The post Hawaiian Taro Takes Root in Oregon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation story, the goddess Ho‘ohōkūkalani gives birth to a stillborn son, who is buried in the fertile soil. In her grief, she waters the soil with her tears, and a sprout emerges, becoming the first kalo plant. This plant nourishes her second-born son, Hāloa, the first Native Hawaiian.
For Native Hawaiians, kalo, also known as taro—a tropical plant prized for its starchy, nutritious, rootlike corm as well as its leaves—is not just a traditional food source but an ancestor, symbolizing a lasting and reciprocal connection to land. As a staple crop, kalo has sustained Pacific Islander cultures for generations.
Especially for those who had left the island many decades earlier, it was monumental to see kalo being planted in Oregon.
Now kalo has sprouted thousands of miles from its ancestral home in the Portland metropolitan area, where a growing Native Hawaiian population resides. The land for the garden—or māla, in Hawaiian—started with just six square feet but has expanded exponentially, with multiple locations. What these gardens produce is more than just food and a bond with Indigenous culture; it is a thriving community.
“We give a safe space for our Hawaiian families,” said Leialoha Ka‘ula, one of the garden project’s founders, describing its greater purpose. “It [is] also food sovereignty, that relationship to ʻāina, or land. It’s a place of healing.”
Ka‘ula, like many Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI), left the islands due to the high cost of living there, combined with low wages and lack of jobs and housing. It’s part of a pattern that followed the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and declaration of statehood by the U.S. in 1959. Then as now, emigration is fueled by unaffordable living costs, low-wage jobs, and a housing crisis driven by tourism, luxury development, and an influx of mainlanders.
In 2020, the U.S. Census reported that, for the first time, more Native Hawaiians live in the continental U.S. than they do in Hawaiʻi, with Oregon having nearly 40,000 NHPI residents. Many in the diaspora long for stronger ties to their home and cultural identity.
According to Kaʻula and others, the relationship with kalo is binding, and without it, Native Hawaiians lose vital connections to their culture and mana, a Hawaiian term for spiritual and healing power. But growing kalo is not as easy as just planting it in the ground. Cultivation took years of effort and help from multiple hands.
Land Access and Indigenous Blessings
Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC) Executive Director Leialoha Kaʻula demonstrates the art of making laulau with fresh kalo leaves from the club’s māla, or garden. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
Born on Oʻahu and raised on Hawaiʻi Island, Kaʻula was steeped in Hawaiian culture through her family. Her grandmother introduced her to the Hawaiian language when she was little. Wanting to continue those studies, she attended a Hawaiian immersion charter school, where she also learned cultural practices like hula, chanting, and the traditional farming methods of her ancestors, including how to grow kalo.
Kaʻula came to the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s to study psychology at Washington State University and eventually settled in Beaverton, Oregon. From her first days in Washington, Kaʻula dreamed of growing kalo there, but accessing land was a challenge.
Meanwhile, she started a hula academy in Beaverton to help carry on the traditions of her elders. She also helped found Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC), one of several such clubs across Hawaiʻi and the continental U.S. promoting Native Hawaiian culture, advocacy, and community welfare after the dissolution of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Kaʻula envisioned growing kalo through the Civic Club as a part of a new youth program, but it wasn’t until she met Donna Ching, an elder at the hula academy, that plans began to take shape. Ching, also Native Hawaiian, served on the board of the Oregon Food Bank (OFB), which has gardens where immigrant communities can grow culturally important foods. Ching helped secure a modest plot for the youth program in the Eastside Learning Garden, in Portland—and the kalo project was born.
The next step was to ensure a blessing for the māla. KALO HCC invited Portland-area Indigenous community organizations like the Portland All Nations Canoe Family and Confluence Project to request permission to grow native Hawaiian plants on local land.
The ceremony and the planting took place in August of 2021. After chanting and prayers, NHPI youth from the club tossed in handfuls of rich, black soil and planted dozens of baby kalo, already sporting several tender, heart-shaped leaves. The elders in the community watered the bed. Especially for those who had left the island many decades earlier, it was monumental to see kalo being planted in Oregon.
