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I am deeply grateful beyond belief. Homecoming’s never set in. I’ve never really felt it. The overwhelm of this voyage. I am deeply honored to be here, but I’m very uncomfortable right now; only because I believe I’m standing here on behalf of the many, the 300 who sailed these canoes; the 12, 15 captains that took a leadership on this voyage. For the pwo navigators that all came together, united to recognize that it’s time to share with the young people and never, ever let voyaging and navigation ever go extinct. And to all the young ones: no matter how much hardship; no matter how dangerous it was; when we asked them to come as investments; the truest investment of handing on what we learned from the great navigators that are there on the wall. Because our time is limited. We can count it on two hands. We are tired. Voyage puts you on your knees; took you to the bone. Clyde, Saul. That’s why we needed Eddie. At the times we were most afraid, we could look to him to find courage. Eddie came the whole way. Eddie was the most important crew member we had on board.
I’m going to be completely inadequate, and I’m going to run out of time and I’ve got to sit down. I’m going to think back at the moment that I was never good enough to be able to express the gratitude of the many to have embraced us the way you have. It never sunk in. Until I came into the channel and looked around.
The constant nagging question we always have in leadership: Is Hokule’a still relevant? Does it still have value? Or is it too old? Has the racing of the 21st century outpaced it so much that things old we don’t care about any more? It’s a nagging question, whether we’re going to borrow your young people, take them to sea, and make the promise they’re going to come back. It’s a nagging question. Well, thank you Hawaii. Thank you for the moment. Thank you for the 150, 200 canoes who are out there, the 1,000 watercrafts, our ali’I here to pay respect to all of this. But again everybody knows the difficult bridge to make; and that’s all we are. We’re just building bridges.
25 days ago, I received a phone call from a friend. He said, “You need to come. Get in your car. You need to come now.” I was dreading the phone call. I got in and you know there are kind of times you are just thinking through all these things that you are gifted and all these things that you are blessed with came from extraordinary generation that, by the way, are not in the room physically. There’s no sign on the chair for them, but we bring them in spirit. I drive to this place of hospice. Go in to a very quiet, cold room. Meet a hospice nurse that said, “You know, he’s too far gone. You’re too late. He’s non-responsive.” I said, “Okay. Let me sit with him privately. Do you mind leaving the room?” I sat down and held the hand of Dr. Ben Finney, the last of the great visionaries, the great pioneers, the great navigators on the wall. I held his hand and I talked to him. I said, “Hey, Ben, your children are on the ocean right now. Pomai is the captain. Kailani is the navigator. They’re coming home.” And I said, “They’re coming home from Tahiti, our homeland.” He squeezed my hand. And I said, “They’re on the old wa’a Hokule’a.” And he squeezed my hand ‘cause he knows. Two days later we would lose him.
There‘s no names on the chairs for the five on the wall. But there, what there is extraordinary stories of a lady. I don’t know who she was. I was told the story she was a woman professor in the University of Hawaii system and she was Hawaiian. 1958. You can count the Hawaiian professors in the 1950s on one hand. Billy Kalau came a long way. He gave Dr. Ben Finney a book. Said, “Read this. It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong and you, as an anthropologist that believe in the ancient voyage of the Polynesian, you need to change that.” It was a decade later that there would be a phone call. Not on our phone lines, but a long distance phone call from Santa Barbara university to a painter in Chicago. Herb Kawainui Kane. They would talk about building a voyaging canoe. I always wonder how come the phone call wasn’t here. How come it wasn’t here? How come we couldn’t see it? Well, go look what we teach in our schools. Hawaiian was outlawed by policy in the public schools. Private teachers had the privilege and the authorization to beat the kids. I know. My grandmother was. At Kamehameha. You graduate from high school; have no idea where your ancestors come from. Have no idea how they got here. Have no idea that they were the greatest navigators and voyagers and explorers on the face of the earth. How come?
