How Hula Is Shifting Alongside Hawai‘i’s Endangered Species

Amid an extinction crisis, practitioners of traditional Hawaiian culture—hula, surfing and beyond—help perpetuate endangered species alongside their own way of life

• By Mindy Pennybacker
• Conservation
• Jun 27, 2024

Students of Hālau Nāwehiokaipoaloha dance a hula honoring the koa‘e kea, a bird that nests in volcanic cliffs, near Volcano Art Center in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park (above; photos by Nani Welch Keli‘iho‘omalu). The koa‘e kea (below) is known in English as the white-tailed tropicbird. See a slideshow of more birds native to Hawai‘i at the end of this story.

DRESSED IN WHITE, their graceful arms outstretched like wings, bright eyes flashing and bare feet darting, the hula dancers of Hālau Nāwehiokaipoaloha transform themselves into a lively, preening flock of koa‘e kea, the white-tailed tropicbird that nests high in volcanic cliffs and soars down to the sea to dive for fish.

“You have to be the koa‘e,” says Kumu Hula Ipolei Lindsey-Asing, founder and teacher of the hālau, or hula school. “Show what a beautiful manu (bird) you are and how important you are in our environment.” The hālau performed its hula honoring the koa‘e in October at the Hawai‘i Island Festival of Birds. After several years on hiatus and online-only, the event, held last year on the Big Island by the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center and the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, convened scientists, environmental groups and the public in an opportunity to share information on the islands’ vanishing birds and efforts to save them.

Long celebrated as a hotspot of endemism, or species found nowhere else, Hawai‘i also has become known as a capital of extinction. In the nearly 250 years since Western colonization, almost half of Hawai‘i’s 73 endemic bird species and subspecies have gone or are presumed extinct, according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative’s 2022 State of the Birds report. Threats to native wildlife and plants include habitat loss due to climate change, tourism-related development, recreational overuse of land and other resources, avian malaria transmitted by invasive mosquitoes, competition from other introduced species and pollution. And then there’s the risk of wildfire, looming ever larger following last year’s devastating blazes in west Maui that killed at least 101 people and ravaged more than 15,000 acres.

In 2023 alone, eight species of honeycreeper—a family of small forest birds—were declared extinct. Another 12 honeycreepers, among a total of 24 Hawaiian land and water birds, currently are listed as endangered or threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. To raise awareness, Hawai‘i Gov. Josh Green proclaimed 2024 “Ka Makahiki o Nā Manu Nahele,” or “Year of the Forest Birds.”

“Every time we lose a species, a part of our culture disappears,” says Jonee Peters, executive director of the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, a National Wildlife Federation affiliate. “The only way we can learn about the ‘ō‘ō (an extinct family of birds) is through hula, mele (song), stories, drawings, photographs, research data or to look at a stuffed bird at the Bishop Museum.”

Contemporary hula isn’t simply memorializing what has been lost. Practitioners of traditional forms of Hawaiian culture—from hula students to surfers to visual artists—are working to prevent additional species from disappearing, even as they aim to help extinct species live on.

Memorializing through movement

At the Festival of Birds, the ‘Alohi Polynesian Dance Academy danced “Nā Manu o Kanaloa,” a fast-paced tribute to the god of the ocean. Beating long bundles of sticks like wings, the dancers depicted both the koa‘e and the ‘iwa, or the great frigatebird. A symbol of King Kamehameha I, the ‘iwa has repopulated the island of Kaho‘olawe since 1990, when the U.S. military stopped bombarding it for target practice.

Another hālau, Na Kupuna ‘O Kohala, danced “Manu ‘Ō‘ō,” a slow and sensuous hula paying ode to an ‘ō‘ō. In the song and dance, the bird stands in as a metaphor for human lovers who meet amid the misty rains and red blossoms of the ‘ōhi‘a lehua, an endemic tree that forms forest canopies throughout the Hawaiian Islands. As the students moved, their black gowns and bright yellow headdresses and lei swayed with them, recalling the bird’s plumage.