The First Harvest
In the first season, KALO HCC harvested 25 pounds of kalo leaves, called lau, which are used for food, medicinal purposes, and ceremonies.
For her role in procuring the land, Ching was given the first harvest to make lau lau—a traditional Hawaiian dish of fatty pork or butterfish along with vegetables, all wrapped in kalo leaves and steamed. The kalo leaf softens in the process, adding an earthy flavor. The leaves are also an ingredient in other dishes like squid lūʻau. The roots, technically called corms, were left to keep growing beneath the soil; they are used to make poi, a nutritious mash that has been a dietary staple for centuries.
Siblings bond while caring for the land, or ʻāina, during a spring “Community Māla Day” on April 22, 2024. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
“I haven’t made lau lau since I left home, because [lau is] really hard to find here,” Ching said. “When you think about how more of us now live on the big continent than in Hawaiʻi, if we move and we don’t take some of that ‘ike—that knowledge—with us, or find a way to grow [it], we’re going to lose it.”
Due to the garden’s success, Oregon Food Bank allotted an additional 75-square-foot space to plant the following year. KALO HCC harvested 500 pounds of leaves, most of which were distributed to community members for free. They were also able to hire one paid staff member to help take care of the māla, thanks to a partnership with Pacific Climate Warriors, an international youth-led grassroots network led by Pacific Islanders to address climate change.
Now the garden produces other crops, too, including carrots, mānoa lettuce (a variety developed in Hawaiʻi), bok choy, and kale, all of which are eventually given to community members. The garden holds weekly work parties, and some 160 volunteers from diverse backgrounds help out over the course of the year, raking mulch, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting.
One volunteer drives monthly from her home in Olympia, Washington, nearly two hours away.
“It’s worth every mile,” said Nicole Lee Kamakahiolani Ellison, who also serves on the board of KALO HCC. Ellison left the islands when she was 8 years old and grew up in Las Vegas. She is is a project manager with IREACH at Washington State University, a research institute that promotes health and healthcare equity within Indigenous and rural populations.
Ellison got involved with the garden a year ago while working on a project with Ka‘ula about Native heart health. She said she didn’t believe kalo could be grown in Oregon’s climate.
A KALO HCC member harvests garlic from the garden in July. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
“You go down [to the garden] and you’re not in Portland anymore,” Ellison said. “It’s like you’re somehow transported back home on some weird magic carpet ride.” She added that a bonus of volunteering is connecting with the kūpuna (elders) who also volunteer, as well as hearing the sound of pidgin, Hawai‘i Creole.
Caring for Kalo
On the islands, kalo, a canoe crop —one of the plants carried to Hawai‘i by the first Polynesian voyagers—is grown in both dryland (or upland) and wetland environments, the legacy of sophisticated traditional irrigation systems that ran from the mountains to the sea in land divisions called ahupua‘a. (Those traditional systems for kalo, once central to Hawaiʻi’s agriculture, were displaced by private land ownership, the sugar industry, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom.) Wetland taro is routinely flooded; dryland kalo doesn’t require that, but needs regular rain and humidity. Optimal temperatures for kalo are in the 70 to 90 degree range.
Planting in the Portland dryland garden typically starts in the spring, with the kalo leaves and corm maturing in about nine months. The garden uses primarily an Asian strain of kalo, but also includes descendants of cuttings from Oʻahu, Mauʻi, and Hawai‘i Island. The kalo in the Oregon dryland garden is adapting well to its new location and growing strong.
Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC) members transplanted baby kalo plants at Pacific University’s garden, preparing the garden for winter, last October. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
Kaʻula said the club members have learned they can grow garlic to keep the soil warm, which accelerates the kalo’s growth in the spring. They also leave the kalo corm, the starchy root of the plant, in the ground during the winter, where it multiplies. One root can quickly turn into 10, she said. For now, the group is electing not to harvest the corms so that they continue to grow.
