Lehuauakea, kapa maker and cultural practitioner, finds community in both the Northwest and Hawai'i
This is the first installation in a series of profiles and Q&As with Indigenous artists with roots in, or connections to, the Pacific Northwest.
Born in Portland and raised on their ancestral homelands of P ā pa ʻ ikou on Moku O Keawe (the Big Island of Hawai'i), Lehuauakea is a mixed Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) interdisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner.
Lehuauakea has roots in two very different places — Hawai’i and Portland.
Their work will be on display at the Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum in Eugene, in April 2023.
A graduate of Pacific Northwest College of Art, Lehuauakea, who is m ā h ū wahine (a third gender expression that has a spiritual and cultural significance to Kanaka Maoli people) explores their Indigenous background, identity, culture and connection to place through their art.
Street Roots sat down with Lehuauakea to discuss their art practice.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Henshaw: How would you describe yourself?
Lehuauakea: As a kapa maker, I am part of the next generation of bark cloth makers for my people. Kapa, the traditional bark cloth that we make, is used for clothing, for bedding, ceremony, for birthing babies and for burying our deceased — so it's really something that is just part of our everyday lives. Part of the work that I do is really focused on bringing that back into practice, not just in an art sense, but in a utilitarian, every day around-the-home kind of sense.
I was born in Portland, which is where my parents met, but I was raised back home on my ancestral homeland on the Big Island of Hawai'i, which is where most of my lineage comes from, on the eastern side of the island.
Henshaw: How did you get started in your kapa practice?
Lehuauakea: When I was a kid, I went to this school in Hawai’i that's just for Native Hawaiian use. It's called Kamehameha School, and it was founded by the last in the line of the Kamehameha rule, so one of our royals. In her will and estate, she wanted to set up a school for Native Hawaiian children because she recognized the challenges that our people were facing due to colonization. Our people were dying off in large numbers and facing a lot of political and financial challenges with assimilation, and so she wanted to set the school up.
So that was in 1887; it's still going. When I was there, we learned a lot about our histories, our culture. Part of that was learning about our practices, our material culture, and including kapa and the patterns that we would use to tell stories.
But when I was just starting high school, my parents moved my family back up to the West Coast, to Beaverton … and I lost touch with a lot of my own identity (and) my own cultural background. There's already a lot of pressure being a teenager and growing up and trying to figure all that out. But adding on cultural assimilation and feeling so out of place in a primarily white suburb — it was difficult to say the least.
I carried a lot of that with me when I went to college. In art school, I was focusing more on a standard kind of Western painting and drawing route, and it didn't include much about my history. I didn't do any traditional practices within my art, and it wasn't until my junior and senior year at (Pacific Northwest College of Art) when I kind of remembered what I've learned as a kid, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that's what I need to bring into practice to fill this void.’
So I started making the tools that we would use to print patterns on a finished piece of kapa cloth, and after I did my senior thesis project, which was this huge installation with a bunch of different carved wooden tools that I made, I realized I needed a teacher to teach me how to make the cloth itself.
It kind of opened up this whole door, I realized there was so much more work that I needed to do. It just so happened a few months before I graduated, my grandma, back on the Big Island, she ran into a person named Wesley Sen. Today, he is one of the most well known kapa makers back home. He is considered to be a master practitioner of his work, even though he would never claim that title. But this is the same person that my grandma used to babysit as a teenager about 60 years ago, and she told him what I was doing. He said, “Well, whenever Lehua’s ready to learn, have Lehua contact me and we'll start.”
A few months later, I was able to go back home and start learning with him. And out of serendipity — I don't really think there's any coincidence — but he just kind of appeared when I was ready. And we started the journey together, and so we remained connected. He teaches me whenever I am able to go back home, which has been a bit difficult with COVID, but I've continued to learn on my own up here on the continent.
There's a lot of work to do and a lot to learn, but I'm very blessed with the teachers and practitioners that are carrying on this work already so that people like me can continue learning.
Henshaw: What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of your work?
Lehuauakea: Probably keeping up with or trying to balance what I want to do personally as an artist, versus what other people perceive me to be and want from me. I think that might be the case for a lot of artists, as well — kind of trying to navigate and negotiate a balance between what others are expecting of you, or think that you should be, or things that you should be producing or what aesthetic that you should be going for, versus what you feel is truly, authentically you. And sometimes those things don't very much align.
