The Battle of Maha‘ulepu
By Jan TenBruggencate The Ka‘ie‘iewaho Channel is a daunting 60-mile passage, across which no early Hawaiian chief was able to launch a successful attack on Kaua‘i. It is an old Kaua‘i tradition that...
View ArticleAncient Hawaiian Field Systems
By Jan TenBruggencate Farming, in a way, is resource protection. When you’re growing food, you don’t need to go out and harvest wild resources. Nearly every human culture has figured that out, and...
View ArticleEarly Hawaiians and the Universe Around Them
By Jan TenBruggencate The sense of conservation is deep in Hawai‘i, and dates to the earliest days of human activity. There is a respect for biodiversity and the connection between people, plants,...
View ArticlePrior to Agriculture, Mana Plain Was the Largest Wetland in Hawai‘i
By Jan TenBruggencate The broad agricultural fields from Waimea to Polihale, at the base of West Kaua‘i’s cliffs, may seem like an unchanged landscape, but they are far different than in ancient days....
View ArticleHawaiian Saltmaking
By Jan TenBruggencate On hot summer days, on rocky shorelines throughout the Islands, you can find pockets of white crystals in depressions in the stones. They are places where waves deposited salty...
View ArticleThe Garden Isle’s Fossil-Rich Landscape
By Jan TenBruggencate A lot of folks think of fossils in terms of dinosaurs — things a couple of hundred million years old. A place like Kaua‘i, which emerged from the ocean just five million years...
View ArticleBringing the Past to Life
By Jan TenBruggencate The stone remnants of early Hawaiian structures are just the bones of what they actually represent. A house foundation today may only be a rectangle of stones, with an opening in...
View ArticleA Canoe Is an Island, an Island is a Canoe
By Jan TenBruggencate Let’s face it. I’m a canoe nut. I’ve built them and rigged them, surfed them, sailed them, raced them across interisland channels, voyaged on them, fished off them. At various...
View ArticleRoyal Treatment from a King
By Jan TenBruggencate Kaumuali‘i, the last king of Kaua‘i, belied the meme of royals as petulant needy folks. He was a superb host. He had, as one would have said generations ago, the breeding. His...
View ArticleAs Large Farms Decline, Small Farmers Hold Strong
By Jan TenBruggencate Kaua‘i is known as the Garden Island, but how our garden is changing. In 1982, according to the Hawai‘i Data Book, there were 410 farms on the island. The average farm size was...
View ArticleMai‘a-Ki Trails
By Jan TenBruggencate All across Hawai‘i there is evidence of mai‘a-ki trails. This is a term for ancient pathways whose routes are often marked by banana and of ti plants. In many cases they are long...
View ArticleThe Hawaiian Makahiki Season
By Jan TenBruggencate One thing that sets us as humans apart from other species is the times in our lives when we do something different, when we ritually vary our routine. In the Judeo-Christian...
View ArticleThe Sands of Hanalei
By Jan TenBruggencate We think of gorgeous Hanalei as a stable, vast half-moon bay, a two-mile crescent white sand beach and a wide plain of fishponds, river, town and taro. But Hanalei Bay has had a...
View ArticleA Whale of a Comeback Tale
By Jan TenBruggencate A couple of years ago, a whale popped up in front of me as I was paddling a one-man canoe alone under the cliffs between Maha‘ulepu and Nawiliwili. There wasn’t another human in...
View ArticleThe Hawaiian Horse
By Jan TenBruggencate Hawai‘i’s proud equestrian traditions started in 1803, more than two centuries ago. The story goes that the first horses in the islands were purchased in California by Richard...
View ArticleCane Juice, Hops, Yeast — the 1st Hawaiian Beer
By Jan TenBruggencate Early European voyagers got their brew where they could find it. Certainly, ships left their home ports well supplied, generally, with casks of rum, and perhaps bottles of wine,...
View ArticleThe Nearly Lost Art of Weaving Makaloa
By Jan TenBruggencate The loss of wetlands in the Islands to agriculture and development may have resulted in the decline of one of the iconic plants, the tallest of makaloa. This noble sedge, which...
View ArticleHow High or Low Can the Oceans Go?
By Jan TenBruggencate We think of sea level changes in inches over periods of decades, but over longer time spans, the evidence is for far more dramatic rises and falls. How dramatic? Hundreds of feet...
View ArticleKoloa Plantation
By Jan TenBruggencate The Hawaiian sugar industry didn’t start in Koloa, and Koloa wasn’t really the site of the first sugar plantation, but these rural myths aside, this South Kaua‘i community has...
View ArticleCoconuts in a Nutshell
By Jan TenBruggencate If you love the look of a coconut, you shouldn’t prune your coconut trees, but if you don’t prune them, you shouldn’t stand under them, either. A swaying palm never looks as good...
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