Master indigenous architect Palani Sinenci knows a few things about how to stabilize and secure foundational structures.
Now the 77-year-old Hana resident recently has lent his expertise in the art of hawele — lashing — to help an innovative online initiative address an insidious threat to the Native Hawaiian home.
Sinenci appears in the second installment of “He Huewai Ola,” a webinar series developed by the nonprofit organization ‘Aha Kane in conjunction with Kanaeokana, Papa Ola Lokahi and the Consuelo Foundation. The series seeks to address domestic violence in Native Hawaiian households by educating men and boys about traditional male roles and responsibilities and providing instruction on traditional skills and cultural practices as a means of positive redirection.
‘Aha Kane Executive Director Keola Chan said the project was spurred by increases in domestic violence related to recent stay-at-home mandates adopted to reduce the spread of COVID-19. While a national phenomenon, rural communities have been particularly vulnerable, Chan said.
“It’s a unique situation,” Chan said. “People are locked up in their homes and unable to seek support. Social workers can’t visit homes. People aren’t going to community centers to get help. They’re not going to hospitals because they’re seen as hot spots.”
Given the circumstances, social media seemed an obvious choice to bridge the distance.
“It’s the only forum right now,” he said.
“He Huewai Ola” is being offered as part of Kanaeokana’s expansive network of programming and is broadcast live every Friday at 2 p.m. via the Zoom video-chat platform and archived on YouTube and Facebook. The show officially launched May 1 with a premise-setting discussion with Keawe Kaholokula, chairman of the Native Hawaiian Health program at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine; Kamana‘opono Crabbe, CEO of the Kohala Institute; Office of Hawaiian Affairs Community Engagement Director Mehanaokala Hind; and forensic mental health expert and kumu hula Malina Kaulukukui.
“This violence that we’re seeing is not part of our traditions as Hawaiians; it’s counter to what we know of protecting and providing for our communities,” Kaholokula said during the discussion. “The answer is within our own culture and our own cultural values and perspectives. Everyone at this time needs to kokua and reach out and make sure that everyone is safe. If there are issues going on, the ohana and others need to bring awareness to that so we can deal with them and the ohana can get the healing they need.
“The biggest thing I’m concerned with is the long-term consequences of what’s happening now,” he said. “Long after we settle the crisis of the disease itself and we get a vaccine, long after that is all the pilikia that’s going to remain, the animosity, the trauma upon trauma for our community. … Now is a good time to address these issues.”
Chan said the series deals with anger, aggression and domestic violence in an indirect way that provides men and boys positive avenues to explore their native history and culture, acquire practical skills that are culturally relevant, and understand their traditional familial and social roles — knowledge that may never before have been passed to them.
“The skills are a part of it, but it goes deeper,” Chan said. “(‘He Huewai Ola’) provides individuals an opportunity to be educated and inspired. We speak to the problem in an indirect way that is not demeaning. They’re relearning roles and responsibilities of men in the home. Maybe they never learned how to cook dinner or clean fish. We start by assuming that they do not have any experience, and we go from there.”
Hawele — an indigenous art that requires care, patience, strength and understanding to securely bind individual pieces together — offers an apt metaphor for what developers of the series are hoping to achieve.
To Sinenci the literal and the figurative are as tightly bound as the handmade sennit he uses for lashing.
“With all that’s going on now, people in Hawaii have to get back to basics,” Sinenci said.
It’s a lesson lived for Sinenci, who “went totally native” after retiring in 1991 from 30 combined years in the Navy and Air Force. That process of cultural and self-discovery included learning the Hawaiian language, harvesting kalo, building and repairing stone walls, restoring heiau and mastering traditional hale building, eventually developing a course in indigenous architecture at Maui Community College (now UH Maui College).
Over the years, he has constructed hundreds of traditional hale using the same lashing techniques he shared in his “He Huewai Ola” webinar.
Sinenci lives on 5 acres of land in Hana, a “mini ahupuaa” that spans the mountainside and the sea, where he plants kalo and tends to 75 coconut trees and a fishpond stocked with some 200 fish.
He has a dream of developing a “Survivor”-style reality TV show in which participants would be dropped into a remote area of Maui with nothing but rope, a knife, flint and a malo and left to survive. He knows he could do it, easily. It’s the kind of confidence grounded in knowledge and experience that he sees lacking in too many Hawaiian men and boys adrift in a culture of distraction and consumerism.
It’s the kind of binding force — lashing — of which too many families are in need, he said. “How do we hold ourselves together?” Sinenci asks.
In explaining and modeling culturally appropriate roles and behaviors, hosts and guests on “He Huewai Ola” hope to contribute to a process of remediating problems such as alcoholism, sexual abuse and suicide and potentially break cycles of domestic violence in the home.
“The Hawaiian perspective on healing is not about the individual,” Chan said. “The individual may have a problem, but the solution involves the whole family. If we can heal the men, we can help heal the family. If you heal the family, you can heal communities.”
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CALL FOR HELP
Support services are still available for families and victims of domestic violence and sexual assault during the COVID-19 emergency period, advises the county Department of the Prosecuting Attorney. Officials say reports of child and adult sex abuse have noticeably declined during the stay-at-home orders, possibly because victims think support agencies are temporarily closed. Here are contact phone numbers for those who need help:
>> Maui Sexual Assault Center hotline: 873-8624
>> Parents and Children Together (for victims of domestic abuse): 243-7001
>> Women Helping Women: 579-9581
