Day 2:  KEYNOTE: Ohana Means More Than Family: Maui’s Response Through the Lens of Cultural Values with Kainoa Horcajo

 

 “Indigenous values can shift how we deal with disasters.” —Kainoa Horcajo

 

2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT

 

Disaster recovery isn’t just about rebuilding infrastructure— it’s about honoring the deep connections between people and place. Principles like reciprocity, collective responsibility, and deep connection to the land can shape a more compassionate and community-centered approach to rebuilding after crises. By honoring these time-tested philosophies, we unlock powerful pathways to healing and resilience.

Kainoa Horcajo is a cultural practitioner and consultant who has dedicated his career to sharing the wisdom of Native Hawaiian traditions. As the founder of The Mo’olelo Group, he provides training and guidance to organizations seeking to integrate Indigenous perspectives into their work.

Listen in as Kainoa delves into the role of Hawaiian values like kuleana, ohana, and aloha in shaping disaster response and recovery, the importance of cultural connections and local identity, the application of indigenous principles throughout the entire disaster pipeline, the significance of rites of passage and community support, and the meaning of aloha as the “how” in disaster work. 

 

Highlights:

  • 02:50 What You Say Becomes Your Reality
  • 08:04 Focus on FInding Connection First
  • 13:17 Indigenous Values in Disaster Recovery 
  • 19:33 ‘We’ is Greater Than ‘Me’
  • 24:03 The WHOLE Community Approach

 

Twitter:

Get ready to bring some island vibes to disaster relief as The Mo’olelo Group Owner, Kainoa Horcajo shares how Indigenous values can guide us to move at the speed of trust when rebuilding communities. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #HawaiianValues #CulturalContext #IndigenousApproach #CommunityConnection #Aloha #WholeCommunityConcept #CulturalCeremony

 

Quotes:

03:10 “You can think whatever negative thoughts you want and it might not do anything. But, as soon as they come out of your mouth, they become reality. So in that space between your thought and what comes out of your mouth, you have to make a choice of whether to voice it or not.” —Kainoa Horcajo 

07:43 “We, in Hawaii, move at the speed of trust.” —Kainoa Horcajo

08:05 “Before you go into any meeting, don’t go in talking business first. Stop and think about how to find a connection. Connection is what it makes it all work.” —Kainoa Horcajo

09:40 “Indigenous values can shift how we deal with disasters.” —Kainoa Horcajo

15:26 “We need to be the plan.” —Kainoa Horcajo

15:28 “What is the main obstacle? Well, the obstacle is the system. So let’s change the system so the system is Indigenous.” —Kainoa Horcajo

22:11 “If you apply aloha to it, then the what and the why will figure themselves out.”  —Kainoa Horcajo

 

Meet Kainoa Horcajo, Owner, The Mo’olelo Group

Kainoa Horcajo is a Cultural Consultant, Storyteller, Speaker, Writer, and Actor based in Wailuku, Hawaii. He is the Principal Owner of The Mo’olelo Group, a multidisciplinary consultancy specializing in Cultural Integration, Community Outreach, Communications, and Experience design. With a background in International Relations from the University of San Diego, Kainoa has held significant roles such as Director of Culture at Grand Wailea and Hawaiian Cultural Ambassador. His work focuses on applying indigenous knowledge systems to corporate structures and the hospitality industry, fostering a deeper understanding and connection with Hawaiian culture, history, and people.

 

Transcription:

Kainoa Horcajo: Aloha. Thank you for that, Jennifer. As she said, we have become good friends when she comes over. Now, I’m her chauffeur and stand in the background going, you pronounce that wrong. But I think she’s gotten all the pronunciations pretty, pretty good. Pretty good right now. 

