Become the map maker — the cartographer for your own life.
Chad Kālepa Baybayan · Pwo Navigator · 1956–2021
Our Kuleana
For six centuries the deep-ocean voyaging traditions of Hawaiʻi went unpracticed. The canoes were gone. The star lines lived only in chant and memory. What brought them back was not a discovery — it was a decision, made by people who chose to learn, to build, to sail, and to teach.
This site gathers that story: the history of the Hawaiian people, the kūpuna who held the line, the navigators who reopened the ocean, and the institutions that keep the record. It is built for students, teachers, families, and anyone who wants to understand what was carried forward and who carried it.
Ke Aupuni
By 1810 the islands were unified under one government. By 1840 that government had a written constitution with three branches. On November 28, 1843, Britain and France jointly recognized Hawaiian independence. Treaty-making had begun earlier — the first, with the United States, in 1826 — and grew to include nations across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
A literate, treaty-making nation that corresponded with the capitals of the world in its own language.
Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. Kamehameha III · July 31, 1843, on the restoration of the Kingdom
Spoken after five months of British occupation ended and the Hawaiian flag was raised again. The words are now the motto of the State of Hawaiʻi.
The Long Record
The story is longer than the timeline below. These are the moments where the thread became visible again.
The islands are settled by deliberate deep-ocean voyaging. Then, for reasons still argued over, the long voyages stop.
Deep-ocean voyaging between Hawaiʻi and the rest of Polynesia falls away. The double-hulled voyaging canoe disappears from Hawaiian waters for roughly six hundred years.
A unified government, a written constitution, recognized independence — and the century in which all of it was taken apart.
Kamehameha I completes the unification of the island chain under a single government, ending generations of separate rule.
Kamehameha III signs a Declaration of Rights in June 1839 and promulgates a constitution in October 1840, establishing a government of three branches.
A British naval officer seizes the Kingdom in February. It is restored on July 31 — the day Kamehameha III speaks the words that became the state motto. On November 28, Britain and France jointly recognize Hawaiian independence.
Armed insurgents confront King Kalākaua, and on July 6 a new constitution is forced upon him. He promulgates it himself rather than it passing the Legislative Assembly, and it takes effect the following day. It is remembered as the Bayonet Constitution.
Charles Reed Bishop establishes the museum in honor of his wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, to hold her Hawaiian collection and the heirlooms of the Kamehameha line.
The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi is overthrown and Queen Liliʻuokalani yields her authority. A century later, Congress would describe the event in law as having occurred "with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States."
A law codifies English as "the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools," effectively removing Hawaiian from the education of Hawaiian children.
Hui Aloha ʻĀina and Hui Kālaiʻāina gather 21,269 signatures opposing annexation — more than half of all Native Hawaiians counted that year. Four delegates carry the 556-page petition to Washington. The annexation treaty fails in the Senate.
With the treaty defeated, annexation is carried instead by a joint resolution of Congress requiring only a simple majority. President McKinley signs it on July 7.
The canoe, the language and the record come back — each one because particular people decided to bring it back.
Hawaiʻi is admitted as the fiftieth state of the United States.
Artist Herb Kawainui Kāne, anthropologist Ben Finney and waterman Tommy Holmes found the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and the plan to build a voyaging canoe and sail her to Tahiti by wayfinding becomes real.
Navigated without instruments by Mau Piailug of Satawal, Micronesia. An estimated 17,000 people — about half the island — met the canoe at Papeʻete Harbor.
Hōkūleʻa capsizes off Molokaʻi. Crew member Eddie Aikau paddles for help on a surfboard and is lost at sea. The rest of the crew is rescued.
The same year, Hawaiʻi's Constitutional Convention establishes Hawaiian as an official language of the state alongside English — eighty-two years after it was pushed out of the schools.
Trained by Mau Piailug, Nainoa Thompson navigates Hōkūleʻa from Tahiti to Hawaiʻi — a feat no Hawaiian had accomplished in some six hundred years.
