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What good would it be to sail around the world, the voyage’s leaders often said, if no one else outside the canoe could share in the journey?
During the past three years, Malama Honua crew members helped bring the Hokule‘a into the classroom through live video chats and email correspondence with about 150 “adopted” schools, most of them in Hawaii.
In faraway ports, Hawaii’s master and apprentice navigators taught local children and onlookers the basics of navigating a Polynesian sailing canoe. Crew members often visited local schools to encourage kids to care for the environment.
At a school outside Cape Town, South Africa, where many of the students lacked basic amenities at home, crews skipped their usual message of sustainability and instead donated hundreds of portable plastic desks.
At the Auckland, New Zealand, suburb of Point England, crews anchored just offshore and came onto the beach to greet about 2,000 students from 12 elementary schools. The students, most of them indigenous Maori, performed chants and learned the basics of the Hawaiian star compass. Crews provided open-house tours of the Hokule‘a just about everywhere they went.
Throughout the odyssey, the Polynesian Voyaging Society was relentless in its education and outreach efforts, opening a Hokule‘a voyage to students and the public as it never had before. The organization reports having engaged more than 100,000 people during the voyage, based on its crew members’ regular counts of how many people they met and the passers-by who came aboard.
“The whole idea was to focus on learners of all ages, from keiki to kupuna, and inspire them on what they already care about and to learn about the world and then to take action,” said Jenna Ishii, PVS’ education coordinator and one of the organization’s two full-time employees working on outreach and education programs.
Back in Hawaii, scores of educators incorporated the voyage into their classes.
About 600 public and private school teachers attended “wa‘a talks” — quarterly summits where they shared voyage-influenced lesson plans and curriculum with one another. The University of Hawaii at Manoa’s College of Education launched a new master’s program inspired by the voyage’s ideals.
When the Hokule‘a left Hawaii, Lunalilo Elementary School embarked on its own schoolwide “learning voyage,” integrating Malama Honua themes of conservation into its science and writing classes. Hokule‘a crew member Maui Taotaha sent the students videotaped “shout-outs” from the canoe deck while holding Lunalilo’s stuffed-animal hawk mascot, Imi Loa, in front of stormy deep-sea swells and distant atolls.
Mary Anna Enriquez, a teacher at Sacred Hearts School in Lahaina, said the voyage moved her to give her middle school students more autonomy in what they choose to learn.
“The whole idea is, you’ve got to change your teaching to match the times,” said Enriquez, who sailed aboard the Hikianalia in 2014. “When the original navigators came across, they didn’t know what they were going to find. It’s the idea of a wayfinder, a navigator, that pretty much runs my classroom. It will help them navigate to whatever harbor where they’re going to end up.”
Enriquez said she uses the Hokule‘a crew’s online blogs to help teach her students to write. She also brings them to the Lahaina Yacht Club about five times a semester to learn sailing basics and then sail 10-foot-long boats. The school created a vegetable garden, which students use to make lunch salads.
“Malama Honua teaches us that we are all connected and the earth is our canoe,” James Hill, Enriquez’s former student at Sacred Hearts, said during a 2014 TEDxYouth talk. “We must care for our canoe, and we must care for each other.”
It’s the sentiment that voyage organizers aimed to imbue in as many of Hawaii’s nearly 220,000 elementary and high school students as possible.
“You can’t protect something (that) you don’t understand,” said PVS President and Hokule‘a captain Nainoa Thompson.
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