The Hula Preservation Society, the BYU-Hawaii Joseph F. Smith Library and the University Archives honored great hula masters with a hula performance for students and the community on Tuesday, May 5. Digital footage of five award ceremonies from the 1980s of “Na Makua Mahaloia: Cultural Greats of the 20th Century” were shown. Maile Loo, executive director of the HPS, said the audience watched recordings of the performance and got “a little glimpse into the magic that was Na Makua. They also learned why it was worth all this effort and time of raising money and working on it over the course of years and why it’s irreplaceable.” The organizations’ goals are to gain awareness for the project that has been in the works for years. The audiovisual footage has been restored and repaired by the Archives and then digitized with the help of BYUH alumni Dr. Ishmael Stagner and HPS so it could be available for the public. The footage shown at the presentation is still available at the University Archives and at the HPS in Kaneohe. The BYUH University Archives is open regular hours while the HPS is open in Kaneohe onlyby appointment. In 1980, Stagner noticed hula dancers and masters were growing old and disappearing without recognition. Stagner grew up surrounded by hula and talented people, his mother being a kumu hula. He created Na Makua Mahaloia in 1980 to honor hula masters for the work they had done in contributing to the Hawaiian culture. The first performance was three-and-a-half hours long and filled with awards, hula, and singing. A Ke Alaka‘i article of the time wrote, “It was a family reunion, with love showered in every direction, tears flowing freely and the Hawaiian mother-tongue blending all into a cultural and artistic unity that became a wholeness, a completeness.” The performance became popular and continued to honor others for another five shows until 1989. The events were filmed and stored in the University Archives for 30 years until Dr. Stagner approached it with a proposal to digitize them and make them public. The work was able to go faster and gain a broader audience thanks to the HPS, according to Matt Kester, the archivist on campus. “The Hula Preservation Society is literally the ultimate partner for us. They’re great to work with, nice people and have a fantastic network of individuals. It would have been great if we had just digitized everything ourselves and put it on our website, but it wouldn’t have been able to reach as many people and the right people – the people who are going to be interested and really going to use the collection.” Loo said,“When we first learned about this Na Makua Collection from the late Dr. Ishmael Stagner, we were just blown away. The people he honored were the teachers a generation or two before the ones we’ve been interviewing because we do oral histories with hula elders. It’s invaluable because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Culturally and historically, everything that is imparted over the course of these five concerts is just a treasure.” Representatives of HPS and the Archives say they want to build a website open to the public with the audiovisual footage and photos they have gathered together. “It’s not so much about us. It’s about the production,” said Loo. “It’s going to continue to just deteriorate if nothing is done about it. We’re still working on it. Still hustling, still getting our applications, proposals and things of all levels to make it happen.” “It’s very rewarding because I know how I felt when I saw it and I want other people to experience that,” said Loo, reminiscing on her experience working on the project. “I could see two generations back on stage, dancing family songs. They’re not just names in a book or names in someone’s genealogy. They’re alive, doing their thing and being celebrated in this twilight time of their lives, which is a very special thing to do.” Keau George, a collections manager at the HPS, said working on the project was “very humbling and I learned a lot with my time, especially with Uncle ‘Ish’. There are things I’ve learned through the process and spending time with him that I wouldn’t have been exposed to or able to learn anywhere else.” “We wouldn’t have been able to partner with the HPS if it wasn’t for Dr. Stagner,” said Kester. “Cradle to the grave, it’s his project and he brought the right people together before he moved on. He was able to do that before he passed away and left us, cementing his legacy as somebody who is a real scholar of hula and Hawaiian composition.”Uploaded May 22, 2015
Writer: Rachel Reed
