are taking care of an individual, but this species is going through these difficulties in the wild habitat loss, climate change, etc.

So it involves the community by educating them what the plight of the species is.

Our wildlife hospital here takes in a variety of cases for care, we get orphaned birds like the manu o kū, the white terns that need to be raised and released.

We have some wedge-tailed shearwaters chicks that are the same.

So for the baby wedge-tailed shearwaters, we feed them fish slurry.

And the way we do that is we put a tube that goes straight into their stomach and we bypass their crop.

It's similar to how they are fed in the wild and that their parents will fill their crop and feed them digestive fish.

But, we don't want them to become accustomed to us.

So when we pick them up, we try to cover their face, and have them not associate our hands with food.

Because of that, it can be alarming to the bird, when they're handled, they don't want to be picked up.

And so a lot of times, they'll start a defensive cry.

(nats birds crying) Which is normal and good behavior, because we don't want them to associate us as like friends or family, anything like that.

So we don't treat them like pets.

We don't talk to them, we don't baby them.

We strictly go in there and do as little that we can with them, just get them fed in out and done.

The other birds we get are usually a human caused injuries.

Whether it's impact with cars, buildings, barbed wire fences.

So she has spinal trauma of some sort.

She ran into a window in Waimea.

She was found on the ground and she couldn't walk or fly.

When we got her she wasn't able to stand or anything she was actually laying on her side.

So right now this is kind of like a reflex test that we're doing.

And it's kind of a natural thing that animals will do when you drag their limb against the edge of the table, they'll naturally want to bring it up and put it down.

So we're just trying to encourage her to do that reflex and get those feet down properly.

And you can see like her, her talons and her toes are pretty balled up.

So we want her to extend them out onto the table flat.

We're trying to give her the natural motion of walking in a more upright position.

Occasionally there are malicious incidents.

We got a report about a downed hawk.

He had a wing injury.

It appears from the x-rays that the wrist is shattered.

From what I can take from the x-ray, it looks like he’s been shot, unfortunately.

I think one of our biggest challenges is that because we're on Hawaiʻi Island, the majority of people don't know about us, they don't see us.

And so I think that's our biggest challenge is getting the word out that this resource exists.

We run with a small team.

Now there are six of us now.

So we rely on volunteers and interns and the general public for the vast majority of what we do.

She’s right here.

Okay.

I've been fortunate with the staff they are as passionate as I am about native wildlife and they're such a joy to work with and their enthusiasm keeps me motivated.

One of the fun things we do is our social media.

We have daily posts and their daily snippets of what it's like to be around our native species, some of their personality traits, some of their beauties, some of the cases that we get.

And it's, it's usually upbeat and fun.

You won't be disappointed, it'll be something to look forward to.

One of the things that I enjoy about the work that I do here is when I am able to successfully help a patient out medically without causing suffering to the animal and then have it be released at the end.

You know, for us, working with wild animals, it's, it’s different than people who work with domestic animals, you know, you have dogs, cats, they, they, they wag their tails, they lick you they purr.

With with wildlife, they're not real happy to be in captivity, this is foreign to them.

Our biggest day, and our happiest days when we get to release them back into the wild and, and they tend to take off and leave with without looking back and saying thank you.

But that's our happiest moment.

This is a wedge-tailed shearwater or ʻuaʻu kani.

The bird came down, probably distracted by artificial lighting.

There was a little bit of blood at the vet’s office on Oʻahu coming from her nose.

We just made sure her blood values were good her weight was okay and did our physical to make sure that you know, she looked fine.

It's a little nerve racking as well, since they've been in care for a while, we really like to make sure that they're 100-percent ready to go before we even try.

On the days where we get to release birds, it feels really special because you get to see all of the hard work of rehab and watch them fly away strong when they might not have made it otherwise.

So that's really, really rewarding to see.

I never knew we would we would have this many patients because we we have so many endangered species.

So we're really looking forward to expanding.

The biggest hope for us at the Hawaiʻi Wildlife Center is that we can help develop that appreciation of native wildlife and why the biodiversity is so important, not only to Hawaiʻi, but to the world.

Having a diverse amount of species in an area enhances all of our lives, the stronger our environment is by the the amount of biodiversity we have.

And so losing a species forever, is a huge loss and it can't be replaced.

So we always hope that the exposure to the native wildlife we have will build that appreciation and teach us how to be better neighbors with wildlife.

Thank you for joining us.

Find bonus features from this episode at pbshawaii.org.

For Home is Here, I’m Kalaʻi Miller, a hui hou.

And another invention that I did was ah, it’s called a tube press and it was sold in Longs.

It’s two little bars with rubberbands on each side, black.

And you put it on your toothpaste and you squeeze it up.

If people aren’t uncomfortable, then there isn’t enough space for change or for growth.

Having Hawaiʻi as the extinction capital of the world is, is something we want to see reversed.