I am going to talk about Hawaiian values, and I’m probably going to move around so I’m going to grab that mic. I love being the last to speak, because I get to spend all day talking with all of you outside, sitting here and listening to everything that’s being said. I can pretty say with a fair amount of confidence that I’m not going to tell you anything that you haven’t already heard because I’m going to talk about Hawaiian values. I’m going to talk about cultural values. I’m talking about just what I see from my lens. I don’t have a single fact in what I think I’m going to talk about. This room is full of people thousand times smarter, more eloquent, more dedicated to the work that you do, and the life that you’ve created for yourself doing this work than me. Like Nicole was just saying, I just showed up. And in three months, I’ll probably be somewhere else. I told her, don’t talk about the Mo’olelo Group. I don’t even know what that means. I know what it means, but I don’t actually know what we do. 

Basically, the philosophical approach that I saw in Maui on that day, on the day after, and all the days following. And like I said, they’re not going to be new. I wasn’t here yesterday, but all of the people from Maui have already said the words that they’re going to talk about. They talked about kuleana, about ohana, about Kokua, about the importance of aina. I’m just going to repeat things that they’ve already said as a good little wrap up. I think that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to either introduce or talk about a few different things, and I’m going to always try. I tell this as a reminder to myself that I’m going to focus on the positive. 

We have Hawaiian proverbs. This one says, “in the world, there is life. And in the world, there is death.” And we believe that you can think whatever negative thoughts you want, and it might not do anything. But as soon as they come out of your mouth, they become reality. So in that space between your thoughts or what comes out of your mouth, you have to make a choice of whether to voice it or not. Because we can spend all day, all life, every moment working, taking care of our community, figuring out a better response, focusing on the negative, and we can waste lifetimes and lives doing so. Or we can recognize what should come out of our mouth should be spreading life, should be spreading ola, not death. So I ask all of us on this journey, hold me accountable as well because I will fail all the time to stay positive. 

I know there was an acknowledgement yesterday, but to recognize our Pomo, Wappo or ohana out there whose land we stand on, mahalo to all of you. I always think of these lands called the yellow mustard mountains in one of their songs. If you don’t know it, you should check it out. It is a good song, because I’m going to talk about our lens. At least what I see is our lens. And I have so many people, and I will say this right away, people like Kaliko, like Noelani, like our Mayor Richard Bissen, who are more culturally knowledgeable than I am. So any mistakes are mine and mine alone, not my kupuna. I acknowledge that as well. We always do something in Hawaii when a local person meets a local person, they’re going to find out if they’re related somewhere down the line. We ask each other three questions. Some would say, WHO YOU? What we’re asking is, who’s your family? But local people, if you’re kind of part Hawaiian, maybe not, who knows, but we know you’re from Hawaii, we ask you three questions. 

My local people will know what these three questions are. The first question is, WHAT SCHOOLl YOU WENT? And we’re not talking about university. We don’t ask what Corporation do you work for. What’s your startup? So we go, WHAT SCHOOL YOU WENT? What high school did you go to? Because it places you geographically. It places you within an Island, within a part of an island. And within that, it tells us a lot about you growing up in our place. And there is a dissonance in Hawaii and in Maui that I don’t know if it’s been reflected in any other disaster community that’s experienced a megafire. If you’re not from Maui, you view Maui perhaps as a world class destination to travel. One of the top tourist destinations in the world. A place visited by 3 million people on our island a year, 10 million across the entire island chain. We, who grew up in Maui view it as a small, agrarian subsistence lifestyle place. We see it much differently. We see our home much differently than other people see our home, and that also is part of our culture and affects how we see the world. So we go, oh, what school you went? So we place you geographically, and we know a lot about you geographically. We place you within space, and then we ask the next question. 