Last fall marked the first time the festival featured a hō‘ike, or a gathering of several hālau, each performing a bird hula. “We wanted to include hālau and showcase hula, not just to be entertaining but as a conservation action, for the way they’re keeping stories of the birds alive and promoting caring for the different species with their haumāna (students),” says Rae Okawa, development director for the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center and a student at the ‘Alohi Polynesian Dance Academy hālau, led by Kumu Lani Isaacs. (The honorific “kumu” or “kumu hula” translates loosely to “master teacher.”)

While today’s hula dancers and teachers can observe the koa‘e, the ‘iwa and other surviving birds in the wild, the Hawai‘i ‘ō‘ō was last sighted in 1902. The Hawai‘i mamo, another rare endemic with yellow feathers, vanished in 1898.

“When we dance hula, we embody the place we represent—the forest, the ocean—and if we don’t mālama (take care of) that place, we can never really experience it,” says U‘ilani Macabio, a hula dancer and surfer who teaches Hawaiian language, history and culture in Big Island public schools. Hula expresses how Native Hawaiians view themselves, she says: as inseparable from the natural world.

Macabio studies hula with Hālau Nā Kīpu‘upu‘u in Waimea. Like other schools, her hālau chooses materials for its costumes carefully. When Macabio and other students gather botanical fodder to create lei and headdresses, they often seek out invasive plants, such as kāhili ginger, and refrain from taking flowers of the ‘ōhi‘a lehua, which has been devastated by a fungus introduced by nonnative plants.

It’s not a huge jump to see a connection between vanishing birds, diseased flora, a colonized people and an endangered way of life. One elegiac song and hula, in particular, illustrates those threads of loss. Queen Kapi‘olani wrote “Ka Ipo Lei Manu” for her husband, King Kalākaua, comparing him to an ‘i‘iwi honeycreeper as he traveled to muster international support after American anti-royalists seized his constitutional powers at gunpoint in 1887.

When performing the hula today, dancers wear red, representing both the crimson ‘i‘iwi honeycreeper and Kalākaua, who reinstated the public practice of hula in 1874 following its prohibition under the influence of Christian missionaries more than 40 years before. Once common in the islands’ upper-elevation forests, the ‘i‘iwi is now rarely seen. Kalākaua, who died in California in 1891, never heard his wife’s song.

Shifting into action

Hula is far from a requiem for a bygone world. It is a living, breathing, adapting and demanding undertaking, with dancers expected to pursue intensive studies of environmental phenomena, says Huihui Kanahele-Mossman, a kumu hula of Hālau o Kekuhi on the Big Island, under the direction of her aunt Kumu Nālani Kanaka‘ole.

“We may use a bird and its behavior—its flight, motions, courtship—as a metaphor for love, or leaving, or other emotion,” she says, “but we have got to know what they do, where they live and all about their habitat in order to make it into poetry.”

Hālau o Kekuhi looks at the entire forest rather than individual species, Kanahele-Mossman emphasizes. “We focus more on the natural phenomena, the volcanic eruptions and the forest coming back after a lava flow, because you need vegetation before birds.”

That need is becoming increasingly urgent. Some 100 plant species unique to the islands are already extinct or possibly so, with 87 percent of the remaining native plant species classified as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Today’s kumu not only expect their hula students to be able to identify flora and fauna by name, significance and behavior, but to engage in hands-on conservation. Hālau including Nā Kīpu‘upu‘u and Nāwehiokaipoaloha prioritize reforestation by planting native species used in hula, including ‘ōhi‘a lehua; hāhā, a lobelia whose bright blue, tubular flowers may have coevolved with honeycreepers’ long, curved beaks; and māmaki, a tree whose bark is hand-processed into kapa, or cloth used to make apparel and canoe sails.

Students grow native ferns and hula plants in their home gardens as well, says Kanahele-Mossman, who is also the executive director of the Edith Kanaka‘ole Foundation, named for her grandmother: founder of the hālau and a pivotal figure in the 1970s revival of hula, chant and the Hawaiian language. A U.S. quarter bearing Kumu Edith’s likeness was issued in 2023, and the Kanaka‘ole ‘ohana, or family, traces its ancestry back to Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano, and Pele’s sister Hi‘iaka, creator of hula and a celebrated surfer.

