Following the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Indigenous Voices of the Americas program, Folklife Magazine continues to spotlight Native artists and experts.

In a vast and silent ocean, a large canoe painted red and white sways and creaks as it rides the waves. The morning wind weaves between the vessel’s twin timber masts, its sails wearing the crimson of the early dawn.

The new day has barely touched the double-hulled vessel, but Lehua Kamalu, its lead navigator, has already risen. Kamalu, along with the rest of the crew, spent the night making notes on the positions of the stars, wave patterns, bird migrations, and the movements of the moon—each step necessary to navigate the ship toward California.

They huddle aft in a silence of sleepy wonderment. Kamalu tracks the sun’s slow rise over the horizon—still a red drum. Its reflection on the waves points the way east and illuminates their position in the sea. Kamalu smiles at the sun’s confirmation. Aboard Hōkūleʻa, a sixty-two-foot Polynesian voyaging canoe, the twelve-person crew uses no navigational instruments. Instead, they function as their own compass, orienting through the signs nature provides. Their training contains the knowledge and practices that keep the science of Hawaiian wayfinding alive. 

*****

Hōkūleʻa is sailed and operated by the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, which I planned to visit while staying with my friend and photographer Jazea Kalea Smith and her family. Her father drove us, and if he hadn’t weaved us through the identical piers with a local’s certainty, I would have been sure we had pulled up to the wrong place: an unassuming cement building, nestled between a jet ski rental and a wastewater treatment plant. I had spoken with the crew through Zoom calls while they were at sea, and the way they described the scene of their work was so thrilling that, sitting in my cubicle in Washington D.C., I had embarrassingly envisioned PVS as more theme park than office.

Kamalu greeted us inside, smiling. Around her, colorful photographs tapestried the length of the walls. A young crew member, Jonah Apo, leaned back against a nearby office chair. We had met before, digitally. Greeting him in person, I could see that his warm eyes possessed a knowledge of true adventure, one I could recognize but not fully understand. He held the proof in his hand: blown-up photographs from their latest voyage that had taken them across the Pacific.

In spring of 2023, Hōkūleʻa embarked on perhaps her most ambitious journey yet: the Moananuiākea voyage, a four-year expedition around the Pacific Rim. Although the vessel has sailed entire oceans, this voyage is even more ambitious. The crew is focusing on education, inspiring future “planetary navigators” through ceremonies and exchanges with the Indigenous communities who reside along their way.

In June of last year, the arrival of Hōkūleʻa in Yakutat, Alaska, gave the Tlingit tribe the opportunity to perform a traditional canoe welcoming that they had not practiced in over a hundred years. Although the town is over 3,000 miles from Hawaiʻi, Kamalu was unsurprised that this was Hōkūleʻa’s first stop.

“I guess part of it is that I’ve been a part of the PVS so long it seems obvious why we would be there,” she shrugged.

These communities celebrated a long-standing kinship. In the 1990s, PVS intended to build another voyaging canoe from only Native materials. After many months, searchers on the islands could find no Koa trees healthy enough to use for the ship’s twin hulls. In an act of ohana (Hawaiian for “family”), Byron Mallott, Alaskan Native leader of Tlingit heritage gifted PVS with spruce logs that they used to build the new ship, Hawaiʻiloa. This demonstration of solidarity was never forgotten. Last year, Mallot’s descendants were welcomed aboard Hōkūleʻa. They exchanged gifts: blankets, to symbolize the warmth that enveloped the crew, and a big salmon dinner that Kamalu jokingly admitted she had prayed for.

“There are some ways to look at the ocean as a big dividing desert of water, but some might say that it is actually the thing that allows us to travel between these spaces and share our culture,” Kamalu said, smiling.

This is one reason why it is so important for Hawaiians to navigate. Reviving the practice of traditional navigation means connecting with a history of pan-Indigenous interaction.

“It’s a harsh lesson to realize that Hawaiʻi imports ninety percent of its resources,” Kamalu continued. “[Our relationship with Alaska] was developed by saying, ‘hey, we learned that some of our vessels came from trees from your land’... that they are still a canoe culture and could remind us of things we still need to learn. It is a story that demonstrates how connected we all are to the world, and it’s not just people that are connected but resources.”

*****

Kamalu and Apo wove us through the back exit of the building, to a garage that opened to the sea, filled with crew members building, crafting, drilling, and sanding various parts of the ship’s anatomy, each person a different mechanism in a well-oiled machine.

Watching Kamalu directing the work, it was obvious that this was a part of the job she was comfortable with. She had found her way here as a volunteer. Fresh out of college, she spent her time sanding the hulls, and, alone with the ship, she was struck with the Hōkūleʻa fever.