Kane, Finney have a dream, include Tommy Holmes. They bring it in. They launched a voyaging canoe and they gave it to us. They gave it to us. The question: what will we do with it? The other miracle of Hokule’a. Do you know that when they were hunting around the biggest nation on earth called Polynesia, they couldn’t find one traditional navigator? They looked at Melanesia, they couldn’t find a single deep sea navigator. They turned to the small islands, which we call Micronesia today. And my understanding there were only six and by a miracle a Peace Corps worker, Mike McCoy, said, “Eh, you want a navigator? He’s five miles down the road, living on the Townsend Cromwell UH research ship teaching professors at the university how to catch aku with traditional lures and he was the youngest. Sometimes I look back and think through what if Hokule’a waited a decade; or two decades to be born? What if we waited? What if it got to the point that Mau is not strong enough to do two miracles? Pull Kahikinui out of the sea 1976. Thank you Buffalo, Billy, Shorty, John Cruz. Please stand. Please stand. Thank you.
That was a time of confusion in ’76. Leadership was compromised in the Society. There were those who loved the canoe and prayed for it; those who didn’t believe that Hawaiian stuff had any value in its own homeland; and there were those who feared this canoe because it’s going to change everything. The arrival of these four men that are left, the last of the crew of 17 that are left, changed the world when it entered the harbor in Papeete. Brought Pacific people together, brought the family back together, and Mau found it like the miracle. But even the greater miracle was Mau when he came back for 30 years and took every one of us, too many to mention, by the hand, like a child. Yanked you through the window of time into the old ocean. And nobody else could do that. On the whole earth. That’s the miracle. Then he stayed with us, and trained us, and never went home, never left our side, so that we wouldn’t die at sea. And the list goes on and on, but on the picture…I don’t know.
My greatest navigator is my father. Grew up poor. Knew the pain of poverty. Come home and there would be all these children in the house. They don’t know the names. They’re strangers. My father won’t talk about these painful stories, but his older brother would tell me. “Yeah, we get these children that have no home, no roof, they’re not going eat dinner tonight; and Hawaiian family take you in. Call ‘em hanai. These are your brothers and sisters. They will sleep with you tonight.” But uncle would tell me, “We would watch and when my, when their parents, they would share the food for dinner, when the parents drank water, tomorrow you eat guava. There will be no breakfast.” My father felt in a very deep way the greatest injustice of all is a neglected and abused child. The greatest.
Under age; LST; landing; Normandy. The bloody beaches. Many died. Father told him, “You go. You fight for the dirt of your country, Hawaii nei. You make shame, no come home.” My father was courageous. Four hundred miles from French shores, 100 miles from the German border, shot in the head by a German sniper; white snow, green fatigues, who was in a tree. It’s a long story of courage. A long story of standing up for what you believe. But my father’s 'olelo would begin in the hospital room. ‘Cause a bullet went through the left side of his head, took out his left eye, exited his nose, crushed this side of his face, and didn’t die. When they bandaged his eyes for two years to try to protect it and saved it, said, “Nainoa, it was in the black blindness of the bandage that I could understand the power of vision. In the vision you were talking to yourself about responsibility. What are you going to stand up for?”
In some very dark days in the time of Hokule’a, we celebrate accomplishment; we remember the hard times. When Eddie set out, we were capsized in a gale; no communications; “Call you from Tahiti in 30 days.” Nobody knew we were upside down, in a gale, and helpless. Eddie, the greatest waterman on the earth, had a surfboard tied to the rail. We turn over at midnight. The light comes up, and in the light there’s no hope, and Eddie…it was so windy that you could not talk to you [pointing to two people close together] in the gale. Everybody’s perched on one hull. The other hull is submerged. Waves up to 12 to 15 feet knock you off, maybe every 20 seconds. In the north wind, hypothermia’s real. And nobody knows. And there’s Eddie. You can’t hear what he’s saying, but you know what he’s asking the captain: to let him go. Sunrise, the captain says, “No, stay with the ship.” Leighton, it’s the cardinal rule. But nobody knows. And you’re going south. Quick. In a gale. Every single hydraulic swell will just carry you down another 10 feet and another 10 feet. Mid-day you see him. Mid-morning, someone puts a black knitted bag around his waist, put some oranges inside, a bag of poi, a life jacket. Eddie’s going to go. And Clyde saw, I swam with him that last time. He had to go. He had to go. Eddie had the dream that we’re going to go down to Kahikinui. We’re going to pull it out of the sea with Hokule’a. We’ll bring pride and dignity back to our ancestors and then we’re going to give it to our children. That’s why he had to go. Because Hokule’a was the light and it was upside down. We call it ehukai. Every time a wave turns on the ocean, it kicks out salt. In a gale, it’s so strong.
