Puaʽa Kalua Akima: One Family’s Legacy of Traditional Hawaiian Values
The lūʽau feast is traditionally much more than a party, it was a ritual for noting life passages by connecting with the aumākua as well as strengthening the bonds within the ʽohana. The pig has always been at the center of the feast and according to Tūtū Pukui, “The puaʽa (pig), had long been the preferred sacrifice to the gods. Taro leaves were a vegetable symbol of the pig; āholehole fish, considered a puaʽa kai “sea pig”, also symbolized and could be a substitute for the real puaʽa.”
Papa Willie is a quiet powerful presence, a man of few words. He began his puaʽa kalua apprenticeship on Oʽahu at the age of nine. “My Uncle’s the guy taught me. He’s David Kailio. He catered a lot of parties in Honolulu.” Creating and sharing delicious food in great abundance has been the kuleana of the Akima ʽOhana for many generations. Kala: “I remember my Aunty Honey, that’s my grandmother’s sister and she was married to Uncle David. We would get in the car and go. In those days I remember they had those front loader washing machines and I can see the squid in there turning around and that’s how they would soften or pound the squid.”
Papa was born in Kaʽalaea, between Waiahole and Kahaluu in windward Oʽahu. He was fifteen when he moved to the Big Island with his mom. “My grandparents’ house is right down the road here”, adds Kala. “In 1961, his mother, my grandmother opened Hawaiian Style. The original restaurant was named Elaine’s Hale Kuke. What is the same today is the counter. Just a counter and she cooked right there so she could be cooking and talking to people at the same time.”
Papa Willy and his family were one of the original Kuhio Village Hawaiian homesteaders, recipients of the 1952 Hawaiian Homelands land grants. And although Willie lived on the Big Island and his wife Lorna was from Maui, they met on Oʽahu. Aunty Lorna: “He would go to Oʽahu to work in the canary. And I would come to Honolulu for the summer for summer vacation and it just so happened that my cousin married his uncle. So we share a cousin. My cousin married his uncle and I would stay with them and that’s how we met.”
Papa’s first job was “setting” the imu, which has to be done in a very particular order and involves a lot of gathering, hauling and cutting. Each layer in the imu requires much labor. Willie Boy shares the process, “You determine how much pigs you going to do, it determines how much wood you going to put, it determines how long the fire needs to burn to drop all these stones down lower into the pit. We normally burn our imu for say about 4 or 5 hours dad?”
Lūʽau preparation has been passed down through the generations and except for the kindling, everything for the lūʽau is gathered from the ʽaina. Willie Boy continues describing the process, “After you get done digging the imu, you get kindling started. We normally use the old fence posts from the ranch like the redwood. We split em up and put newspaper and all this redwood kindling on top of it. We normally use kiawe or mesquite like they call it on the mainland. We start with the smaller mesquite and then put the bigger pieces of kiawe logs on top. Then after the wood we put the river worn stones, or imu stones and you cover all the wood with the stones.”
The next layer is the banana trees. “It’s the cushion for the pig. We cut the banana trees, cut it into pieces then we mash it all down so we can shred it. You look at the fire and you can adjust the banana stumps and it determines how much heat the fire’s going to put out. So the bigger the pig, the longer you leave the pig in, the thicker the banana stumps you going to need.” Then finally after there is, “A blanket of banana stumps down… you put the pig on top of that in a wire cage.” Papa Willie adds, “The banana is the most important part. It tells you how long you can cook it. If you’re going to leave it overnight then you need to put it a little thicker. If you want it for just 4 or 5 hours then you want it thinner.”
Now it’s time to light the imu, or is it? Willie Boy continues, in typical self-effacing style, “And then you determine when you’re going to light the imu. You need to get that right, because we made a mistake once. Papa gave the time but he didn’t specify a.m. or p.m. So we went ahead and lit the imu 12 hours ahead of time. Once you start that imu there’s no stopping it. It’s going to burn.”
Grandson Amas, whose kuleana it is to prepare the pig, speaks in the same soft-spoken manner of his Papa. “For us, the pigs are raised right at my uncle’s house for whenever we do kalua pig, right here raised organic, no shots.” Planning depends on the occasion and how many people there will be, “…it’s all a calculation about how big the pig to the wood to the banana stump. That’s the calculation you need to know.” But that was a secret formula we were not going to find out. “If we tell you…” Along with these calculations, timing is also very important adds Willie Boy. “There’s a schedule for our lūʽaus. We stick to the schedule we learned all this from our dad over there. We try to set the imu 2-3 days ahead of time. We light the fire, we got the water boiling for the pig and then we kill the pig.”
