Inside the “Experience Oregon” exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society in downtown Portland, a man called Naukane has a modest panel to himself. As drawn in an 1847 portrait, this early visitor to Oregon – one of 24 Hawaiian men who arrived in 1811 to set up a trading post on the Columbia River for fur mogul John Jacob Astor – looks somber, perhaps resigned, as if he carries the weight of his native Hawai’i on his shoulders. In a way he does, for the panel with his portrait, a caption and two accompanying paragraphs is the 7,000-square-foot exhibit’s sole nod to more than two centuries of Hawaiian history in Oregon.
CULTURAL HUBS: An Occasional Series
An inset bears the headline “Traces of Hawaiian Communities in Oregon Today.” The text explains that 19th-century state laws designated Hawaiians as “a race … that we do not desire to settle in Oregon.” As a result, “Hawaiians had little opportunity to build a community in Oregon.” They moved on, the text says, leaving evidence of their presence mostly in place names such as the Owyhee River in eastern Oregon.
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That might be news to the approximately 40,000 Oregonians today who identify with the U.S. Census category of “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone or in any combination” – a number equivalent to the population of Lake Oswego. More than 2,500 miles from Hawai’i, events, gatherings and organizations throughout Oregon, particularly in the Portland-Vancouver metro area, regularly share and strengthen the “Aloha spirit.”
HAWAIIAN CULTURE AT THE HĀLAU
Growing up in Hillsboro in the 1960s and ‘70s, Lisa Chang didn’t experience much diversity. Then she went to Oregon State University and befriended several Japanese American students from Hawai’i.
They encouraged her to join the Hawai’i club with them, she said. When it came time for the lū’au – Oregon State’s goes back nearly 70 years – they urged her to learn to dance, and dance with them. “That was my first real connection to hula,” she said.
While living in California after college, Chang took classes at a hālau, a school that teaches hula dance and culture. Upon her return to Oregon, she connected with a Hawaiian club that asked her to share what she’d learned.
Hālaus don’t just teach the official dance of Hawai’i – they preserve it. They are led by teachers called kumu hulas who are “masters of the art, practice, and profession of Hula” and who “have maintained, cared for, created, and advanced the practices, perspectives, and products of Hula through space and time,” according to the 2021 Huamakahikina Declaration on the Integrity, Stewardship, & Protection of Hula.
Chang told the club she needed her kumu’s permission to teach, then trained with the teacher. Each kumu teaches within a hula lineage – a style and method passed down through generations. Chang is part of a lineage with roots on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
She started teaching in her garage in 1998 with five adult students. Word spread, and today her school, Hula Hālau ‘Ohana Holo‘oko‘a, has about 100 students from ages 3 to 84. Eleven classes a week meet over Zoom or in a Beaverton dance studio. Hālau members have performed at birthday parties, preschools, festivals, senior communities, libraries and business events, such as a recent Beaverton Area Chamber of Commerce Coffee Connection that Chang hosted in her role as a longtime ambassador for the chamber.
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Chang, whose husband is from Hawai’i, has learned, shown and taught Hawaiian arts such as featherwork and shell jewelry, made from tiny shells found almost exclusively on the private island of Ni’ihau. She works to promote Hawaiian culture as executive director of the KIAKO Foundation, an Aloha-based nonprofit whose mission is to cultivate Hawaiian arts, language and heritage in the Pacific Northwest. Its signature event is a weeklong summer camp where kids in first through seventh grades learn about Hawaiian language, music, hula, art and food.
“My joy is the connections,” Chang said. “Bringing Hawai’i to people.”
A COMMUNITY CENTERED ON LŪ’AU
Lū’aus began centuries ago in Hawai’i as ritual meals attended solely by men. They’ve since become informal and festive events where anyone can enjoy food, drink and entertainment. At more than a half-dozen Oregon universities that enroll Hawaiian students, lū’aus have been a springtime tradition for decades, drawing attendees from as far as, well, Hawai’i.
Pacific University, in the Washington County city of Forest Grove, touts its annual Lū’au and Hō’ike as the only completely student-run and -directed lū’au in the Northwest. It’s organized by the university’s Nā Haumāna O Hawai’i club, founded in 1959. The university has recruited students from Hawai’i since the late 1950s and is connected with more than 6,700 people in Hawai’i, including alumni, current students, parents of current and former students, trustees and current and former employees, said Pacific’s associate director of communications, Blake Timm.
Janalei Chun, the university’s director of Hawaiʻi outreach and programming, joined the club herself as a homesick Pacific freshman from Hawai’i. As a junior, she became food chair for Lū’au and Hō’ike; as a senior, she also took part in some of the dances. Today she advises the club, which is open to anyone and has more than 300 members, nearly 10% of the university’s 2023-2024 enrollment of 3,589.