“They showed me the ropes, literally!” Kamalu remembered. “My mentors taught me what it means to be a voyager and to take care of the Hōkūleʻa.” She worked her way up, training for years to understand the natural signs that one day made her the crew’s first female lead navigator. “I didn’t have a whole lot of sailing experience before that. It opened the door to so many connections”—a door to a practice that was lost for centuries.

Hawaiian wayfinding began thousands of years ago, throughout the Polynesian Triangle. Spanning thousands of miles between island groups—Hawai‘i to the north, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to the southeast, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) to the southwest—Polynesia could be considered the largest country in the world. To survive, islanders adapted to the ocean that surrounded them, sailing between islands to find food and water. Around the year 400, the first Polynesian peoples discovered the Hawaiian Islands using voyaging canoes.

How they found these islands was subject to much debate. While Western anthropologists assumed it was simply a matter of luck, Native Polynesians held that their deep connection to the ocean developed navigational techniques that brought them to Hawai‘i. Neither could be proven, as during colonization, traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoes, as well as these techniques, had been all but forgotten. In 1975, Hawaiian artist Herb Kāne decided he could prove Native Hawaiians’ wayfinding ability by building a traditional canoe, modeled after a few drawings by Captain Cook, then sailing, without any navigation technology, all the way to Tahiti. 

There were no longer traditional navigators in Hawaiʻi, so they recruited Mau Piailug, a Micronesian navigator who had maintained the knowledge of wayfinding. With Piailug’s help, Kāne’s canoe, named Hōkūleʻa after the guiding star used by Indigenous navigators to find Hawai‘i, and its sixteen-person crew made it to Tahiti. Tahitians celebrated their arrival with a festival promoting the strength of Polynesian culture.

*****

Leaving the offices of PVS, Kamalu brought us back to the sparkling ocean, where Hōkūleʻa and her sister ship, Hikianalia, were docked. We walked through the stacked living quarters of the hulls, where the crew sleeps on small cots stacked on plywood boards.

“You know NASA contacted us?” Kamalu laughed. “They were trying to figure out how to have a crew live in such tight quarters without killing each other.” I had wondered the same thing. “Our crew is mostly volunteers. Most skills can be trained, some quickly and some over a longer period. What’s most important is your ability to understand this bigger community that you are part of.”

Aboard the canoe, Kamalu said, it’s the crew who made the long days bearable. “No timepieces are allowed. That’s a tradition we have kept since the ’70s. Your timepiece, to guide your day, is the sun and the moon.

“We rotate through our roles, keeping an eye for things in the water,” she continued. “It’s a very organized orchestra, everyone with their small tasks to do, from cooking, to mending the sails, to tending to the health of the crew.” The community aboard is the ship’s beating heart. “Living that close with a crew becomes a meditative experience.”

While Jazea photographed Kamalu, Apo and other crew members came on and off the ship to gather rope. His youth still surprised me. Earlier, he had said that being a part of Hōkūleʻa was natural to him, like being on a “spaceship of the ancestors.”' I asked him if it was difficult to be so far away from his friends on these voyages. He was still in school and sometimes went weeks before docking.

“I think my favorite thing about being on the canoe is the ability to disconnect,” he replied. “I don’t have to check my email. I don’t scroll through Instagram or TikTok. I’m just present in the environment that I’m in. To experience the blue everywhere and the night sky, when you’re in the middle of the ocean, it’s an unreal sight to see.”

Behind him, the sun glittered against the ocean, reflecting upon circular symbols painted across the ship’s hatch. Watching my gaze, Apo explained that the symbols were the navigational “Hawaiian Star Compass,” which Piailug had inspired.

The compass orients a sailor to the natural world, representing “the basic mental construct needed for wayfinding,” Apo said. Each arm of the compass is associated with Hawaiian names for separate houses of the stars. Once a sailor learns to identify these constellations in the sky as they rise and set, they can determine where in the sea they are and where they are going. The compass also identifies the flight paths of birds and direction of waves, which can also be used to gain a sense of direction. This means that the compass must always be paired with constant observation of subtle signs from nature.

“Nainoa explains it best,” he said.

Nainoa Thompson, the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s CEO, an original crew member on the canoe’s trip back from Tahiti, and a Native Hawaiian, was quoted in almost every conversation I had with the crew. His philosophies were vital to the ethos of the crew and helped people through the last stretch of a journey.

