Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage
By Ramsay Horn
Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia, two prestigious Hawaiian voyaging canoes, sail across Earth’s oceans to join and grow the global movement toward a more sustainable world. Covering forty-seven thousand nautical miles, eighty-five ports, and twenty-six countries, the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage highlights diverse cultural and natural treasures and the importance of working together to protect them.
The Hawaiian name for this voyage, “Mālama Honua,” means “to care for our Earth.” Living on an island chain has made Polynesians acutely aware that our natural world is a gift with limits and that we must carefully steward this gift if we are to survive together. The worldwide voyage means to engage all of Island Earth—practicing how to live sustainably while sharing, learning, creating global relationships and discovering the wonders of this precious place we all call home.
Eternally inspired by the strong tradition of giving an offering or tribute in the Polynesian culture, luxury lifestyle brand OluKai has partnered with the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage. Crew members aboard both the Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia are exclusively wear-testing footwear from OluKai’s spring 2015 collection. OluKai konohiki (caretaker) and one of Hawaii’s greatest ocean-sports pioneers, Archie Kalepa, will join the Hōkūle‘a for several legs of the journey.
To guide the voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a, navigators use traditional wayfinding, with stars, waves, wind, and birds as mapping points for direction. Pacific Islander people mastered wayfinding and used it to find and inhabit islands in an ocean area of over ten million square miles. Thousands of years ago, this remarkable achievement of humanity involved finding and fixing in the mind the position of islands that were sometimes less than a mile in diameter. The voyages were all the more remarkable in that the canoes were navigated without instruments by expert seafarers who depended on traditional knowledge of the stars and patterns of nature for clues to the direction and location of islands.
Hōkūle‘a began as a dream of reviving the legacy of exploration, courage, and ingenuity that brought the first Polynesians to the archipelago of Hawaiʻi. Cultural extinction felt dangerously close to many Hawaiians when artist Herb Kāne brought people together to build a double-hulled sailing canoe similar to the ones that his ancestors sailed. Though more than six hundred years had passed since the last of these canoes had been seen, this dream brought together people of diverse backgrounds and professions. Since Hōkūle‘a was first built and launched in the 1970s, it continues to bring people together from all walks of life. Its sails, filled with the winds of the Pacific, brought voyaging back to life and helped spark a revival of Hawaiian language and culture and a revaluing of Hawaiian knowledge and technologies. It is more than a voyaging canoe; it represents the common desire shared by the people of Hawaiʻi, the Pacific, and the world to protect our most cherished values and places from disappearing.
Over the past thirty-nine years, the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) has sailed over 140,000 nautical miles within its Pacific Ocean home, reconnecting with the past and reimagining the future as it navigates to places as diverse as Nippon (Japan), Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Sāmoa. To expand the reach of what it can learn and share during its first worldwide voyage, Hōkūle‘a’s sister canoe, Hikianalia, uses sustainable solar and wind energy and combines the latest ecological technology with the heritage of the voyaging tradition. It is equipped with the communications technology that will allow PVS to connect to a global audience, combining contemporary and traditional indigenous knowledge to bring the world along on this journey.
During the 2013 Mālama Hawaiʻi sail of the worldwide voyage, Hawaiʻi’s entire statewide public education system, independent schools, and the University of Hawaiʻi established an “education promise” to join the voyage through online canoe-to-classroom links, special lesson plans, and video exchanges. The ocean school created by Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia includes science, technology, engineering, and math education; the arts; geography; and cultural and social lessons about living sustainably. Hawaiʻi’s learners of all ages will continue to join with people throughout the world on a journey of exploration and cooperative problem-solving. As the voyage expands across the globe, people of all backgrounds can learn together in order to design a better future for all of Island Earth.
The Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage began in 2013 with a Mālama Hawaiʻi statewide sail and will continue through 2017, when a new generation of navigators take the helm and guide Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia back to Polynesia after circumnavigating the globe.
The Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded in 1973 on a legacy of Pacific Ocean exploration, seeking to perpetuate the art and science of traditional Polynesian voyaging and the spirit of exploration through educational programs that inspire students and communities to respect and care for themselves and their natural and cultural environments.
Origin: https://issuu.com/originmagazine/docs/issue21_issuu/38