# data[].attributes.headline
2:30-2:55pm                       View MKP Display & Video in Lobby

# data[].attributes.subject
2:30-2:55pm                       View MKP Display & Video in Lobby

# data[].attributes.headline
Panel Discussion               3:00-4:00pm

# data[].attributes.subject
Panel Discussion               3:00-4:00pm

# data[].attributes.body
Moderator Amy Kalili will speak with ethnographers and scholars: Dr. Larry Kimura, Kepā Maly, and Hālena Kapuni-Reynolds about the impact of Pukui's work on their fields of study. Some themes in this discussion address differences between Hawaiian and Western methods of studying communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Born in Mobile, Alabama, eight-year-old Amy Kalili arrived in Hilo with a southern twang and only a slight understanding of her Hawaiian identity. Who would have known that years later she would be intimately involved in the Hawaiian language movement.
When eight-year-old Amy Kalili and her family moved to Hilo, she had a southern twang and only a faint understanding of her Hawaiian identity. She never would have guessed that several years later she would be intimately involved in the Hawaiian language movement.

Today, Kalili is known for her work with 'Aha Pūnana Leo, a nonprofit, family-based educational organization devoted to revitalization of the Hawaiian language. Most recently, she's recognized for her trailblazing work in bringing Hawaiian language to mainstream television.

While her career has no doubt expanded over the years, her primary goal has remained the same-to promote and encourage the use of 'ōlelo Hawaiʻi. Her undergraduate years at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo helped to lay the framework for her future work in education.

A conversation with her Hawaiian language teacher led to her first job at Hale Kuamo'o Hawaiian Language Center. After graduating with her bachelor of arts and bachelor of business administration from UH Hilo, she went on to work for 'Aha Pūnana Leo.

Kalili later went on to receive her masters of business administration and juris doctor degree through the joint degree program offered by Shidler College of Business and the William S. Richardson School of Law at UH Mānoa. She then returned to ʻAha Pūnana Leo to serve as executive director.

While at 'Aha Pūnana Leo, Kalili was offered a unique opportunity to put Hawaiian language on mainstream television as part of Kamehameha Schools' 2007 Song Contest broadcast on KGMB. Although she had no previous television broadcasting experience, the segments received overwhelmingly positive response.

"I never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing now," says Kalili. "I believe it's the foundation provided because of the work that I've done in and around things 'ōlelo Hawaiʻi and kuana'ike, our perspective-wise as a Hawaiian, that has really opened the doors for me for the things that I am doing career-wise."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UH Hilo alumna Amy Kalili brings Hawaiian language to the forefront - UH Hilo Stories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Born in Mobile, Alabama, eight-year-old Amy Kalili arrived in Hilo with a southern twang and only a slight understanding of her Hawaiian identity. Who would have known that years later she would be intimately involved in the Hawaiian language movement.

# data[].attributes.headline
4:00-4:15                         Break & Exit Library

# data[].attributes.subject
4:00-4:15                         Break & Exit Library

# data[].attributes.body
Bring your pila (ʻukulele, guitar, bass) and your voice as we honor the legacy of Mary Kawena Pukui in song and dance. No experience necessary to join in.

# data[].attributes.body
If you enter from West Lanikaula St. and park near UHH Admin Bldg 335, you can walk down to Mookini. Another option is to enter from W.Kāwili St. entrance and park in the handicap stalls near the UH Bookstore.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kepā and Onaona Maly have worked together on historical and ethnographic studies for more than 45 years.

# data[].attributes.body
Ke Ala a Ka Jeep (Kaliko)

Kaʻū Nui

Kuʻu Tūtū (Bruce)

Kīpūkai

Pua ʻĀhihi

Kalaupapa

Laʻi aloha (Kaʻiuokalani)

Laupāhoehoe Hula

Pua Lili Lehua

Nā Hoa Heʻenalu

Ke Ānuenue

Hanauma

Pōlaʻilaʻi

Mahina ʻo Hōkū

He Aloha Kuʻu Ipo (Bruce)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A 2013 anthropology graduate of UH Hilo now a doctoral candidate at UH Mānoa, Halena Kapuni-Reynolds is a Kanaka 'Ōiwi composer and scholar, born on Hawai'i Island and raised in Keaukaha.
An alumnus of the University of Hawai'i at Hilo is the first appointed Native Hawaiian associate curator for Native Hawaiian history and culture at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. D.C. Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at UH Mānoa, will continue to reside and work from Hawai'i Island.

