We often don't notice what's under our feet. But not the moena weavers. They feel the smooth plaits of lauhala (pandanus leaves) beneath their soles. They walk across the mats and listen to the way the dried leaves rustle. For one weaver the sound unlocks memories of the moena, or traditional floor mats, in her grandmother's house, mats she did not remember until that moment. Lise-Michelle Childers, waking up in Mokuleia, Oahu, during a moena repair retreat, swung her feet out of bed and planted them on the mat beneath her and smiled, closing her eyes in bliss. "Moena abundance," she would later say as she led the morning welcome circle. To the twenty weavers gathered that day last September, she said that ulana, which in Hawaiian means to weave, also means to prophesize. So she asked them, What was their prophecy for the day, for the future? Hers was moena abundance. That more homes, maybe even one day her own, would have such large moena covering the floors, like the one at the North Shore estate they were in now. It is only in the presence of such abundance that I now recognize their rarity—when was the last time I saw such moena, or walked on one?
Later, we examine the moena on the property that the group is here to repair. All but one are older than any of us, our ages ranging from three to 74. In the guest house we encircle "the finest mat of all the moena that live here on the grounds," says Marques Hanalei Marzan, a curator and cultural adviser at Bishop Museum. "It's definitely an inspiration." It is about ten by fifteen feet, striated in light and dark shades of tightly and evenly woven slender strips of lau hala. It gleams in the morning light, smoothed and softened from a century of wear. Marzan guesses it was made in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and judging from the consistency of tension in the weave, likely by a single person. How long did it take that person? It's difficult to know: "It depends on their ability and availability of time to commit to a project, because as we all know it's so hard to say, 'I'm going to spend two months on nothing else but this one thing.' We can't do that anymore, versus our kupuna [elders]." For reference, a slightly smaller mat with much wider strips of lauhala took him six weeks, working a few hours a day.
"It's interesting thinking about one person making one mat," says Emma Broderick, the executive director of Puuhonua Society, a nonprofit Native Hawaiian arts collective leading these moena repair workshops. "So much of our focus has been on how we can get many hands on one mat." Things have indeed changed from the days of moena abundance, when there once was a mat in every home, a weaver in every family and time.
When the current homeowner (who prefers to remain anonymous) and her family bought the property in 2010, she fell in love with the mats from the moment she saw photos of the house. "Right from the beginning, to me they were part of the structure, part of the house, so I just continued to protect them," she says. Some of them were likely made for the home, which was built in 1936. But after a few years they were in need of repair. "Many people probably would have thrown them away, but because the spirit of the mats was, for me, part of that house, I just kept talking to people," looking for someone to mend them. She finally connected with Maile Meyer, Broderick's mother, who told her, "Hang on, I am working on a project to develop weavers because this craft should not die." And so the homeowner waited. And finally, in 2017, Keanahala, the community program Meyer founded to reclaim the knowledge and practice of weaving moena lau hala, came to care for the mats. They have come almost every year since.
The homeowner remembers one time in 2019, when Keanahala had come to repair the moena and found the house flooded. "Every mat was saturated. If they hadn't been there, I would have irreparably damaged the mats trying to lift them and get them out. But because there's mana [spiritual power] in the property, and in those mats, they were there, and they cared for them and dried them out. Nobody would have ever taken care of those mats the way they did."
Fiber artist Marques Hanalei Marzan (seen above repairing a large legacy moena, or traditional floor mat), remembers growing up among the lau hala hats his great-grandmother had made and hearing stories of the single, large moena she wove, which conformed to the footprint of her house in Kona.
