ABOVE: Maps, lei, woven lau hala pieces, CDs, high school yearbooks and home videos are among the many thousands of items now archived in the Moae Molokai Digital Repository, a new and growing database of the island's history and culture.
Armed with her computer, Melia Kalawe is on a mission. "A lot of people don't know who we are," she says. "So I just turn the computer around and have them type in their names."
What the festivalgoers are typing their names into is the Moae Molokai Digital Repository. While digital archives are nothing new in Hawaii, Moae Molokai is unique—made by Molokai people for Molokai-specific research. A partnership between Ka Ipu Makani Cultural Heritage Center and the Molokai Library Services Cadre, the project is funded by grants, including a $100,000 award from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The centralized, searchable database of twenty thousand-plus documents—yearbooks, newspaper collections, maps, oral history transcripts and more—went live last February.
As a student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Kalawe wanted to do research on her home island, but she ran into a problem. "I realized that there weren't many primary sources or sources in general that could capture anything about Molokai," she says. "So many Molokai-related resources are written by non-Molokaians. We'll finally be able to have our own voice, as far as the way Molokai is written about and recorded."
For archaeologist Pulama Lima, founder of Ka Ipu Makana Cultural Heritage Center, this access to primary sources amounts to what she calls "digital sovereignty," as Molokai residents now have a home for their own material history. Kalawe and Lima, with the help of local student interns, spent the better part of two years finding and scanning records dating back to the 1850s from the Hawaii State Archives, the Hawaii Public Library System, Molokai schools and local family collections. Since coming online Moae Molokai has continued to grow. Next steps include finding a space on Molokai to house some of the physical records.
For members of this small island community, the archive is not only a research tool but a scrapbook. Ric Ornellas, a longtime teacher at Molokai High School, was born and raised on Molokai. "Let's see," he says, typing "Ornellas" into the search bar. 117 hits. "Raymond Ornellas Is New Hoolehua Postmaster"; "Mrs. Ornellas to Be New Maunaloa School Secretary." "Oh my goodness," he says as he comes across a 1972 article from the Ka Molokai newspaper titled "Ornellas Home." "I was visiting home [from New York]," Ornellas recalls. "My fourth-grade teacher interviewed me."
Ornellas tries more searches. Notable Molokai events and local family names yield class photos and newspaper ads for laundry services mixed in with archaeological surveys and deer fencing plans—a collage of the personal and the historic.
"We need this," Ornellas says. "So much can be lost."