His supervisor Michelle Delaney, assistant director for history and culture at the Museum of the American Indian, wrote the grant proposal for the nascent Native Hawaiian associate curator position to be community focused and 100 percent remote.

"We are thrilled to have Halena join the [museum] team and welcome the increased emphasis on Native Hawaiian cultural research and programming which will be developed over time," says Delaney.

Kanaka 'Ōiwi scholar

Kapuni-Reynolds is a Kanaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) composer and scholar, born on Hawai'i Island and raised in Keaukaha. A double major, he received bachelor of arts degrees in anthropology and Hawaiian studies from UH Hilo in 2013, and also received the anthropology department's Outstanding Graduating Student Award.

Kapuni-Reynolds received his master of arts in anthropology with a focus on museum and heritage studies from the University of Denver in 2015. His master's thesis, "Curating Ali'i Collections: Responsibility, Sensibility, and Contextualization in Hawai'i-Based Museums," analyzed the ways in which ali'i (Hawaiian high chiefs) collections are cared for and exhibited at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum and the Lyman House Memorial Museum.

"When I was an undergraduate at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, I majored in anthropology and Hawaiian studies, took an array of courses focused on Hawaiian language, community-based archaeology and ethnohistorical research, and participated in numerous internships across East Hawai'i," says Kapuni-Reynolds. "These experiences continue to inform my education at UH Mānoa as an American studies graduate student, where I have taken courses in museum studies, Indigenous studies, diasporic literatures, and U.S. history, culture, and politics."

"I am grateful to the UH faculty and staff members who continue to support my intellectual and personal growth over the past 15 years," he adds.

Following his graduation from UH Hilo, Kapuni-Reynolds served as a graduate assistant for the museum studies graduate certificate program at UH Mānoa, where he worked collaboratively with faculty members to organize conversations and events around museum decolonization and Indigenization.

In 2022, he assisted in the development and implementation of "Weaving a Net(work) of Care: A Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Museum Institute," a museological training program for individuals in Hawai'i and across the Pacific, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Community outreach and programming

Kapuni-Reynolds's new duties at the Smithsonian museum include doing professional curatorial work associated with research, exhibits planning and development, collections review, collections development and information, community outreach, public programming, education and public service functions.

This includes research for the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, specifically how to include participants from Hawai'i to perform and share on the National Mall. He will also be developing new programming for the Smithsonian's museum across the state. A traveling banner show on Hawaiian sovereignty may also be in his future.

In addition to these responsibilities, Kapuni-Reynolds is finishing his dissertation, which tells a decolonial story of the 'āina aloha (beloved lands) of Keaukaha. Delaney said she hopes he will publish it with the Smithsonian museum.

- UH System News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UH Hilo alumnus is first Native Hawaiian associate curator for Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian - UH Hilo Stories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A 2013 graduate of UH Hilo, Halena Kapuni-Reynolds is a Kanaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) composer and scholar, born on Hawai'i Island and raised in Keaukaha.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ka moʻopuna i ke alo, The grandchild in the presence

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Hand written by Mary Kawena Pukui. This is a mele whose melody and lyrics were written by Pukui herself. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Haʻaheo Kaimana Hila I ka hale ipu kukui Kū kilakila a i luna He kiaʻi no ka moana

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Alan D. McNarie
Kaliko Beamer-Trapp sits with two students in a tiny conference room at the offices of Kahuawaiola, the teacher training and certification program for Hawaiian language immersion schools, in a redwood "temporary building" on the University of Hawai'i Hilo Campus. Both Beamer-Trapp and the students are speaking entirely in Hawaiian, punctuated with frequent laughter.