Weavers of all levels of experience join Keanahala, which means the "hala cave," a reference to historical accounts of "weavers who sought refuge from the sun's heat in cool, damp caves to weave," Broderick says. "The caves' conditions were optimal, keeping the lau [leaves] pliable, preventing damage and breaking when weaving." She says her mother was introduced to weaving through the bookstore and shop that Meyer founded, Na Mea Hawaii, which showcases Native Hawaiian arts and hosts classes—in the past it included those by the late master weaver Gladys Kukana Grace, famous for her finely patterned papale, or hats. Meyer tried her hand at a few papale, but "she's not really a fancy person, and she began wondering, 'What else can you weave?'" Broderick says. "That's how she got to moena."
Before Western contact, Hawaiians wove the sturdy lau hala into moena for living spaces and pea (sails) for voyaging canoes—papale came much later, with the missionaries. Families used to have a "healer in every home, board and stone in every home, weaver in every home." When people moved into a dwelling, Broderick says, "the first thing kupuna did was sit in a corner and weave a moena just for that specific home. You don't leave with it. You make it for every home."
These days, however, you're more likely to see papale, fetching $400 and upward, than moena, partly due to the sheer amount of material needed to make mats. A hat may take about twenty lau versus the thousand needed for an eight-by-ten-foot mat. On that first repair day in Mokuleia in 2017, the weavers gathered four thousand leaves to fix just a single moena. The hala tree (Pandanus tectorius) was once so prolific in Hawaii that one moolelo (story) tells of Pele being entangled in its roots. In her frustration, she tore them apart and threw them in every direction, spreading the tree across the Islands. But as urban development destroyed hala forests, what was once abundant is now relatively scarce.
About twenty years ago, when Meyer became interested in moena and began conversations with weaving kumu to start Keanahala, they realized that "if you're going to develop the ono [taste] for weaving in people, then you also need to develop the ono for planting," Broderick says. And so most of Keanahala's work comes before the weaving, in planting pu hala (hala trees), caring for them and harvesting and preparing their long, bladelike leaves. Or as Lyanne Kapiolani Naipo Binkauski calls the process, "kanu to kukaa"—kanu meaning planting and kukaa the rolls of lau ready to weave.
Binkauski came to lau hala weaving one Sunday morning in 2015. She was driving her dad to church along Likelike Highway, and they passed a grove of hala. The sight seemed to unlock his memory, and "he took me back to his childhood, when he spent a lot of time with his mother collecting lau hala," Binkauski says. "At that time I had no concept about hala. All I knew was beautiful hats and mats." Until that point she didn't know she descended from a family of weavers. But even then it wasn't until two years later, when her father passed away, that a cousin told her that Binkauski's father, too, was a weaver. "He never told me," she says.
She attributes his reticence to the era in which he was raised, when Indigenous practices were suppressed and Western influences were assimilated. Now, she says, she's "come full circle" and is the kahu (caretaker) for multiple hala groves. She says that every island had at least one famous hala grove—on Oahu they were in Kahala and Kaneohe, where she grew up. On Maui, though, most have been decimated by the hala scale insect, which continues to be a threat, along with new invasives, like the coconut rhinoceros beetle, which is also destroying Hawaii's coconut palms. She talks of each affected tree like a sick relative, so deeply does she feel each assault. Of her renewed connection to hala, she says, "I did not realize at that time how transformative it would be for me, my spirit, my being in every sense." She reminds me that the word hala can mean death. And transition.
"Hala has always been symbolic of Hawaii," says Nick White, whose family owns an estate in Laie where weaving group Keanahala has harvested the leaves of hala trees, like the one seen above, to malama, or care for, the property's moena. "There's something about the tree that's very comforting to me, that makes me feel at home and safe. And the feel of a hala mat is so grounding."
"In English we call this one banana bread," says Lorna May, known as Auntie Lorna, pointing to the little brown dashes in a pale dried lau hala. In Hawaiian: "kikokiko," or dotted. Sometimes the spots are more like speckles, and sometimes the entire leaf is patterned so "it looks like it's moving, like it's almost alive," Auntie Lorna says. As with many disciplines, to be a weaver is to be attuned to details that the rest of the world doesn't see. She says dark lau are particularly prized; Hawaii Island is famous for its red hala; and the native thorned variety—"the most coveted and sought after"—is reserved for hat making.