What’s the next question? WHAT YEAR YOU GRAD? Okay, they’re laughing because they know it’s true. What year you grad? Okay, because we want to know what generation you fit in? Are you my generation? Are you my older cousins, my younger cousins? My parents, my grandparents? So now, we’ve not just placed you in space, we’ve placed you in time. And now, we’ve got two points in space and time to figure out a direct connection between me and you. A person I’ve never met before. And then we ask the third question. Oh, you must know so and so. And we find out that you knew my auntie, or my uncle, or my cousin, or my kid because we’ve placed you geographically and temporally. And now, there is trust. And many times we’ve heard today, we in Hawaii, we move at the speed of trust. It’s a saying I’ve heard Uncle Ed Lindsey say before he passed, who was Lahaina? It’s something I speak about when I still do cultural awareness training for all of the deployed female workers. That’s part of what my firm Mo’olelo Group does. 

I tell them before you go into any meeting, whether it’s with a community group, an individual or a government agency, don’t go in talking about business. First stop and think about how to find connection because it’s been said over and over to everyone that connection is how it makes it all work. Even if you’re not from Hawaii, I encourage you, and that’s what I love about what Jennifer has done here. Everyone from After The Fire and what she created, she’s created a community. She created points of connection, like a constellation that we can chart our way forward. That’s what After The Fire does. And frankly, that’s what these disasters have done. They’ve done them within our own Maui. As Kukui was talking about sitting on the airplane, being with people that are born and raised in Maui that she did not know that have been working in the disaster, and now getting to sit at the same table as them. I get to share about my lens. But make no mistake, with those native peoples of this place, with the native peoples of your place. We will talk more about not just Hawaiian values.

When you hear me say these Hawaiian words and values, what does it make you think about from your place? Because indigenous values can shift how we deal with disasters. But indigenous values are different from Western values. Indigenous values are reciprocal. They are always a two way street. We do not have one way values like we do not have one way styles of communication. We do not have hierarchical values. Our values are not something over something else. Our values are reciprocal. So these indigenous values can shape how we deal with disasters. What is our response? But they also shape, as this last panel just talked about how they affect us. So all the way through the pipeline, from initial response, from awareness, from prevention, mitigation. And finally, recovery. We need to apply indigenous values to this. I want to stand at some point. So here’s the deal, culture disturbance determines response. We’ve seen many different responses. And for those people that have worked in this for much longer than I have, we see different responses, and those responses are determined by our values. Right now, our shared values create culture. And the deal is that, what I love about this is it brings together a bunch of people that can talk about what values work and what values don’t, and then figure out how to apply them. 

Some of the values that I’m going to talk about are principles that can be applied anywhere. And some of the values are techniques. There’s a difference between strategy and tactics. I believe that they have some pretty darn good principles, some pretty darn good strategies that can be applied anywhere, whether you’re on the East Coast, whether you’re in the Gulf, whether you’re in the Pacific Northwest. Because we figured it out that the same people that sailed across the ocean to land in Hawaii thousands of years before Columbus crossed the sea. These islands we travel to by ocean, but they were formed by fire. And the concept of a disaster makes it feel like it is not a part of your life. And when Jennifer asked me to speak, I told her that I didn’t want to because I’m largely out of work now. She talked about what she saw, and I apologize if you brought this up yesterday. I asked her to clarify because it didn’t make sense. She goes, when I go to two places, I see a startled connection to the land. And I thought she mistyped because I didn’t understand. What do you mean by a startled connection? She goes well, most places, when something like this happens, people are once again, or for the first time have a relationship with the land that they are on. But for indigenous peoples, it wasn’t. It’s not the same way. And what she saw for the first time in Maui was that we didn’t have that startled connection, because we were already connected to the land. And we were already connected to the land through Hawaiian culture, whether you are Hawaiian or not. 

And for a lot of you, I know that you know Maui. You come here. And even if you just stay at the hotel, you get a chance to learn a little bit of Hawaiian culture. Thanks to people like Kaliko and every single other local person that works in a hotel or attraction and has an opportunity to connect with you. The massively insane learning curve of post disaster, the first time that it comes to you and you get bombarded, if you’ve never worked in government before and you’re just a community person like us, you start just being slammed with the acronym soup of everything. There is FEMA desk, NDRF, all these different acronyms coming at you as we start to look for, where can I put in the culture? Where is it within this place? We see a lot in Hawaii in certain areas, in setting ground rules, maybe in bringing somebody up to give a land acknowledgement in offering an opening pule, perhaps setting a framework with how to interact with an environment, right? How to interact with people when we go into a place? But I would encourage us all to think about it, and I think Kaliko might have said a little bit of this earlier. We want a seat at the table because we can kind of take disaster and apply it to colonization, apply it to modern day Hawaii, right?

