Honolulu Weekly

It’s somewhat curious that we often treasure most the artifacts that we can never fully understand. It’s true on many scales and from many eras, from Easter Island’s staid mo’ai to the so-called Sator Square and, from more recent history, the locally treasured hale pili.

It’s been more than a year since the Bishop Museum announced its plan to take apart and rebuild the only known authentic Hawaiian hale of its kind on the islands, a grass thatched structure that came to O’ahu from Kaua’i more than 100 years ago. The project is part of a greater restoration of the museum’s Hawaiian Hall, where this morning, officials–who can only speculate as to exactly how old the hale is–are unveiling it in its final stages of refurbishment.

“It might have been decades old when we got it, but likely even older than that,” said Betty Lou Kam, the museum’s vice president of cultural resources. “It was a long–abandoned house, and because it was abandoned, we don’t know exactly what kind of hale it was. It’s small, so it certainly wouldn’t be somewhere to spend an entire day. It might have been a sleeping house. It probably provided shelter of some kind.”

While the hale pili took just two or three weeks to take apart in early 2007, it has taken months to put back together.

“Most of the process was not actually putting it together but trying to locate the right kinds of materials,” Kam said. “They had to look for places to obtain pili grass or ‘uki’uki that was the right size or length. They needed thousands of feet of lashing. We’re still making that.”

The restoration plan was largely developed by cultural consulting firm LeoKanaka, which enlisted help from local high schools and other groups in an effort to share the process with the community.

“It was really important that the people involved were young people,” Kam said. “They learned from the elders, but it shows how this is really all about life and generations. The hale is still here and offering opportunities to learn, hands-on experience, and the basic purpose of any house, which is to bring people together.”

And even once the project is complete and the Hawaiian Hall exhibit officially reopens in August, the hale pili will continue to engage the community by sparking curiosity about a structure we may never fully understand.

“Just the idea of a house is so nice,” Kam said. “A place to provide shelter and to protect, and I think our hale is a kind of shelter for traditional knowledge in a way. It’s not just stored inside, but it’s flowing out of every part of it, every material used, from the hands that first built it to the many hands of this community that worked on it today.”