It's a few weeks after the repair retreat, and we are on an expansive estate in Laie, standing under a hala tree that Keanahala planted about twenty years ago. It is a thornless variety, called kilipaki, after the Hawaiian name for the Gilbert Islands, where it's from. "It's a hardier leaf, thicker, more utilitarian," Auntie Lorna says, which makes it great for mats. And that it's thornless is a huge plus for processing. "We like the thornless because the beginners don't like to get poked, and we don't want to chase them off the first time."
Auntie Lorna says she came into weaving when looking for something to do after she retired. She tried making kapa (bark cloth) but couldn't handle the smell of the fermentation, and she found she was allergic to the down in feather lei making. Then her husband gifted her a class with Gladys Grace. "What really spoke to me was the first day, when she said, 'I am not going to just teach you how to take these leaves and weave them, but I'm also going to teach you how to weave relationships and how to weave the past and the present,'" she recalls. Auntie Lorna, who is part Chinese, part Hawaiian, part English, was raised by her Chinese paternal grandparents, who told her to suppress her Hawaiian heritage. "That part of my life was cut out," she says. It wasn't until the classes with Grace that she connected to her Hawaiian identity and culture.
"Don't grab it and look away. Look at what you're touching," Auntie Lorna tells us. We've harvested the dry, brown leaves from the trees and are preparing to strip the leaves from the hard ribs. But carefully: When you open up the lau's folds, there are "all kinds of goodies," she says, like gecko eggs, swarming ants and—worst of all—centipedes. We're all jumpy, for we have already spotted one slithering out of the lau, and another has bitten one of us on the finger.
Every other week, Keanahala hosts gathering days, usually at this Laie estate or on the grounds of Germaine's Luau, and they also gather for weekly prep days at Ward Centre in Honolulu. It takes weeks of cleaning, stripping, rolling, winding and curing before lau are ready for weaving. After all that, the stiff brown leaves are surprisingly supple and smooth yet strong enough to outlive us all.
"There's a beautiful relationship to [a mat] if you are walking barefoot," says Emma Broderick, director of the nonprofit leading the moena repair workshops. "Our body oils soften it and make it shine, and the moena's so happy. It's meant to be sat on. Meant to be with us."
Keanahala teaches its members not only about the care that goes into a mat before it even exists but also how to care for it once it does. In what other craft are beginners allowed to handle a century-old work? It's like walking into the Louvre and touching up a Picasso. Part of it, of course, is that mats are made to be used: trodden on, scraped by furniture, dribbled with soda. The moena in themselves are not as precious as what they bring together, what they represent.
"I always love the idea of taking care of, adding my mana and my hand and energy to things that have been made previously from generations," Marzan says. "It is a reminder that we're all connected, that stories continue on through what I'm doing today. It's also an affirmation of community. We need each other to get certain things done."
Back at the Mokuleia property, weavers are patching torn pieces and frayed edges of the moena, overlaying them with new strips of lau. To repair something is to know it intimately—to give names like giri-giri (pidgin for cowlick) to inconsistencies like three strips in the mat converging into one, to puzzle over the decisions of the weavers before them. The mats provide hints to their origins. Not all of them were made in Hawaii—one mat, Marzan guesses, based on its size and serrated edges, is from Tonga.
Over three days the weavers of Keanahala repair the mats; they refresh themselves in the ocean in front; they take refuge in the space, in each other, in their hands, in the hala. "We are both prophesying and also the prophecy fulfilled," says Broderick in the welcome circle. "We're still here; we decided to come back. I'm really grateful to get to continue the work and know that if you leave today, the work will continue. The kukaa that we're using to weave were maybe made by you, but probably not, so somebody else is allowing you to weave. So just deep gratitude for the work of Keanahala. We benefit from the foresight of our ancestors and work with our descendants in mind."