Leighton, you know. It’s like fog. You could not see the island of Oahu. You could barely see Kamaloa, and you could barely see Lana’ihale. We were out there. Going south. In the gale. Nobody else is out there. Eddie had poor eyesight. Just so you know, when we talk about courage; when we talk about courage and standing up what you need to stand up for, like my father would say, that act of Eddie on a surfboard, paddling to an island he cannot see, was the greatest act of courage of all time. Clyde, Saul, please stand up. Where’s Clyde, Saul? But in the time then when there was so much question, my dad came and he was the one that provided us; took us; said; picked us up off the ground. “Get off the ground. Stand up for something.” My father said, which is cornerstone to that departure moment, “If you believe in something; if you believe that you need to turn things to the justice, to make things pono, to make things right; then you should have the courage to try.” Lt. Col. Lacy Veach is not up here, but I’m bringing him into the room. Best friend. Troubled about the blue planet. The blue island earth. Keiki o ka aina, ku aina, Hawaii’s second astronaut. My opinion, Hawaii’s greatest explorer of all time. We would sit at the 6,000 foot elevation in the foothills of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai. In the black lava, it would absorb all light to bring the stars close; strengthen your ability to imagine and envision, and he would talk about this island we call earth; that there’s no other one like it. We have the most powerful instruments in the world. Hubbell can see 13 billion lightyears into space. That’s 13 billion years of history of light traveling through space. Close to the Great Bang. Great Bang’s so powerful it didn’t have light. Not going to find it. But we can find life. So how come? If we are so intelligent, and if we are so brilliant, and if we are so accomplished at doing anything we want to do, why are we putting our children’s future at risk?
These are instructions from all these great navigators. Lacy would say, “You have no idea, Nainoa, how beautiful your island earth is until you see the whole thing from space.” But humanity’s changing it, and the world’s going to change humanity. Quick. In 1992, plant the seed of the idea. Take Hokule’a around the world because you can’t protect what you don’t understand and you won’t if you don’t care, and you can’t do it by yourself. He said, “Take Hokule’a. It needs to see and feel the earth, and you need to connect with humanity.” That was the seed. It was planted. In 1992. And guess what? Leadership would get together. We all would get together, and we would sit down. Where are we going to go collectively? We’d talk about Lacy’s vision and we wouldn’t go. Empowered by the idea, empowered by the vision, but that vision became very unrealistic when we started to ask, look at how dangerous it is to go around the world. Look at all these things that are going to make it too high risk. So that unrealistic dream, we just put it aside and we’d go until the next meeting.