For decades, the foundation has served as caretaker for several important cultural sites, including ‘Īmakakāloa Heiau, a 700-year-old Big Island temple complex dedicated to Laka, the goddess of hula. There, the foundation conducts ceremonies and cultivates a garden of traditional hula plants, including orange-blossoming ‘ilima shrubs and ‘ie‘ie, a forest vine boasting large lilylike flowers in hues of rose and apricot.

Kanahele-Mossman says she has seen an increase in recent years of honeycreepers—such as the ‘amakihi and the ‘apapane—in populated areas, including parking lots in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. While it’s too early to attribute a rebound to the state and federally sponsored practice, begun in 2023, of releasing sterile mosquitoes that interbreed with and reduce populations of the wild mosquitoes carrying lethal avian malaria, decades of habitat restoration and conservation work by the state and environmental groups may be paying off. “In places where we have uniform vegetation, with trees that are food sources for these kinds of birds, I’ve noted a whole bunch of birds we normally saw only at higher elevations [where temperatures are too cold for mosquitoes] now coming down lower,” she says. “I do hope the impact of avian malaria will lessen dramatically in the next few years.”

Since the 1990s, the Edith Kanaka‘ole Foundation also has been restoring and farming the lo‘i kalo, or taro paddies, of historic Waipi‘o Valley, alongside the Hi‘ilawe River. At another foundation project, Haleolono Fishpond in Hilo, volunteers learn about traditional fish farming and help rebuild rock walls and propagate limu, or seaweed.

“When we started to clean out Haleolono Fishpond, we saw the hīhīwai (endemic snails) coming back,” Kanahele-Mossman says. “All it needs is a good cleaning and letting the waters flow.” Between pond restoration and working with area conservationists to manage predators like mongoose and cats, “We are able to observe the ae‘o (Hawaiian stilt) coming back,” she says.

“Because we’re in this mo‘olelo (story), we see these changes,” says Macabio, the dancer, surfer and teacher from the Big Island. “We’re like a scientist.”

Sliding toward solutions

Hula isn’t the only form of traditional Hawaiian culture that centers its practitioners in the natural world. Surfing, hula’s twin discipline, is also said to have been introduced by the goddess Hi‘iaka, who renews plant and animal life in places covered by her sister Pele’s lava flows.

Cliff Kapono—like Macabio, a Big Island surfer—is also an ocean conservation scientist and an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Currently based in his hometown of Hilo with his wife and children, he says: “As Hawaiians, we are the place we are from. We are this place, just like the bird, fish, rock, tree, wind.”

Kapono’s interest in Hawaiian celestial navigation led him to become a scientist. And the challenge of shaping and riding traditional surfboards—heavy, narrow planks that lack a fin and are made from wood, rather than plastics or foam—taught him to respect early Hawaiians’ mental and physical agility. Every time he paddles out, he says, he is mindful of the coral reefs that form the islands’ powerful, symmetrical waves—waves that inspired the invention of surfing, or he‘e nalu: the art of wave sliding while standing tall on a board.

Those reefs, critical not only to surfing but to entire oceans, are in danger. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that a quarter or more of coral reefs worldwide have been destroyed, and another 60 percent are threatened. Hawai‘i’s reefs are no exception, with warming ocean temperatures, acidification and pollution from land-based runoff resulting in steady increases in the frequency and severity of coral bleaching events—when stressed coral expel symbiotic algae—since the mid-1990s.

In 2014 and 2015, coral bleaching struck 56 percent of reefs around the Big Island, 44 percent off West Maui and 32 percent surrounding O‘ahu, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In another major bleaching event in 2019, up to 55 percent of coral in some reefs died, the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources reported, with repercussions throughout the food web for resident invertebrates and fish.

Surfing also suffers when coral die, Kapono says. Reefs erode and collapse, and waves lose energy and change shape. In response, he is directing a research project, called Honoli‘i after his local surf break and supported by the National Science Foundation, that studies how soil and pollutant runoff affects reefs’ microbial diversity.

“Microbes are the immune system of the coral reef,” he says, referring to the ocean bacteria and fungi that coat reefs in a thin layer of protective mucus. In his lab, a nonprofit affiliated with Arizona State and the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, he is studying the makeup of the reef’s microbiome before, during and after major runoffs, tracking how rapidly the reef returns to health following an influx.