When tourism came to Hawaii, we say, Hawaiian culture is like a condiment on the table. One of my teachers would say, they’re like the ketchup on the table. Just make sure ketchup is there, and it’s cultural enough. Then we got to saying, no, we don’t want to be the condiment. We want to be at the table. We want to sit at the table, But I truly believe that indigenous values are the table. We should all be sitting at the table of the people of that place. And whenever you hear somebody say that, that’s a good thing. Thank you. I saw this on Instagram just last week about a fire going on somewhere so I borrowed it over here because we need to be the plan. What is the main obstacle? Well, the obstacle is the system. Let’s change the system. The system is indigenous, and we’re just applying the specific tactics and techniques that we need to, the money, the cash, the pipeline to fit the indigenous way of thinking. 

Because we’re just talking philosophically here, here’s a couple thoughts. One, culture is based on rites of passage, it’s based on ceremony. So when a disaster happens, we’re not startled into a connection with it. We’re already connected. In Hawaii, we are connected to floods, through our gods who are connected to the water. Through our gods and our mythology. We are connected to fire in that same way. One of the most amazing rites of passage I’ve ever heard was, and I don’t know if Jolie is here. So in Aotearoa in New Zealand, in some tribes when they go away, when the men go away to war and they come back, they would do something really interesting. And I believe I’m getting this right, but they would crawl through their women, certain female elders of the tribe, to enter the village because going away to war was essentially leaving the land of the living. Morality was different. The consequences of your actions were different. And returning home, you needed to provide those people, those warriors who’d been away to protect home an opportunity to come back and re-enter life without carrying all that with them. Now, a lot of indigenous cultures have this. Hawaii in some areas had similar ones. But when you look at indigenous cultures, especially at these incidences of PTSD are basically nil. The opportunity for them to rejoin the community are basically nil. 

And so when you hear the people that work in these mental health areas, even if we don’t have something there, what can we do to recreate that opportunity? What sorts of rites of passage can we use? Can we create for our community to be connected in the ways they need to. Because when the fire came for us, it was like war. There was no sleep. We just went out and did what we had to do. And every step away, whether it’s in a place or an age, we can create rites of passage in this pipeline of recovery to find a way so that you get there. You get to be present in the space at that time. I’ve heard a lot of talk about the community here. There’s a word that we use a lot, which is kakou. Everyone says kakou. So kakou just means WE. But it’s inclusive of the speaker we. So when I say aloha kakou, it means like, hello to all of you guys, including myself. And many years ago, I was part of a working group with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 

We were working on a framework to connect with indigenous communities in the Hawaiian community and another Hawaiian elder, uncle Walter Ritee, who comes from the island of Molokai told a story about that island, which is very small and very rural. All neighbors and people get a lot of baggage. There’s a lot of history there. They don’t always agree on stuff, whether where the fence line should be, or what happened when the dog came over and ate your chickens, or very big stuff. But when somebody gets married, when somebody passes away, all that goes away. You cook food, and you show up at the door and take care of that person. You take care of that family because you know that the WE is greater than the ME. And too often in our modern society, we will focus on the one thing that sets us apart as trying to figure out the 97 other things that make us in common. We love to do this. We love to focus on the one negative occurrence in our day, as opposed to the hundreds of positive occurrences in our day. 

