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Sacred Forests – Part Two: A New Friend to the Rescue

By Sam Low, author of Hawaiiki Rising

A year earlier, Nainoa had driven into Honolulu to a restaurant called Fisherman’s Wharf – a place with a maritime motif, a motley collection of binnacles, steering wheels and curved ship’s ventilators – to have lunch with Herb Kane and a friend of his from Alaska.
The meeting was inspired by an event that took place more than two centuries earlier when Captain George Vancouver visited the island of Maui. While there, he measured a large canoe and found it to be over 108 feet long. It was fabricated, as he later wrote in his ship’s log, “of the finest pine.” Vancouver knew that pine did not grow in Hawaii.
“Where did the wood come from?”…

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Sacred Forests – Part I: The Search

By Sam Low, author of Hawaiiki Rising
In 1990, the Polynesian Voyaging Society decided to create a new canoe, to be called Hawai’iloa after a famous Tahitian navigator. Hawai’iloa would be built of traditional materials – lauhala for the sails, olana for the lashings, koa for the hulls, ohia for crossbeams to connect the hulls, and hau for stanchions, decks and steering paddles.
“Hokule’a was built quickly, of modern materials mostly,” Nainoa Thompson recalls, “and then we went right into sailing – it was an ocean project – the emphasis was on sailing her, not building her. But when our ancestors built and sailed voyaging canoes, it required the labor and arts of the entire community, everyone working together – some collecting the materials in the forest, others weaving the sails, carving the hulls, lashing, preparing food for the voyage, practicing rituals to protect the crew at sea.…

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UN Conference in Samoa Unites World Leaders Behind Small Island Nations as Climate Change Looms

By Courtney Mattison
Equipped only with the tools of Polynesian ancestors and their unwavering conviction, the crews of the Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia traditional voyaging canoes sailed into Apia, Samoa on Sunday after navigating from Hawaii through Polynesia since May. The Pacific Voyagers and Nainoa Thompson – President and Master Navigator of the Polynesian Voyaging Society – were accompanied onboard the Hōkūle‘a for its most recent sail by ocean artist Wyland and Conservation International’s Greg Stone and were welcomed ashore by Dr. Sylvia Earle amid an impressive display of traditional Polynesian performers. Once on shore, the Samoa Head of State addressed his guests with a profoundly heartfelt speech expressing Samoa’s appreciation for its kinship with Hawaii, setting the tone for a four-day conference hosted by the United Nations on Small Island Developing States (SIDS).…

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