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NA’ALEHU ANTHONY
For Na’alehu Anthony, 2007 has been a year of sharp contrasts.
In late-winter and spring, Anthony was aboard the Hokule’a on its voyage to Micronesia, where it delivered the Alingano Maisu to Mau Piailug on Satawal, the master navigator’s home. Subordinate to his duties as a crewmember, and captain between Palau and Yap, was the work of shooting video for a television special, as well as a documentary of his own.
In Micronesia, the pace of the voyage became frantic as the canoes went from island to island. Lugging enough camera and sound gear for two people, Anthony had difficulty getting on and off the canoe; all told, he lost $15,000 of equipment. Then there was the 20-hour storm that marked the passage to Satawal.
“But when I came away from Satawal, I knew I had the end of my documentary,” Anthony remembers.
“When I left Satawal in 2005 after interviewing Mau, I figured I had 95 percent of the story and I was nervous about how to end it. I was real stubborn about not including Maisu. But then it dawned on me, that this was the closing of the circle. It was the ending of this huge story that never connected for me until then.”
Back home on O’ahu, Anthony traded the ocean for Kaka’ako and the dark, cramped production room of Paliku Documentary Films. To put together the story of Hokule’a’s first thirty years, he expects to spend two months searching and sorting 80 hours of video, some of it precious archival footage, to assemble an hour’s worth of the most compelling images and interviews. After a few showings in Hawai’Ii this year of rough cuts, next year he’ll take the documentary out on the film festival circuit.
Anthony doesn’t expect to make any from the documentary, but he is committed to seeing the project through. As a Hawaiian, it’s his kuleana to use his skills with 21st-century technology and create a mo’olelo of Mau Piailug and Hokule’a.
“I’m in it because this is an important story to tell. We owe all the success of Hokule’a and the revival of voyaging across the Pacific to Mau.
“These stories are all vivid right now. Mau is here. Nainoa Thompson is here. Shorty Bertelmann is here. Billy Richards is here. Guys that just went and did it in 1976 are here. It’s exciting because we know them and they’re awe inspiring, but what about 50 years from now?
“I have the access and part of the skill set, I have all these pieces to put it together and put a time stamp on it, to let people in the future experience what it’s like now.”
Anthony’s camera work is heavily featured in Hokule’a: Passing the Torch, the KGMB special that aired in August and tells the story of the voyage to Satawal, the pwo ceremony there that initiated five Hawaiians into the Society Of Satawalese navigators, and the tour of Japan that followed. This new documentary, as yet untitled, will be broader.
About three years ago, Lehu decided 5 years ago to make a documentary about Mau. The initial idea was to create an oral history that also looked at the colonization of Micronesia and the woes that followed as traditional ways were displaced. But the navigators who learned from Mau told many great stories about him and the revitalization of wayfinding.
“Now, the basic story is: One man can make a difference. My theory is that if Mau wasn’t there as a navigator, none of this would have the expanse that it has thirty years later. Hokule’a probably would have gone to Tahiti and back, but with the kind of person Mau is, the kind of navigator and teacher Mau is, and how much knowledge he has, not just of navigation, it wasn’t going to stop there.”
Anthony spent many hours interviewing Mau in Hawai’i and Satawal. In 2004, while Mau was in Hawai’i for medical treatment, Anthony visited him several times without a camera. When Mau asked when filming was to start, he began to bring a camera and interviewed him an hour at a time to help him feel comfortable with camera crews, the setting and the idea.
“We did everything in Satawalese. I don’t speak Satawalese, so we sat with a translator, or we sat and let the translator and Mau go back and forth. In the documentary, we’ll use subtitles. Keeping the Satawalese will bring out his emotions and it will make it accessible for his people.”
Mau is brilliant, says Anthony. He anticipated where every step he took would lead, and what he thought would happen did happen.