This winter, they put a dome over the kalo plants to see if they would last through the freeze—which they did. Now the KALO HCC can have kalo year-round, just like in Hawaii.
Native Hawaiian Foods and Health
The success of the māla comes at a time when it may be needed most. Recent data shows that nearly 60 percent of the NHPI in Oregon lives below the poverty line. The food bank has taken hits from the recent federal funding cuts, losing 30 truckloads of food due to the USDA’s food-delivery cancellations across the U.S., and said they have already seen a 31 percent increase in visits to their locations compared with the previous year.
“Our [cultural] diets are healthy, but food is expensive, and when it’s expensive, many move away from that diet to something more affordable—and a lot of that affordable food is not healthy for us,” Ching said.
“Everything that our lāhui (community), our aliʻi (royalty), and our kūpuna (elders) did was never about one person. It was about, how does it trickle down? How does it create a unified community?”
In October 2023, KALO HCC published an academic paper about their Portland kalo project, describing how establishing the māla in the continental U.S. connected people to the land, improved their mental health, and created a sense of place for Native Hawaiian community members. The paper also suggests that the garden, through cultural foods and practices, might improve health outcomes overall.
“Culture is health, is what we’re trying to argue,” Kaʻula said. “Sometimes people say that traditional healthcare aligns with the Western models, but we’re trying to say no, we want Indigenous healthcare. Can we get the FDA to approve poi as medical support? Can we get the FDA to approve kalo as a supplement, and how can we ensure better access to all of that?”
KALO HCC is currently conducting another study, this time through clinical trials, in hopes of finding the connection between traditional foods, physical health, and emotional wellbeing. For this study, they are working with Oregon Food Bank and Oregon’s Pacific University to collect and analyze data. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders living in the U.S. have some of the highest rates of heart disease, hypertension, asthma, cancer, obesity, and diabetes in comparison with all other ethnicities. Research ties these poor health outcomes to colonization and historic inequities, multigenerational trauma, and discrimination, as well as poverty, lack of housing, education, and environment.
“[From] what we see in other Native communities, their views of food and how it relates to health is huge,” said Sheri Daniels, the CEO of Papa Ola Lōkahi, a Native Hawaiian health organization that advocates for the well-being of Native Hawaiians through policy, research, and community initiatives. Daniels said that providing data can be challenging, but offering resources and opportunities for people to improve self-esteem and strengthen cultural identity are always possible, and can yield insights, too.
“The cool thing about kalo is that you get to build community, you get to meet and see others who might be in the same [emotional] space as you, trying to establish that bond of what it means to be Hawaiian,” she added.
As of this March, new kalo plants had already started sprouting through the soil. They will triple in size in a month, providing more nourishment to the local community in the upcoming year. KALO HCC has also created additional māla at Pacific University, where 25 percent of the student body is Native Hawaiian, and at schools in Tacoma, Washington and within the Beaverton School District.
“Everything that our lāhui (community), our aliʻi (royalty), and our kūpuna (elders) did was never about one person,” Kaʻula said. “It was about, how does it trickle down? How does it create a unified community?”
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]]>The post A New Indigenous-led Student Movement Is Protecting Sacred Waters appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Seventeen-year-old Danielle Rey Frank was first drawn to activism in the sixth grade. As a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in what is now Humboldt County, California, she grew up on the Trinity River, which isn’t just a part of her Tribe’s food systems and livelihood, it’s also a sacred place that’s central to their ceremonies and traditions.
The Trinity and other area rivers have been consistently under threat from pipeline projects, along with rising water temperatures, pollution, and fish kills due to damming and water diversions from reservoirs and tunnels. All of which have been compounded by increasingly dire drought conditions.
After an elder from the nearby Yurok Tribe came to speak about these issues in her class, Frank knew she couldn’t afford to wait to fight for the future.
