Preservationists to offer advice on saving communities

Since childhood, Kaneohe native Mahealani Cypher loved listening to her grandmother’s family stories. She wrote them down to preserve them, and later, when she took the older woman for drives along the Windward coast, more history was revealed.

“As we passed valley after valley, my tutu could name all of the ahupuaa (traditional Hawaiian land divisions) and the families from these areas,” said Cypher, former president of the O‘ahu Council of the Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs.

Not every family, however, had someone like her grandmother to keep old names alive along with the responsibility to take care of the ahupuaa where one lived. “I learned that many people did not have this knowledge passed on to them,” she said.

In 2007 Cypher and Leialoha “Rocky” Kaluhiwa brought community members, organizations and government agencies together seeking ways to restore this knowledge. They came up with an Ahupua‘a Boundary Marker program that marks boundaries from the 1876 map of Oahu with signs bearing the symbol of a pig’s head atop an ahu, or stone altar.

She will speak Thursday at a free public seminar on preservation sponsored by the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation and the National Park Service. Other presenters will include Stephanie Whalen, executive director of the nonprofit Hawaii Agriculture Research Center, and Glenn Mason of Mason Architects, who will discuss a development called Kunia Plantation Village.

Kunia Village is all about community, Mason said. “The beauty wasn’t (so much) in the small, modest individual houses, (but) in the integrity of the neighborhood, the spaces between the houses, preserving a whole pineapple camp.”

Since 2009, after the plantation closed down, HARC has restored about 104 houses, providing affordable housing for low-income farmworkers and retired Del Monte pineapple workers with the help of tax credits.

The ahupuaa boundary marker program has installed about 90 signs around Oahu thus far, Cypher said. “It is being used by kupuna teaching in the schools and has sparked something in younger educational groups to pursue projects that are aina-based,” such as restoring Hawaiian fishponds, heiau and native forests.

“We wanted to show the types of historic resources: cultural and pre-contact, plantation-era, neighborhoods, cultural sites, buildings and districts,” said Kiersten Faulkner, HHF executive director, of the seminar, which runs from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Aloha Tower Marketplace Room 3. Visit historichawaii.org for details.

ON THE MOVE

Hawaiian Airlines has announced that David M. LeNoir Jr. is its new vice president of financial planning and analysis. He was previously vice president of finance and accounting at Silver Airways, a regional airline in Florida. LeNoir also served in a number of financial planning and analysis positions at FedEx and Spirit Airlines.