With me personally, I've been blessed with so many wonderful connections and experiences and spaces that have been overwhelmingly inviting and open-minded in terms of what my creative output might look like.
Because my practice is very varied, my main focus is practitioner work; so the kapa making, the tools making associated with that. But, I also do large-scale installations like for Facebook, or illustration work, and woven, wearable textiles, and even just conventional painting on panels. So there's so many different shapes and forms on my work. Sometimes people don't understand the purposes, why there's so many different forms. So I think navigating that and trying to see the value in all these different ways of expression, while also trying to communicate that value to other folks can be a bit of a challenge for me.
Henshaw: What would you find to be some of the most rewarding aspects of your practice?
Lehuauakea: Hands down, that would be the support that my community in the Pacific Northwest and especially our youth feel when they see themselves represented in such a positive light. I'm seeing that come through via an expressive, creative modality, I think.
Growing up as a teenager here in the Northwest, it was visibly not light, visibly, you know, something, something else. Feeling displaced was huge, and I didn't really realize how important it would be for me to have a role model until I was in the position to be that for someone else.
In the last couple of years, I've been dancing with Hula Halau, a hula school based out of Hillsboro, and most of the kids there, and the community associated with that school, we're all either part Hawaiian, or have ties to the islands as well. But a lot of them haven't been (to Hawai’i).
There's a lot of reasons why we're displaced from our own homelands, and a lot of kids have not ever had a chance to go back and learn, and be there in person and feel the land beneath their feet. When they see that there's someone who's a younger generation — someone my age, who has similar experience to them, who looks like them — doing this kind of work and sharing our stories with a wider audience, I think it empowers them to be themselves and to be proud of their heritage, to be proud of who they are, even though we might be a minority, even though we might not necessarily fit into the boxes that other faces and people might try to put us in.
My hula teacher, she was brought to tears when she saw my last few shows in Portland because she was just so moved that this kind of platform existed for me, but also to be shared with our younger kids. And that's, I think, the most meaningful thing for me, just to be able to have that kind of positive impact, because I didn't really have that when I was a teenager.
Henshaw: What are some of your biggest inspirations?
Lehuauakea: First and foremost, like definitely all of the surviving samples of kapa and tools that we have access to. A lot of them are in museums around the world, but they've been documented through various forms. So you have images of some, drawings of some and descriptions of some of the patterns. That's been just an amazing resource to learn from because that's how our practitioners back in the (1970s) were able to revive this nearly lost art form and without that, I wouldn't be where I am today.
But also, I'm incredibly inspired by all of the other barkcloth practitioners throughout the Pacific that are doing their part to revive their people's bark cloth practices. Namely, most of my connections are back home in Hawai’i and down in Aotearoa, which is New Zealand. We're all connected because we work with the same fibers, but we all have different ways of processing the cloth and different sensibilities being contemporary peoples respective of our own island nations. And so I think that's really beautiful, because we get to share our own stories through our own kind of visual sensibilities.
These things also speak to what our own people cherish, that goes back thousands of years, and we've always been voyaging people across the Pacific, the transfer of knowledge and sharing practices is something that has largely been uninterrupted for millennia, and to be able to continue that even through new ways like Instagram and the internet — that's just new ways of sharing, right? And so that's been really helpful inspirationally, and also just encouraging me to continue doing what I'm doing, because I know I'm not alone. The work that we're all doing is collectively important to our communities.
Henshaw: Do you feel like having part of your upbringing here in the Pacific Northwest has informed or influenced your work at all?
Lehuauakea: Most definitely, because I think that if I had not moved back here as a teenager, I wouldn't have felt that void in my cultural upbringing, because I was raised around it — you know, raised Hawaiian, Japanese — and then all of a sudden, that was cut off, and I was displaced and put up here. I knew that I was missing out on something, even if I was young, and I couldn't articulate quite what it was until later.
If I hadn't moved here to the continent, I wouldn't have known that something was ever missing, and I probably would have gone down a completely different path, either artistically or done something else entirely. So I think without having groups in two different places across oceans, I would not be making the work I am now.
Henshaw: When you're creating, what are you really working to communicate to your audience, or to people who see your work?