“This is our world,” she says. “We’ve already lost so much [oral history] with our parents and grandparents. If we lose our river, we don’t know who we are. We don’t know what will happen then.”
She started going to protests and hearings and speaking on panels about what was at stake. Then in 2018, when she was in high school, she helped form the Hoopa Valley High School Water Protectors Club to empower more youth to get involved.
The club, which now consists of roughly 50 Native students from the school, meets to connect to their cultural roots, write letters to policy-makers, and speak out at hearings and rallies. They were also largely instrumental in the creation of the new Advocacy and Water Protection in Native California High School Curriculum, released in March through Save California Salmon (SCS), a water advocacy group in Northern California.
Developed in conjunction with a coalition of other entities—including Humbolt State University’s (HSU) Department of Native American Studies, Klamath/Trinity Unified School District Indian Education Program, Blue Lake Rancheria, and the Yurok Tribe’s Visitor Center—the curriculum was made as an antidote to rising climate anxieties amongst youth and positions them as the leaders in the fight to protect their vitally important waterways, something tribes in North America have been fighting to protect for centuries.
“Our restorative environmental management and tribal place-based knowledge are best practices for climate resiliency. If we teach the next generation how to better manage and live with the land, they will become the leaders that can solve our challenges,” said Cutcha Risling Baldy, department chair for HSU’s Native American Studies Department, in a press release.
Inside the Curriculum
The Advocacy and Water Protection curriculum was initially inspired by a summer speaker series at HSU that featured Indigenous scholars, leaders, and activists across the state. Much like that series, the curriculum includes several video presentations from those speakers, along with study materials that cover environmental justice, Indigenous rights, community resilience, allyship, and youth activism.
Lessons also combine science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM), utilizing traditional ecological knowledge, which has been acquired by Indigenous and local peoples over thousands of years through direct contact with the environment—something that climate scientists at the U.N. have acknowledged will be integral in the fight against climate change all over the world.
However, one of the curriculum’s focal points is the integrity of California’s rivers and the ongoing threats to salmon, currently facing extinction from climate change and water diversions. Those lessons teach about water policy and law, and cover current tribal battles over area water diversions such as the Delta Tunnels—a $15.9 billion project that would send significant amounts of water to farms in the Central Valley and Southern California—along with the movement by the Winnemem Wintu and Pit River Tribes to bring salmon back to the McCloud River, which were eliminated in 1945 with the building of the Shasta Dam.
So far, the curriculum and teacher’s guide have been downloaded by at least 600 educators across the country, and either used in full, isolated, or adapted to specific lesson plans.
“We have had teachers from Oakland with no Native students who are adapting the curriculum to [lesson plans about] refineries and fracking issues, which is really cool,” said Regina Chichizola, policy director for SCS. “They said they’ve been teaching about environmental justice for a while, but not from an Indigenous lens.”
‘Sacred Water’
In 2020, the youth of the Hoopa Valley Water Protectors Club saw how their voices mattered, when they demanded that Governor Gavin Newsom hold a hearing in the northern part of the state about the Delta Tunnels (now called the Delta Conveyance Project) and its potential to destroy their salmon runs. They succeeded in getting a hearing scheduled much closer to home—those meetings typically took place seven hours south, preventing many tribal members from testifying.
The hearing included many voices opposed to the tunnels, and was preceded by a rally with members of nine tribal nations that included emotional pleas from the youth in the Water Protectors Club. The young people learned from this event, as well as from SCS’s viral #undamtheklamath media campaign, about the importance of spreading the word through social media, and helped later formulate the curriculum’s media section about allyship and advocacy.
During the event, a number of Indigenous people—including Caleen Sisk, tribal chief of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and a board member of SCS—chanted and sang traditional songs, which Frank said moved a lot of people to see a glimpse of what they’d be losing. The project has not been shut down yet and is currently under environmental review, but she said she and other youth felt that their voices were heard.