Few people could claim to be more immersed in Hawaiian language and culture than Beamer-Trapp. For six years, he taught anthropology, computer graphic arts, French, Marquesan, and aquaculture-all in the Hawaiian language- at Nāwahīokalani'ōpu'u Hawaiian Language Immersion School in Kea'au. Now, in addition to his work at Kahuawaiola, he works as an instructor in Hawaiian at UH and teaches Hawaiian language online while pursuing a masters' degree in Hawaiian Language and Literature, serving as President of the Mohala Hou Foundation, which works to "promote public understanding and involvement in Hawaiian culture including music, dance, language, material crafts and history" - and he still finds time to perform, occasionally, with other members of the legendary Beamer 'ohana, one of the first families of Hawaiian music and hula. He's also served as a Hawaiian language judge at hula competitions.

Surprisingly, when Beamer-Trapp emerges from his student conference and speaks English with a visitor, he does so with a British accent. He was born on another isle - the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England - and became a hanai (adopted) member of the Beamer family in a special ceremony in Waipi'o Valley in 1996.

"I'm not Hawaiian," says Beamer-Trapp, a slender, relatively young man with close-cropped, dark hair and an infectious smile. "I never will be, and I'm not expecting to be and I don't want people to think I am, but I love Hawaiian language and culture, and I think it's just as valuable, it's just as worthy as any other on Earth today. So it should still have a place in the modern world, and that's what I'm here to do, is to help that happen."

Beamer-Trapp's odyssey halfway around the world began in 1982, when his parents divorced and he accompanied his mother to a new life in California. Many Americans tend to look at Britain and see all the similarities with themselves, but the young Brit found plenty of culture shock: the language, the culture and the school system, in his eyes, were all "very different," and not all the change was to his liking. He made a conscious decision to "retain my Englishness," as he puts it.

"I think that was one of the important realizations that started me on my path to the value of looking at a culture and a language that was particular to a certain people," he says.

In 1985, he joined a troupe called Dances of the Pacific, founded and led by a kumu named Marge Bronson. The troupe performed a variety of music and dance from around the Pacific, including Tahitian, Tongan, Maori and Hawaiian. Performing with the group he first experienced, indirectly, the influence of the late Winona Kapuailohiamanonokalani Desha Beamer, universally known as "Auntie Nona": beloved kumu hula, musician, composer, storyteller, author, teacher and cheery advocate of Hawaiian language and culture.

"In the 40s, she [Bronson] was a student of Auntie Nona Beamer in Hawai'i; therefore, the type of hula she learned was Beamer-style hula, based on the hula style developed and taught by Helen Desha Beamer," relates Kaliko. "Marge subsequently went back home to California and started teaching Beamer-style hula there, which ended up turning into Dances of the Pacific."

In 1989, after Bronson had passed away, Dances of the Pacific invited Auntie Nona to California for a tribute performance to her. It was the first time Kaliko met the beloved matriarch of the Beamer clan in person, and it was an event both would long remember.

"That was when I made my first lei. I found some plumeria somewhere, and I presented it to her onstage," he recalls. Then he went to join the rest of the troupe in their performances.

Auntie Nona would recount what happened next so often that Kaliko can recite her words from memory: "I asked, 'Who is this young haole boy? He's out there singing with the Tahitians, dancing with the Tongans, singing with the Hawaiians. I want to know who he is.'"

"We ended up becoming friends just by chatting," Kaliko recounts. "We stayed in touch by mail. I was trying to write Hawaiian mele, to write Hawaiian poetry and songs."

But his main focus, at that point, was Tongan culture. He was living with a Tongan family and making a living by working alongside them, building rock walls.

"I got an inside view of Polynesian family life - modern life in California, but Tongan nonetheless. The speech, the mannerisms, the food were all Tongan....I was hanging out with these people, eating their food, living in their house, and basically sucking up the Tongan lifestyle,' he remembers. He started to learn the Tongan language, "just by being around these people," and he liked it.

He also performed with the Tongans on cruise ships, which was how he first got to Hawai'i. He scoured Honolulu bookstores for a volume on Tongan grammar and he found none. "When you ask speakers of any language to describe the grammar, you're going to get a blank stare, he remarks. He did, however, find Hawaiian grammar books, which began to lead him in a new direction.

Then, in 1994, "Auntie Nona sent word to her cousin in California to find me and tell me, 'Kaliko, why don't you come to Hawai'i?'" The Beamers requested a $1,000 scholarship from Kamehameha Schools to bring him here to study Hawaiian language and culture, and they got it.