I had called him a few weeks prior to my visit, a bit intimidated by his lengthy career. But I felt his voice soften when I asked him about his childhood neighbor, Yoshi, a Japanese fisherman who embraced a great respect for the sea. I could hear his smile through his stories of growing up on his grandfather’s dairy farm in old Hawaiʻi and Yoshi’s gift of a bamboo fishing pole. Thompson’s rich, textured voice reminded me of the sea, and behind him I could hear the birds sing their morning song.

“I didn’t understand it intellectually,” Thompson stated, “but there was a strong link growing between who I was and the ocean.”

Thompson first heard about Hōkūleʻa while paddling canoes outside the canal near the house of Herb Kāne, the ship’s architect. One day, Kāne invited Thompson over for dinner. Kāne’s house was filled with star charts and pictures of ancient Hawaiian canoes, things Thompson had never seen before.

“In my homeland, we weren’t allowed to talk Hawaiian because Hawaiian was outlawed by the policy in the school system in 1926,” he explained. Thompson listened intently as Kāne described his plan to create a canoe to bring back the techniques of ancient Hawaiians. “All I knew was that I was inspired by something so powerful that it made me proud of where I come from. These conversations connected me to a family I never knew. They changed my sense of who I was in a society that didn’t value who wewere.”

Thompson flew to Tahiti to watch Hōkūleʻa arrive, then joined the crew for their return voyage. To him, the ship’s successful journey proved the power of Polynesian peoples’ connection to the sea but also their connection to one another. If the “family of islands” is defined by the similarities between Polynesian cultures’ languages, religions, and traditions, the canoe served as a vessel for connection.

“They knew that this was like a needle sewing this layer of genealogies,” Thompson said. “The names of the navigators and canoes have remained in our language, never lost. I believe that the ocean is the oldest language in our country—the understanding of the ocean and the heavens and the cosmos and the atmosphere and the bird and the waves. This is the first language, the language that got us between these long distances.”

Thompson spoke with an inherent spirituality and strength, so it was hard to imagine him as anything but the gentle leader he is now. But he continually spoke of his own fears as a young man.

On their voyage back, Piailug dropped out over disagreements between the scientific, cultural, and spiritual motivations of the original crew. He left a voice recorder with the message, “Do not look for me. You will not find me.” Without Piailug, the return crew was forced to use Western methods of navigation. Thompson took this as a bad omen and, in a moment of fear, mentioned that he wanted to quit. An elder walked right up to him with tears in his eyes and grabbed his shirt. “‘Hey, boy. Don’t you ever talk about quitting.’ He came really close to me and said, ‘You get on this canoe and take her home. It’s your time.’”

Thompson told the story as if it had happened yesterday. “I knew I had to go. That’s what courage is: not the absence of fear but to do what you need to, even when you are truly afraid.”

After his return to Hawaiʻi, Thompson continued to voyage with Hōkūleʻa but struggled to recognize the patterns of nature without a teacher. He spent long visits at the planetarium at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu after hours, tracking the patterns of the sun, moon, and constellations. Piailug’s departure had been an invaluable loss to the PVS. Despite his hours of study, Thompson could not master the techniques Piailug had perfected.

Realizing he needed a mentor, Thompson spent months searching for Piailug throughout Micronesia. After an accident that caused the infamous loss of Hawaiian surfing legend Eddie Aikau, Piailug called Thompson. “I will train you to find Tahiti because I don’t want you to die,” he told him.

Thompson spent the next twenty-eight months with Piailug. The first day of class, Piailug drew out a star compass in the sand, using stones to represent the constellations. Thompson learned slowly, sitting in tide pools and feeling the subtle movements of the water, swimming in the ocean at night to get used to sailing in darkness. He learned that Piailug was from Satawal, a small Micronesian island with about 600 residents. There were not enough resources to sustain the population, so navigation was about survival. Mau’s connection to the night sky was incredible. At one dinner, the crew asked Piailug to point to the Southern Cross, and he pointed straight to the constellation without even looking up.

Piailug told the story of how his grandfather, Satawal’s master navigator, taught him to listen to the cues from nature. “At the age of one, he was selected to carry on the family legacy of navigation,” Thompson said. “He placed him in tide pools at different parts of the island so he could play. He played to know what it was like to feel wind, to touch sand, to hear birds, to taste salt. He learned the feeling of different parts of the island. By five years old, he was on his first deep-sea voyage.”

Thompson got quiet as he recounted the lessons of Piailug’s grandfather, and I found myself holding my breath. “His grandfather let him go inside the ocean so he could go inside the wave. ‘When you enter the wave,’ he said, ‘you become the wave. And once you become the wave, you are the navigator.’ The difference between man and everyone else is that there is no difference between the wave, the star, the lightning, the bird, and the wind.”