Lehuauakea: It's hard to just nail that down to like one or two (things). I guess the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that we're still here. I think for a lot of Native people, and for Native Hawaiians specifically, like we're often exoticized and kind of fetishized to the point of, you know, we only have one image that's widely recognized, and that's like the coconut bra hula dancer on a beach kind of thing. There's so many other more accurate depictions of who we are, as people and our culture is always evolving, instead of sitting on the shelf in a museum, right?
So being part of a diaspora, that adds on to the history of what it means to be a contemporary Hawaiian. And for me, it's bringing kapa to a wider audience, and in doing so, I'm bringing our history, our culture, our language and our identity to a wider audience and sharing that story, instead of having that story shared by someone who's not of our own people.
I think also, it's really important to talk about sustainability, environmental issues. From a Native Hawaiian standpoint. Being island people, we feel the effects of our lands hurting so much more acutely, because we are on an island. We see rising sea levels literally taking houses and buildings and roads down. Our islands are eroding much, much faster, because our storms are stronger. Our coral reefs are dying and so they're not acting as much of a buffer as they used to be … I mean, you notice with the endangered and extinct animals, we are considered the endangered species capital of the world. And what kind of title is that you have as your own homeland — that's what you're recognized for.
Because my practice is so inherently tied to the land — I mean, the material I paint and work on is trees — it's actually a very sustainable practice where you're very tied to the lands and understanding not only the cycles of the trees, but also when it's a good time to plant, or harvest or attend to your materials; your trees, your dye plants. And then I also work with earth pigments a lot — so how do we sustainably harvest and gather in a respectful manner, in an Indigenous way?
I think there's a lot to be reckoned with in terms of like demands and consumerism, when you bring that into this kind of art practice, because it's not the same as like painting with acrylics on a canvas; (I can’t) go to the store (for) environment materials — everything is on a different timescale.
I think the more people that see my work, there's more of an appreciation of cycles that are beyond the Gregorian time or the 9-to-5 kind of schedule is, there's more of an appreciation for things that are greater than us. So yeah, I think those are like the two biggest things that I hope people can take away from seeing my work.
Henshaw: You work with a lot of natural products in your work — plants, dyes and pigments. Does that pose any sort of difficulty or barrier for you when you're not working in Hawai'i and instead located in the Pacific Northwest?
Lehuauakea: Yeah, so with the bark that I used to make the kapa most of the time, I'm able to go back home and gather materials with my teacher, Uncle Wes. Other times, when I haven't been able to go home, like with COVID, I was getting material sent to me, from other teachers, and so that was truly a blessing because I was able to continue the work and keep that momentum up and keep running, even if it was over 2,000 miles away, and so that's been very helpful.
With the earth pigments, there's so many pigments no matter where you go, and it's just a matter of learning more about the land that you're on. And also respecting that even though I'm Native, I'm also a visitor to this continent. No matter where I go, these are not my ancestral homelands here. So being respectful of that, and learning about these histories and communities that are still very much here and very much present.
But it just brings me closer to the people that I'm around, the people that I work with, and consider mutual friends and artists, and also closer to the land and the work that I make.
Then with plant dyes, Hawaiian kapa historically was considered to be the finest, not only because of the quality of the cloth, but also because of the insane range of colors that we achieved through natural dyes. And there was really a mastery with the knowledge of plants, and how to process them to different colors. I don't have access to all those plants here on the continent, right? I think that's where Indigenous ingenuity comes into play, being resourceful with the materials that I do have access to, and asking permission to be able to use these plants and these materials in my work.
Learning more about the ecologies that I'm a visitor to, while also honoring the histories of the craft itself. I think that also speaks to our diasporic histories as Native Hawaiians in transit — learning about our place, but also not forgetting where we are originally coming from.
Henshaw: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Lehuauakea: If there's any younger folks, especially young Native kids who are reading this or anything like that, just keep going. I think there were so many times that I was really discouraged as a kid. Native people have the highest suicide rate out of any demographic, and there's so many times I just, I didn't know how far I was going to make it, to be quite frank, and literally art and kapa making gave me my life. That gave me my life back.
And so if there's anyone who is feeling like there's not really a place for them, or the work that they make, or their vision and their perspective, there's always a place, and we need all of it.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
© 2022 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657 , ext. 404
