MĀNALEO A native speaker’s voice lives on Story By: Wanda A. Adams FEATURED MOʻOLELO
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hat didn’t the late Mālia Craver do? The composer of this year’s competition kahiko chants humbly accepted dozens of unsought honors, capped in 2007, just two years before her death, by the Honpa Hongwanji Mission’s “Living Treasure” designation.
ni Children’s Trust for 20 years as a social work assis- tant and later cultural practitioner. Craver’s “Nou E Ka Lani” (“O Chiefess”)
and “Ka Lani Kapu” (“Sacred Chief”), the girls’ and boys’ competition ka- hiko chants, respectively, similarly honor Nā Aliʻi Nui. Scholar Mary Kawena Pukui honored Craver with the name Kawaihoʻouluohāʻao, a reference to waters
In a video for the Na Momi Ho’oheno oral history project (https://vimeo. com/31238796), she told how, in elementary school, she was chided by a teacher for speaking Hawaiian on the playground. “This is an English Standard School,” he said. “But this is Hawaiʻi, home of the Hawaiian,” she retorted. Later, she closed the subject: “I prayed to God. He told me not to listen to you.”
that “bring growth to the people.” The two devised a curriculum still in use today, blending Western therapeutic ideas with the Hawaiian peacemaking/ conflict resolution prac- tice of hoʻoponono (“to put right,” as Craver defined it).
So what didn’t Craver do before her death at age 82, on October 3, 2009? She didn’t hula, though she spoke wist- fully in her oral history video of having always wanted to do so. She did co-found one hula competition and have another named for her, and she frequently judged the language divisions of hula festivals. It is unclear why she did not take hula as a child. But, she said, that unfulfilled yearning was a factor in her lifelong commit- ment to “put the children first,” and her devotion to the Queen, who was, like her, a knowledge keeper, healer, and teacher.
Born in 1927 in Nānākuli Homestead, Aunty Mālia was raised as the hā nai child of her grandparents in remote Hoʻo-
kena, West Hawaiʻi. They lived with a foot in two different centuries, focusing on land and family, Akua and education. In 2009, she would be named a Distinc- tive Woman of Hawaiian History as a “primary source” of oral and written materials for students and teachers. She was a prolific poet, setting her words to mele (song) and ‘oli (chant). Her first poem, “Puʻuhonua Nani” (“Beautiful Refuge”), praised Hawaiʻi’s last reigning monarch, Liliʻuokalani, for leaving her wealth in trust for the care, education, and assistance of Hawaiian young people. Craver worked for the Queen Liliʻuokala-
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49 YEARS OF CELEBRATING KEIKI AND THE ART OF HULA
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