I remembered that Kamalu had mentioned the inherent spirituality behind traditional navigation. “There’s going to be things when navigating,” she said, tilting her head, as if unsure how to continue, “that won’t make sense when you do the math.”

Apo had nodded in agreement. He told me a story about the first time he navigated: he and four others had stayed up through the night, agreeing that the small atoll they were searching for would be directly along the horizon at sunrise. When the sun rose, there was no sign of an island, and as they sailed further, they began to worry. Apo wondered if they should turn the canoe around. But finally, they noticed two white birds that typically stay closer to land.

“The birds came straight from the horizon, and split the boat in half,” Apo said. A minute later, the atoll appeared.

Thompson remembered the fear he experienced when navigating on his own for the first time. He had planned to lead a voyage to Hilo, but it had stormed for days. “If I can’t go, I can’t fail,” he remembered thinking. Suddenly, Piailug appeared soaking wet, with a simple message: “We are going to go.” Piailug said, “The storm is going to come. You get up and turn to the wind until you get through it. The storms on the ocean are big and beautiful. All you need to do is pay them respect.

“But that is not what worries me about you, Nainoa,’ he continued as Thompson looked up with surprise. “Because in you, there are always two storms: one on the outside and one on the inside. That’s the storm I worry about. The storm inside you.” 

Thompson said that this broke through to him. “I had always dealt with fear by hiding it behind an imaginary door. So long as the door is closed, I was okay. Piailug helped me open the door and hold fear as a good friend.”

After this, Thompson was free to become the leader his community needed, although he denies he has led anyone. The respect he has for his teachers is present in all his stories. But he told me that as important as it is to acknowledge his ancestors and teachers, he is much more focused on the future. “It is critical we support the next generation,” he said with quiet reverence. “They will be the ones to heal the Earth—the greatest task of any navigator.

 “We tell children now that they should be afraid of nature, afraid of their future,” he continued. “We must change this.” Education was a large part of the crew’s Moananuiākea voyage, the mission to inspire future navigators to safeguard the oceans.

The Hōkūleʻa crew has faced recent obstacles. The Lahaina fires in Maui halted the Moananuiākea journey, and changing sea levels and conditions have stalled further sailing until 2025. In a press release, Thompson stated, “We are in a changing ocean, and we need to pay attention.”

But the crew is used to such a change in tides. They’ve spent the delay recruiting members and training new navigators. Hōkūleʻa is meant to serve as a beacon of hope, Kamalu reminded us.

“We can look back on our history as Hawaiians to times that were very dark and uncomfortable to reflect on,” she said. “People use storms as a metaphor for this, dark times where the weather brings challenges.” After all, the word Hōkūleʻa means “star of gladness.” “You have to hold onto the light that will come at the end of those storms, and just head toward it.”

Now seventy-one years old, Thompson feels his voyaging career winding down. When I asked about his legacy, I sensed him withdrawing. “I don’t see I have a legacy. I have a responsibility, kuleana.” He took a beat. “Extinction stops when your students are better than you.”

*****

As we drove out of the industrial landscape, Jazea and I stopped to walk along the beach. We were inspired by this extraordinary perseverance of culture and by a series of spiritual lessons we had been lucky enough to receive. The crew had graciously let us inside their home aboard Hōkūleʻa, allowing us to become a part of their team for one small moment. The tide rushed in, engulfing our feet in the white of sea foam, and, slowly, the purple of twilight began to set in. We felt a part of everything. Jazea told me that the gift of the canoe was present in moments like these. We placed our feet in reflective tide pools and listened for the sounds of the family of nature.

Above our heads, the stars came out one by one to dance, reflected along the black pools of the ocean. Over the horizon, the star of gladness rested directly over Hawaiʻi’s latitude, just as it did fifty years ago when Thompson returned from Tahiti, and as it did thousands of years before that. Behind us, Hōkūleʻa sat waiting like a jewel in velvet, ready to guide her children home.

Grace McCarty is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a recent American history commencement speaker and graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She currently resides in San Francisco, her hometown, and hopes to continue documenting stories that highlight the diverse human experiences that create culture, art, history, and local news.

Jazea Kalea Smith is a photographer with a special love for 35mm and medium-format film. She is studying religious studies and oceanography at California Polytechnic University, Humboldt. She hopes to work in the field of marine resource management in addition to pursuing and continuing to hone her journalistic photography skills.

Special thanks to Sonja Swenson Rogers, Lehua Kamalu, Jonah Apo, Nainoa Thompson, and the Polynesian Voyaging Society for their contributions and endless support in writing this story.