Akoni Kamehameha

My family has cultivated taro in Hanalei Valley since before James Cook arrived. That's not a number I can give you — we don't count generations in years, we count them in harvests. The paddies my great-great-grandmother chose for their flood patterns, their soil depth, their position in relation to the river — those are the same paddies I harvest from today. The huli she selected because they produced the best corms in her growing season are the varietals I still propagate.

In Hawaiian tradition, kalo is the elder sibling of humanity. The creation story places kalo as the first-born of the sky father and earth mother — the food that existed before people, that sustained us, that we are obligated to in return. When I talk about taro cultivation, I am not talking about agriculture. I am talking about genealogy. The plant is family. That distinction shapes everything about how I farm and how I teach.

I serve on the Hanalei River Watershed Alliance because the paddies require water management at a scale that no single family can maintain alone. The flooding and draining cycles that keep the soil alive depend on relationships among the farmers who work this valley, and those relationships depend on shared understanding of the resource. I teach kalo cultivation at Kauai Community College for the same reason — the knowledge has to survive in more minds than just mine.

The State of Hawaii gave me a Cultural Practitioner Award a few years ago. I appreciate the recognition, but what it marks is the result of work done by generations before me. I am the current carrier. The award belongs to the valley, not to me.

What I want visitors to feel at the end of a day in the paddies is not 'I learned something interesting.' I want them to feel the weight of a corm pulled from the mud, the temperature of the irrigation water, the smell of fresh poi being pounded, and understand that this is what sustained civilization on these islands for a thousand years. That weight, experienced with the body, is the knowledge I'm trying to pass on.