"When I heard that news, I made a plan," he recalls. "I said, 'In two weeks, I'm going to be on a plane with all of my stuff and I'm going to be on my way to Hawai'i.'" He made his deadline, reducing his belongings to eight suitcases and getting them and himself on a plane in May of 1994.

"I kind of came into a black hole, because I didn't know anybody here," he remembers. "I didn't really know where Auntie Nona lived. I didn't know where Pahoa was." He met Kapono Beamer and Uncle Keola Beamer when he came to Kamehameha Schools to collect the scholarship. By chance, he found his way to "a meeting put on by OHA [Office of Hawaiian Affairs] at Kamehameha Schools to discuss with community leaders in the Hawaiian language and culture area, how to perpetuate Hawaiian culture in Hawai'i...I met Kalena Silva, Pila Wilson, Kauanoe Kamana Wilson, Larry Kimura, Kumu John Lake and many others who were very kind to me and invited me to continue my studies. They said to me, 'Why don't you come to Hilo to learn the Hawaiian language?'"

Auntie Nona invited him to live at her house. He found out, finally, where Pahoa was.

"She, I suppose, saw some promise," he says, wonderingly. "Her real life's goal was to help all people who wanted to learn Hawaiian language and culture - to help them to get there, to help them to do so...to perpetuate Hawaiian culture in all its aspects.... She and I went and did lectures, performances and presentations all over the place. We were performing with Keola Beamer and his wife Moana as well."

He realized that through the lectures and performances they were doing, Auntie Nona was teaching him about Hawaiian culture in the traditional Hawaiian style.

"Maka hana ka 'ike," He Says. "You Learn by Doing."

Auntie Nona passed away on April 10, 2008. Since then, Kaliko and the rest of the Beamer 'ohana have devoted themselves to continuing her legacy. The Mohala Hou Foundation that Kaliko heads, for instance, is probably best known for its Aloha Music and Dance Camps in Keauhou, directed by Keola Beamer (Kaliko teaches Hawaiian language and 'ukulele at the camps). [See Ke Ola magazine, September/October, 2011.] But the foundation also runs a number of other programs. It's the Hawai'i affiliate for Guitars in the Classroom, for instance, which brings guitarists to local schools to supplement their often fiscally-beleaguered music curricula. The foundation's Ho'oulu ("to stimulate growth") program focuses on "broad community interaction and bridge-building" through performances and other cultural activities.

And then, of course, there are all of Kaliko's other teaching activities; in addition to his work with the university and Kahuawaiola, he runs an online Hawaiian language classroom called 'Olelo Online ( www.oleloonline.com).

"I love teaching Hawaiian language," he says. "I have lots of great students, and I try to remind myself all the time of what Auntie Nona taught me, especially her teaching techniques - how to show love and aloha as you teach, and how to teach in general.

"She really refined how to teach Hawaiian culture....What Auntie Nona has done for so many people was that she gave so many people encouragement in their desire to learn Hawaiian language and music and culture.

"I'm just another one of those many people. I must give my credit to her." ❖

Contact writer Alan McNarie at amcnarie@yahoo.com.

'Ōlelo Online - Kaliko's online Hawaiian language lessons: www.oleloonline.com

Mohala Hou Foundation: www.mohalahou.org

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kaliko Beamer-Trapp: A British Transplant and his Love Affair with 'Olelo Hawai'i - Ke Ola Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Alan D. McNarie Kaliko Beamer-Trapp sits with two students in a tiny conference room at the offices of Kahuawaiola, the teacher training and certification program for Hawaiian language immersion schools, in a redwood "temporary building" on the University of Hawai'i Hilo Campus. Both Beamer-Trapp and the students are speaking entirely in Hawaiian, punctuated with frequent laughter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hoʻoheno i ka wai o Palahemo Ia wai ʻāwili me ke kai Me ka ua kaulana aʻo Haʻao Hoʻopulu ʻelo i ka ʻili o ka malihini

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
ʻŌlelo Online — Your Online Hawaiian Language Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ʻŌlelo Online, Your Online Hawaiian Language Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Take live and fun Hawaiian language classes via Zoom from Kaliko Beamer-Trapp or learn at your own pace with online content.