ʻAha Pūnana Leo is founded by Hawaiian-language educators, and the first Hawaiian-medium preschool opens at Kekaha, Kauaʻi. Children begin learning the language from the small number of elders who still spoke it.
The first schools of Ka Papahana Kaiapuni, the Hawaiian language immersion program, open within the state Department of Education — the year after families lobbied the Legislature to establish it.
On November 23, Public Law 103-150 is approved: Congress apologizes for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and "the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination."
Mau Piailug inducts five Hawaiians — among them Chad Kālepa Baybayan, Bruce Blankenfeld and Nainoa Thompson — into Pwo, the highest order of navigator.
Hōkūleʻa circles the globe carrying a single message — care for our island Earth — covering roughly 42,000 miles and more than 150 ports in 23 countries and territories.
Hōkūleʻa marks fifty years since her maiden voyage. On July 30, the first Pwo ceremony ever held in Hawaiʻi inducts six new navigators — including the first Native Hawaiian women to hold the title.
Ka ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi
In 1896 a law made English the sole medium of instruction in every school in the islands. Hawaiian children were educated away from their own language, and within two generations the number of them who grew up speaking it had collapsed.
It came back the same way the canoe did — because particular people decided to bring it back. In 1978 Hawaiian became an official language of the state again. In 1984 the first Hawaiian-medium preschool opened at Kekaha on Kauaʻi, teaching children directly from the elders who still spoke it. By 1987 immersion had reached the public schools.
The voyaging story and the language story are the same story, told twice: something almost lost, held by a few, and handed deliberately to the young.
Hōkūleʻa
He waʻa he moku, he moku he waʻa.The canoe is an island, the island is a canoe.
Hōkūleʻa — "Star of Gladness" — was built to answer a question that scholars had argued over for a century: could Pacific islanders have found and settled these islands deliberately, navigating by stars, swells, birds and wind?
She answered it by sailing. No compass, no sextant, no GPS. Since 1976 she has covered nearly 300,000 miles, and the answer has stopped being a theory and started being a school.
Sailing Now
Hōkūleʻa and her sister canoe Hikianalia are mid-voyage across the Pacific. The sail plan was extended by a year out of respect for changing climate conditions — the canoes remain in the southern Pacific through 2027 before turning toward Northeast Asia.
As PVS CEO and Pwo navigator Nainoa Thompson put it, the change is not a postponement — it is "being respectful, paying attention, being humble with nature."
Kūpuna
Lahaina · grandfather to two navigators
He took his grandsons fishing along the Lahaina shore — Olowalu, Lone Pine — and passed down what he knew of the ocean while they were still boys.
Two of those boys were first cousins — Archie Kalepa and Chad Kālepa Baybayan. Between them they would go on to be initiated into pwo.
"This is where my love for the ocean began." — Archie Kalepa, on his grandfather's summer classes
Wayfinding is more than guiding the canoe. It is about nurturing a crew of friends by building positive relationships on the deck of this canoe and among the communities we visit. It is also about continuing the tradition of honoring our ancestors, and the culture and heritage they represent. Chad Kālepa Baybayan · Pwo Navigator · 1956–2021
Where the record is kept
Honolulu · Founded 1889
Founded by Charles Reed Bishop in honor of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last descendant of the Kamehameha line. Now the State Museum of Natural and Cultural History of Hawaiʻi, holding millions of objects, documents and photographs of Hawaiʻi and the wider Pacific — with serving the interests of Native Hawaiians named as a primary purpose.
Oʻahu · Founded 1973
Founded to perpetuate the art and science of traditional Polynesian voyaging through experiential education — programs that ask students and communities to care for themselves, for each other, and for their natural and cultural environments.
Hilo, Hawaiʻi Island
Where Chad Kālepa Baybayan served as navigator-in-residence, building wayfinding curricula that hold Hawaiian culture and Western science in the same hand rather than in opposition.
Connect
This project is built for students, teachers, families and anyone who wants to understand what was carried forward — and who carried it.
If you have photographs, corrections, or something this page has missed, we would be grateful to hear from you.
or email hawaiian.nation.project@gmail.com