Science didn’t wait. 1992 sustainability wasn’t a word. 1992 climate change wasn’t even really measured. Lacy did. He knew. Then this whole language over 16 years comes forward. We start talking about hypoxia, we start talking about dead zones, we start talking about acidification, we’re talking about sea level rising, we’re talking about drowning islands in the Pacific, and we’re talking about islands that are now trying to get economic value out of an island that they know is going to go under water by trying to sell it; and then your whole culture for 3,000 years gets uprooted from the only home they have, and then where do they go? The Pacific islands have nothing to do to create climate change, but they may be the ones to suffer the most first. We’re at high risk, but when the language keeps coming forward and we start to absorb what’s really, actually kind of happening and have no prediction of what’s going to go on…
We had a meeting April 1st, 2008, in Honolulu; the Voyaging leadership. Billy was the chair. The question was, should we go around the world? And we voted four times, ‘cause we knew if we’re not unified we can’t do this. Unanimous four times. But that wasn’t the question. That wasn’t the question. The question is about risk. As the world changes, and it’s going to change us, we started to raise the question about what’s more dangerous. The hurricane? The many seasons of the tropical oceans? The rogue wave of Africa? Many of the diseases we had to face being 700 days on land? The pirate of Somalia? We added it all up. Scary proposition, but what is more dangerous? The hurricane or the pirate, or staying tied to the dock ‘cause you don’t believe you can go, and that your whole essence becomes ignorant, apathetic, and inactive? So when you raise the question about what’s more dangerous, we don’t raise it at ourselves, we raise it at our children. And we left. We trained. We prepared. I remember, in Hilo, next to my son and my daughter, who were five, trying to make my children understand that I’m going to leave their home and to understand that their father has to do what he does; to understand that in some time you’ll get it, you’ll know that he was just the son of a warrior that would stand up for what he believed in. But I certainly didn’t stand up by myself. Shorty, thank you. Monohe.
These are the times that I forget the names, Kalepa, Perkins, Peia. Thank you for coming the 4500 miles from Aotearoa to be here at homecoming. And thank your crew. Matai, Billy, Kalani, Kalau, Pomai. All of you. Jean-Claude, Mpho. Knowing that Tahiti had to be here, this homecoming would be completely incomplete if Fa’afaite wasn’t here, because he reminds us of who we are. Mataiea, thank you for the stone. In the pouring rain, leaving Mataiea, the mayor comes up to me and says, “Take this stone on Hokule’a.” He says, “This is not our stone, it’s yours.” He took me in a boat, drove around the corner, and said, “You see this mountain up here? This mountain is for Pele, and the one below it is for Pauoa, the navigator. My father’s genealogy. We’re family and connected.” Fa’afaite had to be here. So we made promises. The life jacket for this earth is the oceans. Take the next four breaths. Three of them come from the sea. The things that we take in commonplace, even the breathing that we do, is at risk. We thank the Jean-Michels and Heremoana for being here on behalf of the President of Polynesia; thank you for the way they treated us.
I am babbling now because I’m tired and I’m really uncomfortable about not being able to catch you all, but the promises we made were many, to the oceans, to the education of our children, to the protection of our land. Thank you Eric Co for Pae’aina and showing the light. And we made promises that...I was clear that we should go, but not many. There were those in Hawaii that were not clear. There were those that actually came up to me, confronted me, grabbed me by the shirt, and says, “You have no right to take Hokule’a around the world. You have no right ‘cause it’s not your canoe. It’s my children’s canoe in the poorest of communities. What if you lose it?” They weren’t concerned if they lost me, but they’re concerned if they lost the canoe. So Umpo, thank you, because by far the highest risk was your waters around South Africa and the kindness of your people helped us deal with the fear that we treated in the fields of lightning, in the strong currents, in the risk of rogue wave. You die. One rogue wave, you die. And one of them was a senior statesman and I really rocked me, really questioned me, and I left the office in Washington and I slept on it for two days and I called him back and I said, “No. I’m sorry, we’re going. You should be afraid of the canoe being gone. But again, the reason that we’re going is for our children. I’m willing to take the risk.”
So I am very humbled and I’m very proud to tell you right now that Hokule’a is home. Go take a look at her. Just step by her. Tell me how much damage you see. Tell me how many broken things you see. ‘Cause this canoe was cared for for 37 months by an extraordinary community and if there is anyone that was invaluable, irreplaceable on this voyage; he’s not going to like it, but I want to make everybody know we couldn’t do this without Captain Pwo, Bruce Blankenfeld.
Email Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com
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