If we look at it from the philosophy of kakou, it says, A, if you’re in pain, I’m in pain because you’re part of the collective WE. And if you came to Maui during the time, directly after the fire, that’s what you saw. You didn’t see individuals. You didn’t see the government and community. You did see divisions all over the place. You saw fracturing. You saw infighting. You saw people disagreeing with each other, but it was not as important as the larger goal. It was not as important as the WE. Because how we do things matters. I’m jumping to the bottom because I just threw them up there randomly. They’re not actually in any order. If you guys are big TED people, you might have heard of Simon Sinek, and he’s got his thing about the Golden Circle. The what, the how, and the why. How many of you guys know that? Okay, a good amount of you. All right. This whole thing went back to Apple and Dell, and it’s like Dell focused on what they did. We make fans, we make computers. Apple focused on the why. And that’s why 80% of you, besides me and Jennifer, have iPhones. We’re smart. We have androids. That was a joke.

We focus on the WHAT and the WHY too much. We all know the WHAT. You guys are all here for both the what and the why. Aloha is the HOW, because how we do things matters. I don’t know about your individual organizations, but I can tell I can tell you what? The HOW matters. How do you approach this situation? How much Aloha do you bring to the situation? Are you focusing just on the product or the process? Because the process is the HOW. It’s not just a means to an end. The HOW is Aloha. Because if you apply aloha to it, then the WHAT and the WHY will figure themselves out.

I got two minutes left. I want to talk about kuleana, and that’s it. Everyone say the word kuleana. So kuleana means responsibility, and we think about responsibility in the western concept as a negative. Oh, it’s your responsibility to take out the trash. Oh, it’s your responsibility to do the dishes. But in Hawaiian philosophy, kuleana means responsibility, but it also means privilege. Because if it’s your responsibility to take out the trash, it means that you have the privilege of actually owning physical things. If you have the responsibility to do the dishes, it means that you have the privilege of having food on your plate at your home. And a lot of people don’t have that privilege right now. Kuleana is not just about what you can do, it’s also about what you don’t do. And a lot of people today, I believe, both in here and in personal conversations, talked about being aware, being wary of mission drift, and knowing what your purpose is here, and knowing when it’s time to step away. If you look up kuleana in the Hawaiian dictionary, you’ll see authority because it corresponds back to land. It’s all about this place. 

So I encourage you, wherever you go home, I want you to go home, and I want you to find out, if you don’t know already, who the people of that place are. Now, because we’ve seen some really cool stuff, I think this is something about Cal Fire and prescribed burns in California. I know there’s a whole thing about that. And for the first time ever, if when diving through the NDRF and everything else in FEMA, there’s something they’re calling the whole community approach. How many guys know about the whole community approach? Now the best thing I love about this is the first government document I’ve ever read that has the word philosophical approach. I thought, hey, that kind of sounds like kakou. Okay, if we can apply a kakou approach to everything, we’d be in a much better place. I have the privilege of shutting down today after this. I don’t know where you’re going to go. But in Hawaii when we close a meeting, when we close a conference on a particular day, all Hawaii people are worried about what I was going to do. We usually end it with a certain thing. I’m going to ask everyone to stand up. And look, I made the words for everybody. I’m going to bring you guys up here on stage with me, actually. So if we can have everybody who’s outside, come inside. Everybody makes just a big circle.

Culture is about ceremony. Culture is about doing things. It’s not just about talking about things. So for those of you who’ve never heard of this song, this is something that we end with often. And thank you all for playing along with me, because there’s been a lot of facts. Yeah, that’s good. Yes, good. That’s actually the protocol. There’s been a lot of facts. There’s been a lot of emotion. And Hawaii aloha is about emotion. It’s about recognizing our love for our land. But it’s also about recognizing our love for those people who stood next to us and continue to stand next to us as we do the things we need to do. We just go 1, 2, 3, down this thing over here, and all the Hawaii people can sing loud with me.

This is the short version, I only have the first verse and then the two choruses. Jennifer’s husband, you’re summoned in here. This is the whole Lilo and Stitch Ohana thing. No one left behind. Are you ready? I know you can sing well. (Hawaiian song)

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