story by Roland Gilmore
photos by Dana Edmunds

A warm wind is blowing on O‘ahu’s leeward coast: down from Mount Ka‘ala, through Makaha Valley and then out to sea. Not a strong wind, just enough to rustle the leaves of Dalani Tanahy’s wauke patch. Left untended, these paper mulberry plants will would grow like weeds, sending runners underground and shooting up new plants where you’d least expect them. But that sort of unfettered growth does nothing to suit Dalani’s purposes, and so her carefully managed crop of roughly 200 plants grows as uniformly as a field of corn, each eight-foot-high row separated by a mulch-covered walkway; branches regularly pruned at the trunk to create a smooth, unscarred bark; the whole works irrigated by drip-lines.

“Because of the way wauke grows, one plant today equals forty plants next year if it’s happy,” Dalani says, gesturing to a recently tilled, currently empty vegetable field that sits just across a narrow dirt drive from her patch.. “But if I didn’t keep a really tight rein on it over here, then that whole field over there …” she gestures toward a recently tilled, currently empty field just across from her patch “… would be covered—that’s just how crazy wild it can get.” 

Wauke is not native to Hawai‘i. It isn’t food, nor is it strong medicine. But it was so essential to Polynesian culture that it is widely thought to bewas probably one of the a “canoe plants” — that is, one of the life-sustaining crops carried here by the earliest human arrivals, who themselves came somewhere between 300 and 600 A.D. It was brought here because it is the best plant for making bark-cloth, and kapa figured in virtually every aspect of Polynesian life, from ritual adornment and funerary rites to day-to-day clothing and bedding. By the eighteenth century, when Europeans first happened upon Hawai‘i’s shores —and logged the first written accounts of life in the Islands, —the plant was ubiquitous. In fact, according to the highly regarded ethno-botanical history Native Planters in Old Hawaii, it would be “useless” to attempt an inventory of all the places wauke was reportedly farmed. So long as certain conditions were met—light winds, rich soil, plenty of water—the plant would almost certainly have been under human cultivation ... and virtually all of it for kapa. Read more.