Kapono notes that Hawaiians survived the near eradication of their people and culture by introduced diseases, the dispossession of their lands and access to natural resources, and the destruction of their temples and traditional agriculture and aquaculture systems. Now, he says, as stewards of the land and sea, they are advancing conservation science following their ancestors’ knowledge, refraining from fishing during spawning seasons and avoiding overharvesting nature’s bounty, from forest trees to seaweed.

“We are in this world of fast science, and if we don’t look to where these Indigenous science practices evolved from, we’re just on a hamster wheel,” he says. He offers his own journey with surfing and his chosen field of study as an example. Originally an unmotivated student, “I could progress in surfing, whereas in academia, I felt I was working so hard just to stay with the pack,” he says. “But once I started to connect my surfing to my studies, I felt my science was becoming innovative and advancing, and that the power of tradition and Indigenous perspective was setting me ahead of the curve.”

Fashioning a future

“I remember reading a Hawaiian-language newspaper article by an old Hawaiian man who lamented not seeing the native birds anymore in native habitats,” says Marques Marzan, a cultural advisor and curator at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, as well as a fiber artist, a fashion designer and a hula dancer and chanter in the hālau of Kumu John Keola Lake.

“All of these foreign birds were introduced early in the 1800s and pushed [the native birds] out,” he says, “which probably was a commentary on foreigners pushing out Hawaiian communities and taking over their land.”

Everything changes, Marzan believes, hula and surfing included. Traditional practices are “definitely not static, not trapped in the past,” he insists, pointing out that Hawaiians have always loved new ideas and have been quick to adopt new languages and technologies—a skill that has helped them stay resilient in the face of extinction.

“When Western fabrics and metal tools were introduced, they became incorporated into kapa-making practices,” he says. Take Ka‘iulani, niece of King Kalākaua. The last heir apparent of the Hawaiian Kingdom, she tried in vain to stop the U.S. annexation of the islands before her untimely death in 1899 at age 23. Even as she resisted foreign colonization, “Princess Ka‘iulani was famed for her love of imported peacocks and their feathers,” Marzan says. (She was also a surfer, and the Bishop Museum’s collection of traditional wooden boards includes a slender model that belonged to her.)

Despite Hawai‘i’s Indigenous people and endemic species suffering great loss, Marzan is optimistic for the future. His own contemporary sculpture, baskets and apparel carry traditional patterns forward with fresh energy. Like his fellow hula dancers, he selects his raw materials scrupulously, with an eye toward sustainability. That means drawing on repurposed metal and glass while eschewing songbird feathers, which, although used in royal robes, didn’t figure into historical hula costumes, he says.

“When I make lei with plants, feathers or shells, it’s part of a long-term commitment to preserve culture and practices, and also to find ways to help preserve those resources and the environments that contain them,” Marzan explains. “I enjoy seeing the light and joy and excitement it brings to a young person who tries hula for the first time—that kind of flicker in their eyes that shows this creativity, innovation and passion newly coming to life in our community.”

When speaking by phone from his home in January, Kapono expresses a kindred delight in passing the torch. He had just come in from surfing at Honoli‘i with his 3-year-old son, who had caught a wave and stood up on his board by himself for the first time. “It was such a breakthrough,” the proud father says with a laugh. “He had to go again and again.”

Who knows how such joyful practices can shape individual and collective destinies? In Macabio’s words, hula is “the embodiment of all the elements, the places, the people, the experiences of the past and a window into the future.”

As she says, “We have a kuleana (responsibility) to take action. It takes all of us.”

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NWF Priority

On the ground & in the air

The Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, an NWF affiliate, supports the release, begun in 2023, of sterile mosquitoes in an attempt to limit transmission of the avian malaria virus, lethal to many forest birds. Other CCH initiatives include a lawsuit against a Maui hotel, requesting a change to exterior lighting during fledgling season to prevent bird fatalities; and holding O‘ahu landowners to account for unpermitted development, the death of a Laysan albatross, and the destruction of habitat and death of a colony of federally endangered Hawaiian yellow-faced bees. Learn more about CCH.

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Read more about writer Mindy Pennybacker and photographer Nani Welch Keli‘iho‘omalu. Honolulu-based editor Matthew Dekneef conducted an orthography review of this story. Scroll down for a slideshow of native Hawaiian birds.

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