When the imu is set and the pig is inside on top of the banana stump, “… then the ti leaf covers the pig and the burlap goes on top, then you put the dirt on top. Most important to put a lot of dirt on, because once you see the smoke come out, that’s where the pigs going to get burnt. Somebody has to be on watch all night, constantly walking out, checking the imu to see if it leaks.” When the pig is cooked, the whole process is done in reverse, taking care to dispose of each layer as it comes out.
Then the pig comes out, “We take the pig out and shake the wire and the meat just falls off the bone. We take it right out of the imu, into the cooler and to the party. All the leftovers go to everybody who helped prepare for the party. Family from off island, from the mainland and the next day the neighbors are all eating good. Everybody has lunch over here.”
Another tradition for the Akima’s is military service, most recently Amas, but even in such distant places as Germany, Hawaiian traditions are carried with them. “Me and another guy Pi’i, Aunty Pua Correaʽa nephew, he was in the same company, same battalion I was in. I walked by and he looked at me. He was a battalion commander’s driver and I was in-processing and he looks at my name and we started talking. We met up with the rest of the guys. There was another guy from Pepeekeo…it was at his house we did the pig. We just dug a hole and seeing that there’s no banana stump or ti leaf, we used newspaper and cabbage. There were no imu stones, so we just used blue stones and whatever rocks was there. They were exploding because they couldn’t take the heat, so we stood back. There wasn’t enough heat because of the stones so we uncovered it and we had to rotisserie. There was the flavor and the smoke and everybody was there from Hawaii.”
Kuʽulei: “A very important value that I know is ingrained here. Remember I started off and I used this word poke, just a small phrase and here is the sequence. Nana ka maka,(look with your eyes); ho’olohe pepe’iao (listen with your ears); pa’a kou waha (close your mouth); hana ka lima (work with your hands). Papa, back in the day learned with these four core values” and he has passed it on to the next generations.
These values are being perpetuated by sharing and accepting kuleana from a young age. Kala: “Lu’au has always been a part of us and everyone had a kuleana. The boys do whatever kuleana there is. My dad has the last say,” When did the boys start working lūʽau? Amas and Alika hesitate and Willie Boy says, “When they tall enough to stand over the pig head. If you can reach, grab that thing. “Once you tall enough, even if you cannot grab the leg. Carry propane tank. If they’re standing there, we’ll pretty much get them involved. All the hard work, the young boys do em. My nephew, Willett’s son Kekoa, Brad all the guys that aren’t here. All the shoveling that’s all these guys. You got to work your way up from the bottom. You got to do all the hard lifting the shoveling, if there’s an extra shovel, then I’ll grab the shovel, but we bring just enough for the young kids. It’s good times, fun times. We hang around the imu until late, playing cards and talking story.”
And so the kuleana is passed on. Papa Willie: “I used to be the stamp of approval, but right now this crew, the 3 of them, they know for what to do. I just keep back now and watch. I just watch.” The mutual respect and regard the members of this ʽohana have for each other comes through their deferential manner and as an unseen deep connection that ties their stories together as one. Through this connection there is humor and joy. “Last night Dad tells me, ‘No forget tomorrow, we got to take the chairs out’. I look at him and I tell him, ‘I got to work late tomorrow’. He almost spit his water out. I call Alika, tell him, ‘No forget tomorrow’ and he tell me, ‘Oh, we working late tomorrow. Start at twelve o’clock’. I call Amas’ from work to remind him it’s today and he’s like, ‘Oh we working late today’. They’re working the mountain on the trails and stuff, so I get home and I call him up and tell him, ‘So what, you at the house?’ He goes, ‘Oh no’. So I tell him, ‘You better get to the house, cause I’m not there yet’. He tells me, ‘Where you at?’ I told him, ‘I’m at Kawaihae. I’m working late.’”
Kuʽulei: “This is an absolute treasure. I don’t know how else to word it, or explain it. What we see before us is absolute maintenance, preservation, continuation. In my particular lifestyle, the paniolo lifestyle, it’s far and few between now. More and more the lifestyle itself, it is changing. To go from a horse to a four wheeler, it’s more efficient now. I can honestly say that a cowboy can be hired and he may not necessarily know how to shoe his own horse. How odd is that? So it’s important, so important to maintain what you know and pass it on, pass that baton and teach.”
The wisdom of Hawaiian traditions and values are providing a path to sustainability and the future survival of the earth. The ability to feed ourselves, work as a village, a community and the ability to be really present, to see, to hear, to work with our hands. These are the gifts that the Akima ʽOhana are perpetuating within the family and within our small community.