Sisk is also one of the leaders whose video presentation is featured in the curriculum, which focuses on the Trump Administration’s Water Plan, the Shasta Dam, and looks at how federal recognition is tied to the ability to access resources and support. Her tribe also has a separate fourth-grade curriculum on protecting salmon.
Included in that curriculum is the short documentary One Word Sawalmem, which is co-directed by and features Pom Preston, Chief Sisk’s son. The film is about Indigenous communities and their intimate knowledge about living in balance with the natural world. “Sawalmem” means sacred water, and Preston hopes that by sharing what he has learned about the land and its sacred value, he will inspire others to protect it in a deeper way. “People need to know the truth and that there is more going on in this world than we are being taught—and here’s the proof,” Preston told Civil Eats.
California’s Water Issues
The climate crisis in California has made the need for action more urgent than ever before. In May, as fire season loomed, Governor Newsom declared a drought emergency in most of the state’s counties, eventually signing an executive order for the state’s population to reduce water consumption by 15 percent. In 2020, the state’s number of wildfires hit a record-breaking high with 9,600 fires burning over 4 million acres, and according to the Division of Water Resources, 2021 is shaping up to be the state’s third driest year on record, with numerous active fires burning since June.
The Yurok Tribe has already reported a massive juvenile fish kill event this year in the Lower Klamath. The news came a day after the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees water resource management, announced it would not honor the request of the Tribe to release more water flow to prevent the kill.
“Without the river in proper conditions . . . we’re not able to participate in our native culture the way we should be. . . . Our river is like a creek running through our reservation when it’s supposed to be the heart of everything. . . . We don’t even have salmon anymore. Our families used to catch 110 a summer, now we are lucky if we catch two,” Frank said at a recent hearing with the California Water Board.
Advocates at SCS have been critical of Newsom, accusing him of continuing to go along with the Trump administration’s Water Plan, which prioritizes big agriculture operations, and reroutes water to Central Valley growers, particularly almond farms, one of the state’s largest industries. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated California was home to 1.6 million acres of almonds, with each acre requiring three to four acre-feet of water, which comes to roughly 18 percent of all diverted water used for state agriculture.
Reclaiming the Narrative for the Future
Almonds can be traced back to the Franciscan Padres, who brought them from the Mediterranean and were responsible for the construction of California’s missions, which, along with boarding schools, forced assimilation on Indigenous peoples, brutally stripping them of their languages, cultures, and often their lives, leaving in its wake decades of history books favoring settler colonialism that don’t tell these stories at all.
The creators the Water Advocacy curriculum were in part responding to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union that found school systems have been failing Native children across the U.S., calling out current education as a tool of oppression.
Standard curricula can demoralize Native youth, Risling Baldy told the North Coast Journal. “[W]e know that once they get [to school], they’re confronted consistently with people who question their own stories. It’s time to change that. It’s time to start at the very basis of the structural curriculum that we teach our youth, to tell them that their stories are important and matter, that their voices are important and matter.”
“[I want] tribal people in particular, but also non-Indian students, to hear that it’s not all historical trauma and we’re gone,” said Vincent Feliz in a short video from Humboldt State University’s Place-Based Community, an outdoor learning program that integrates knowledge from area Tribes. “It’s historical trauma, and we’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.” Feliz is a Chumash lecturer in the Social Work Department at the school, which has a large Native studies program.
“By connecting local issues and environments to our education, and encouraging us to apply what we are learning to benefit our communities and California policy, we are helping to solve critical issues and getting students excited to learn,” says student Danielle Frank. “The curriculum educates us on how to sustain what we have left of the sacred world our ancestors left, while teaching what can be done to help revive it.”
Frank recently graduated, and she plans to continue an internship with SCS and find work in advocacy.
“I didn’t think kids belonged in politics . . . I didn’t think that we were educated enough on these topics to get up and speak our minds,” she added. “But, in reality, we are the ones that have to.”
All photos courtesy of Danielle Rey Frank.
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