“He knew what was happening in his own homeland with colonization and how drastic the changes were in Micronesia. Shifting to a cash economy means you have to work. You can’t stay on Satawal and hear stories about navigating. You have to go to Yap and work for $1.30 an hour so you can buy rice and you’re working 50, 60, 70 hours a week.
“That gave him the idea to plant navigation somewhere else and make sure that it grows well there so when Micronesia doesn’t have any teaching navigators, his people can go there to learn.”
With the Maisu, which was financed, fabricated and built by several ‘ohana wa’a in Hawai’i, Satawalese and other Micronesians will not need to leave home to learn navigation.
Along with a portrait of Mau, Anthony will create contexts for people who are not of Mau’s culture or been on a voyaging canoe. While in Satawal, he filmed the daily life and hopes to create a visual and audio montage that shows how great a place the tiny island is. He also wants to set Hokule’a in the context of the ‘70s when, for example, Hawaiians were being evicted from rural communities to make way for development and the Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana organized to end bombing of the island.
“We’re not in the ‘70s anymore when there was the spark and genesis. I’m going to try to put people in that time so they can feel the emotion of that place and time.”
Thanks to Billy Richards, a member of Hokule’a’s first crew, Anthony has vivid images from 1976. When he asked Richards to interview for the documentary and lend photos, the reply was a shocker.
“Billy said, ‘I have film. I have all this eight-millimeter film, but there’s no sound.’ He had a box filled with 34 reels still in the original packaging. There’s two hours and it’s phenomenal.
“If there were two people sitting on the rail of the canoe, he shot the two, then one of them, then the other one. Then he changed angles to shoot the two again. It’s totally usable. It’s just a lucky find.”
Seeing the film, Anthony realized that members of the first crew were great adventurers who had to reinvent voyaging by filling in what was missing.
“They’re cooking in a cracker tin back in a sandbox, just taking lickings. By comparison, where we’re at now is a pleasure cruise.”
The fundamental difference between 1976 and 2007, he says, is the crew didn’t really know that they were going to get to Tahiti.
“I never worry if we’re going to get where we’re going. I worry about all the other various things that can happen, but not that we’re going to miss the target. There’s no question.
“But these guys? First trip? They didn’t know. They trusted Mau and gave themselves to him.”
On this year’s voyage, Billy Richards told rich stories about how he met other members of the first crew and how he first stepped aboard Hokule’a.
“At the time, he thought it was just a fluke, but retrospectively, it seems like there was this grand plan for all these guys who had the mana to be able step on board.”
Like other younger members of Hokule’a’s crew, Anthony came to the canoe through the voyaging classes offered by the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at UH-Manoa. During the mid- to late-‘90s, the Ho’okele courses were being developed and the course numbers changed several times, allowing Anthony to repeat it for several years. The class led him to crew training and eventually work when Hokule’a was in dry dock before its sail to Rapa Nui.
To work on Hokule’a, he quit his job installing car audio systems. When dry dock ended, Bishop Museum asked if he would host teleconferences between Hokule’a and school children. He was given training in editing video, as well as access to an editing bay, technology then worth about $100,000. After taking three months to produce, direct and edit a half-hour show, he did eleven more at a pace of one every other week.
“I would never do a half-hour show every other week now unless there was lots of money,” says Anthony. “That was paying my dues. “
He then co-produced Hokule’a: Guiding Star, a documentary about the sail to Rapa Nui that brought some recognition and a job as a cameraman at KITV. After earning an MBA from UH-Manoa in 2005, he decided to try independent film making for two years and formed Paliku Documentary Films.
“Everybody has different way that Hokule’a connects them to their culture,” says Anthony. “Once, we were sailing into Kualoa and because we’re from there, I’d heard all these stories on how it was the most sacred place in the island and there’s all this mana.
“We were sailing up to it and I went, ‘Wow, this is the view plain someone had 2,000 years ago. This is what they came upon.’ There was the connection for me: If I can see through my ancestors’ eyes, that will give me some kind of purpose.”