Through many decades of isolation in Kalaupapa on Molokai, a common element unified and offered hope to thousands of leprosy patients.
It was music.
Now, in the midst of a global pandemic, where many find themselves sheltering at home and socially distant from others, a Molokai nonprofit aims to share that music and its history in a virtual concert. Saturday’s fundraiser will be the first public event to generate support for a memorial at Kalaupapa.
The disease known to Western medicine for centuries as leprosy was first noticed in Hawaii in the early 1820s. Native Hawaiians called it “ma‘i pake” (the Chinese disease) because it was believed to have come to Hawaii with immigrants from China.
The illness, now known as Hansen’s disease, was incurable and inevitably fatal.
With no knowledge of how the disease was spread, the Hawaiian government condemned patients to lifetime involuntary confinement on the remote Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai. The first prisoner patients arrived on Jan. 6, 1866.
Valerie Monson, executive director of the nonprofit Ka ‘Ohana O Kalaupapa, is leading the campaign to build a memorial at Kalaupapa that will list the thousands of names of all the men, women and children who were sent there. Many who died there lie in unmarked graves.
“It’s about 8,000 people,” Monson said Monday, speaking from her office. “We believe we have all the names and now we’re in the process of verifying spelling. We’ve got a lot of registers and records in our digital library and we’ve helped over 800 descendants learn about their Kalaupapa ancestors.”
Hansen’s disease became curable with the development of specific antibiotics in the 1940s. In 1949, the Hale Mohalu facility was opened to provide treatment in Honolulu and with that it became possible for patients to remain on Oahu, and continue their education or learn a trade. When the isolation law was eventually abolished in 1969, it was with the provision that Kalaupapa residents who wished to remain there could continue could do so.
Monson says 12 former patients live there now.
The next step for Monson and Ka ‘Ohana O Kalaupapa — and it is a big one — is raising the money to build the memorial and maintain it. The ‘Ohana estimates on its website that it needs about $10.5 million overall, with approximately $5.5 million for construction and a $5 million endowment that will cover care and maintainence “into perpetuity.”
“The Music of Kalaupapa,” which begins at 1 p.m., will feature Brother Noland, Melveen Leed, Kevin Brown, Makana, Lopaka Ho‘opi‘i and Stephen Inglis. They will perform songs written by people who lived in Kalaupapa — the Boys of Kalawao, the ‘Aikala Brothers, George McLane, Ernest Kala, Sammy Kuahine, Helen Keao and Bernard K. Punikai‘a.
“I’ve actually had this idea of a concert for about 20 years, and finally it’s happening,” Monson confided. She visited Kalaupapa for the first time in 1989 when she was a reporter for the Maui News. One of the things she noticed as she got to know the residents on return visits was the importance of music.
“People would talk about the music that had been written there, songs that were written by people there, and they’d talk about the people who wrote the music,” she said. “These musicians have sometimes not gotten credit for the songs that they wrote, so this concert is not just entertaining. It’s about learning about some of the history of Kalaupapa that you don’t often hear about, learning about these songs and how the songs came to be.”
All the performers are connected to Kalaupapa in one way or another, but Kalaupapa is especially close to the heart for Inglis. His parents were involved in the struggle to prevent the destruction of Hale Mohalu in the late 1970s. Many years later, he partnered with Dennis Kamakahi on an album of songs about Kalaupapa. The album, “Waimaka Helelei,” won a Na Hoku Hanohano Award (slack key album of the year) in 2012.
“We did a few of our own originals inspired by (Kalaupapa and Hale Mohalu) and then we paid tribute to Bernard Punikai‘a, who was my sister’s godfather, a real outspoken activist, and one of the aunties and uncles I grew up with (visiting Hale Mohalu with my parents),” Inglis said Monday afternoon.
“Besides doing Bernard’s songs, there are some by well-known composers like Samson Kuahine who wrote ‘Sunset of Kalaupapa,’ but the (Kalaupapa) tradition goes back to the Boys of Kalawao. There was a song from 1879 — the lyrics had been saved but not the (original) music. Bernard, before he passed away (in 2009) wrote a melody for it. Luckily there was a scratchy tape recording of him singing it so Dennis and I were able to record it. We were thrilled to do that.”
Inglis will be honoring those memories on Saturday.
‘The Music of Kalaupapa’
>> When: 1 p.m. Saturday
>> Watch: facebook.com/kalaupapaohana or youtube.com/user/palolosteve
>> Info or to donate: kalaupapaohana.org
