When Huihui Kanahele-Mossman was a girl, she spent a lot of time with her grandmother, Edith Kanaka‘ole. With her tutu as her teacher she grew up bilingual, a native speaker of Hawaiian as well as English. She also learned traditional Hawaiian culture and etiquette when her grandmother took her and some of the other grandchildren into the community.
“She liked to take us to places around our island,” said Kanahele-Mossman, who lives on the Big Island. “She’d introduce us to the people who live there so that we know that they are kamaaina of these places, and if we ever want to go there we go to these people first and we say hello, we make known to them that we were there when we were visiting. She was insistent of going to these places and meeting kamaaina of those places and becoming friends with them. That’s not only a memory that I have of her but something that I still do today.”
Kanahele-Mossman is now the executive director of the Edith Kanaka‘ole Foundation. On March 27, she celebrated the official release of the commemorative quarter celebrating her grandmother’s contributions to the preservation and perpetuation of Hawaiian culture as a teacher of chant, hula and language. Kanaka‘ole, who died in 1979 at the age of 65, shared her knowledge with the members of her halau hula, and with students at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and Chaminade University. She wrote more than 70 songs and capped her life’s work with two Na Hoku Hanohano Award-winning albums in the late 1970s.
“A deeply respected and beloved kumu hula, composer, and community leader … (Kanaka‘ole) played a critical role in the preservation and celebration of Native Hawaiian culture,” said U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz in a written statement. “Her legacy lives on through her work and the lives she impacted, and this new quarter from the U.S. Mint will help share her story with people across the country.”
That story is a uniquely Hawaiian adaptation of the traditional American “melting pot” where all are welcome, cultures blend together and English is the unifying language citizens share in common. As a cultural leader in the Native Hawaiian community, she welcomed non-Hawaiians who were sincerely interested in perpetuating Hawaiian culture and the conversational use of the Hawaiian language.
Davianna McGregor, professor of ethnic studies and director of the Center for Oral History in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UH-Manoa, describes Kanaka‘ole as a pivotal figure in Hawaiian history.
“She’s so important in the whole renaissance of Hawaiian culture, and reconnecting our Hawaiian people with our soul as Hawaiian people and reconnecting … the spiritual and scientific wisdom of our ancestors.”
Professor Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa of the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at UH-Manoa says that Kanaka‘ole is also significant for her ability to embrace both pre-Christian and contemporary Hawaiian spirituality.
“Edith Kanaka‘ole was a fabulous teacher, but beyond that she was a brilliant inspiration for the Hawaiian people. … She said, ‘We Hawaiians are all Christians now (but) we should respect the gods of our ancestors because our ancestors respected them.’ What she was saying to everyone in the classroom is, no matter who you’re worshipping today, you need to know the ancestors and what they thought.”
Kanahele-Mossman said, “One of the big things about my grandmother was her insistence upon people using mele, people actually chanting out in public. People actually regarding ceremony as something that they can do and not only leave it to a certain class or a certain kind of people. … Everybody has to start to chant. Everybody has to start to share these mele. That’s a big thing that my grandmother insisted upon throughout her life.”
Puakea Nogelmeier recalled that insistence and commitment to equality while he was her student at Chaminade University in the late 1970s.
“In chant class one night, she explained that she had been criticized for teaching ‘deep culture’ to a group that included non-Hawaiians,” said Nogelmeier, a professor emeritus of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii. “She stated clearly that she believed knowledge could only be perpetuated if ‘those who care carry it forward,’ and that she was proud to have such a group to work with. That interchange affected my perspective as well as my sense of self in a community where some can be pretty exclusive.”
From that day on, Nogelmeier, who is Caucasian, said when he was confronted by people who resented his deeper knowledge of the language, her words reminded him to move past their comments.
The coin itself is an unprecedented honor. Kamehameha III and Kalakaua appeared on coins issued by the Hawaiian kingdom, and a figure based on the iconic Kamehameha I statue was included in the design of a commemorative silver half dollar issued by the U.S. Mint in 1928. Kamehameha I was featured again on the Hawaii state quarter that the mint issued in 2008. The Kanaka‘ole quarter makes the kumu hula the first Native Hawaiian woman to appear on a Hawaiian or United States coin.
For collectors, the Kanaka‘ole coin is the seventh in a series of 20 American Women Quarters. Five quarters are being released per year through 2025 to celebrate the accomplishments and contributions of American women in the areas of abolition, the arts, civil rights, government, the humanities, science, space and women’s suffrage. Honorees are selected by the Secretary of the Treasury with input from the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Initiative, the National Women’s History Museum and the Congressional Bipartisan Women’s Caucus, and made with an eye to including women of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds and sexual identities.
The front of each coin has a bust of George Washington that was created by sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser when the original Washington quarter was being designed in 1931; that design was not selected for the coin that entered circulation in 1932. The back of the coin shows Kanaka‘ole with her hair and head lei becoming one with the Big Island landscape, and the words “E ho mai ka ‘ike,” which Kanahele-Mossman translates as “grant me knowledge.”
In Hawaii, Kanaka‘ole was famous for her willingness to share her knowledge with all who sincerely desired to learn. Na Hoku Hanohano Award-winning kumu hula Lehua Kawaikapuokalani, who is also known as Kawaikapuokalani Hewett, was one of her students at UH-Hilo in the 1970s. Communicating in an email, he fondly recalled “her humility, aloha and her ability to embrace all in her presence. She was a true embodiment of the ‘olelo noeau (proverb), ‘e wehe ka umauma i akea,’ ‘open your heart as wide as you can.’ ”
Grammy Award winner George Kahumoku Jr., said in an email that Kanaka‘ole led by example in getting other cultural practitioners to share their knowledge outside their families and beyond Hawaii’s shores.
“She encouraged me to teach slack key guitar to not only kanaka maoli, or native Hawaiian, but also to anyone who was interested. She opened up the floodgates of teaching hula, language, Hawaiian culture, and arts and crafts to anyone who was interested even though they did not have the koko, or Hawaiian blood. … She came from a place of aloha and taught us aloha, and we shared the aloha she taught us with the world!”
Acceptance was also foremost in the thoughts of musician Christy Lassiter, who is part-Native Hawaiian and learned hula from Kanaka‘ole on the Big Island.
For Lassiter, who traces her Hawaiian genealogy back more than 1,000 years, and whose Caucasian ancestors came to Hawaii more than 200 years ago, Kanaka‘ole’s willingness to teach someone who looked like “a little haole girl” is another tribute to her greatness.
“She would make room for people like me, who’s a fair Hawaiian, and not keep me back because I didn’t have black hair and brown eyes,” Lassiter said. “Her kindness permeated our community. She wasn’t self serving, she was community serving, and she was kind when we were a world in turmoil with Vietnam still nipping at our heels. I think that is huge.”
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Edith Kanaka‘ole quarters
The quarters are available to purchase in 100-coin bags ($45), 2-roll ($40) and 3-roll sets ($60), along with proof sets (price varies) from the United States Mint. An ornament of the quarter ($35) is scheduled to be released in the summer.
Info: usmint.gov