Club members start planning Lū’au and Hō’ike a year in advance, Chun said. They plan a menu and order food for three lū’au seatings. They pick a theme for the performances that make up the hō’ike. They interview and choose dance instructors. By the time about 2,000 Lū’au and Hō’ike Day ticket holders start showing up on the second Saturday in April, club members have bonded.
“The friendships that they make can last a long time,” Chun said. “Even now, I see one of my friends who I did food committee with, we will still share our memories of how we did – our mishaps and all of our triumphs during our time as chairs.”
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That bond extends to Pacific parents who help with Lū’au and Hō’ike, some of them from Hawai’i. “We have parents who come back year after year even though their students are long since graduated,” Chun said. “They’ve made friendships with other parents, and they want to share their knowledge with the incoming parents. Those connections are lifelong friendships.”
On a cloudy, cool afternoon this April, the aromas of Japanese shoyu chicken, Hawaiian Kahlua pork, Filipino long rice and Samoan coconut buns wafted through Washburne University Center, which was hosting the lū’au. Some of the food had come directly from Hawai’i, to be prepared by club members and Pacific University’s dining service.
As evening fell, a crowd formed outside Pacific’s Stoller Center. In the lobby, club members staffed a pop-up market, the Country Store, selling Hawaiian goods not readily available on the mainland: leis, fresh bouquets, macadamia nuts, candies, beverages, snacks, breads, sauces and more. In the gymnasium, site of the hō’ike, attendees looked for their seats in sections named for Hawaiian islands and greeted one another boisterously. The atmosphere was that of a giant family reunion.
For this year’s hō’ike, the club chose the theme “Tatou o Fa’atasi,” a Samoan phrase that means “United as One.” Over more than two hours, students showed the breadth of the Hawaiian ohana, or family, with performances that drew from Hawai’i, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Philippines and Japan. During some dances, audience members rushed the stage to fulfill a tradition of throwing paper money at the performers. Afterward, club alumni collected every bill.
“To see them come back and help, and then also to hear how they’re doing in the real world after they’ve graduated, it just comes full circle,” Chun said.
While Lū’au and Hō’ike is the club’s signature event, members have also shared Hawaiian culture in performances at schools, senior centers and Hillsboro Farmers’ Markets, Chun said. This spring, Noah Yamashiro of Beaverton, a music performance and economics major who was co-chair of the club’s musicians committee, offered Pacific’s first senior recital to include Hawaiian music.
Chun said the club has created a community that spans generations. “We celebrate holidays together here in Oregon and our children have grown up together and some of our children have come to Pacific as well,” she said. “So it’s a full legacy here.”
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INSTALLING AN ARTISTIC VISION
Portland artist Kanani Miyamoto once wondered if it was OK to mix art styles.
Early in her career as a printmaker, the family of European printing and printmaking techniques known as intaglio was her thing, she said in a recent artist talk. Then she learned Asian techniques such as Japanese woodblock printing.
“That really opened up my world, my art world,” she said. Combining Western and Eastern approaches to printmaking also spoke to her identity as a person of mixed heritage, including Native Hawaiian and Japanese ancestry.
She used both screen and block prints in her 2016 public art installation at the Portland Building, “Industry of Aloha.” The work depicted vivid but nonnative Hawaiian blooms atop monochromatic indigenous flora – a commentary on how tourism in Hawai’i has affected traditional cultures and lands.
Miyamoto’s current installation at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, “Across Oceans,” blends hundreds of hand-carved, cut and pulled prints that draw on symbols of her home state of Hawai’i. They fill the Reser’s second-story windows and the entrance to the nearby Beaverton City Hall. It’s her biggest installation yet.
Miyamoto said she didn’t have the installation fully planned when she began. “I showed up with hundreds of prints and a story in my head,” she said.
The story includes:
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- Kalo, a plant with heart-shaped leaves known on the U.S. mainland as taro. In Hawaiian lore, kalo was the first child of the sky father and earth mother and sustained its younger siblings, humans.
- Pua kala, the only native poppy in Hawai’i, once abundant and now a threatened species. Miyamoto included it as a nod to the delicate nature of the Hawaiian islands.
- The ‘ilima flower of O’ahu, where Miyamoto is from.
- The manu-o-Kū, a native white tern that’s a symbol of migration and navigation. Early Hawaiian sailors tracked it to return to land, and today it’s the official bird of Honolulu.
- Blue circles that contain stars, also important for ocean travel.
In a city that ranks second among Oregon cities for its Asian American population, including many of Hawaiian descent, the “Across Oceans” story spans two community landmarks, representing and celebrating connections. And from July 26-28, it’ll be the de facto centerpiece of the Legendary Makers Market: An Asian American Night Market, which will feature more than 200 vendors and partners celebrating Asian American cultures.
CONNECTING IN CLARK COUNTY
Deva Yamashiro wanted to make sure her sons and other people of Native Hawaiian descent had a way to appreciate and connect with their culture.
So in 2006 the O’ahu native, who had moved to Vancouver, established a local nonprofit called Ke Kukui Foundation to celebrate Hawaiian culture through dance, music, history, language, cooking and more.
Over the next 11 years, until Yamashiro died of cancer in 2017 at age 62, she became known as an accomplished hula teacher and a committed cultural ambassador. Shortly before her death, she had her Sept. 15 birthday declared as Deva Leinani Aiko Yamashiro Day in Vancouver and won a 2017 Governor’s Heritage Award for her contributions to the state of Washington as a master traditional artist and a tradition bearer.
Today Yamashiro’s ‘ohana, or family, carries on her work. Son Kaloku Holt serves as the foundation’s executive director and daughter-in-law Alyssa Holt, who was born and raised on Hawai’i, serves as program manager. Noting that the kukui, the state tree of Hawai’i, is a symbol of enlightenment, Alyssa Holt said, “That’s what we hope to bring to the community – that light, with cultural education, cultural connection.”
Moving to the music … and making the music. Photos: Joe Cantrell
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One way they do so is through their hālau, where students learn hula dance and culture. Another way is through Lei Day, a daylong event inspired by an annual Hawaiian celebration that honors the custom of giving and receiving lei. This year, the event filled Clark College’s Gaiser Hall with hula performances, a lei making station, a display of student-made posters about Hawaiian islands, vendors and food.
Yet another way is Four Days of Aloha, touted as the largest Native Hawaiian event in the Pacific Northwest. It began 22 years ago as a summer hula camp in a middle school cafeteria – “very intimate,” Alyssa Holt said. This year the event runs July 25-28 at Clark College and Esther Short Park in downtown Vancouver. The schedule includes an opening feast, cultural workshops, a hula competition, a daylong hō’ike, a concert featuring multiple acts, vendors, a beer garden, a kids zone and more. Tickets run from $10 for individual events to $105 for a VIP festival pass.
Then there’s the foundation’s newest endeavor: restoring the cultural center it once had. This year, the foundation bought a roughly 1,600-square-foot building off Mill Plain Boulevard, near PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center, Kaloku Holt said. The Holts plan to use the building to bring a Hawaiian cultural center back to Vancouver and Clark County so the community can “have a place to gather and not have to wait for every summer to be together,” Alyssa Holt said. Kaloku Holt envisions a space for hula, ukulele, craft workshops, language classes and other activities.
While running the foundation is hard work, hearing about its impact is its own reward, the Holts said.
“People sometimes sign up for dance classes, they want to take hula, but little do they know they’re actually signing their family up to become stewards of Hawaiian culture and Aloha spirit,” Kaloku Holt said with a laugh. Families tell the Holts how glad they are to have found others who want the same cultural connections for their children, he said.
“It’s really a blessing for us to be able to see how a culture in a little speck of the Pacific Ocean can change the trajectory of lives of children, or families for that matter, and just see how tight they can become,” he said.
FROM PAST TO PRESENT
Naukane, the 19th century visitor from Hawai’i whose portrait is at the Oregon Historical Society, has company.
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A floor below the panel that relegates Hawaiian communities to history, the historical society hosted a May 18 event titled “Celebrating Hawaiians in Oregon” in partnership with KALO Hawaiian Civic Club, a nonprofit based in Aloha, and Oregon Rises Above Hate, a coalition that formed during the pandemic in response to a wave of anti-Asian violence and harassment. Admission to the historical society was free for the day to promote the sharing of Hawaiian culture through activities and educational videos.
Participants in one of the day’s workshops bent over tables, industriously weaving narrow coconut leaves into Hawaiian hats called pāpale. As they did so, they were preserving a centuries-old tradition — and they were creating tangible evidence that they’re very much present in Oregon today.
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Coming up soon
- July 25-28: Four Days of Aloha. The 22nd annual Hawaiian Arts and Culture Festival, with workshops, performances, and many vendors at Clark College and Esther Short Park in Vancouver, Wash.
- July 26-28: Legendary Makers Market: An Asian American Night Market. A free, open-air market outside Beaverton’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, with more than 200 vendors, including several with Hawaiian food and wares.
