Announcer: Announcer: Major funding for Hawaiians was provided by Hawaiʻi Public Television, with additional funding made possible by Bank of Hawaiʻi.

Narrator: It is the year of the Hawaiian, 1987.

In a state of over 1 million people, pure Hawaiians number 8244.

Only 2000 speak the Hawaiian language.

Hawaiians are in prison, unemployed, on public assistance, and near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.

They are strangers in their own land, in their only land.

Yet, despite the events of the last 200 years, the Hawaiian spirit is alive and fighting to perpetuate the heritage that was almost lost, fighting to save the land, to revive the language, to pass on the dance.

One thing has survived above all else, it is that which contains the history of the Hawaiian people.

It is the mele.

Samuel Pua Haʻaheo: Chanting in Hawaiian.

Narrator: It has remained because great chanters like Samuel Pua Haʻaheo ensured its continued life by passing it on to a chosen one.

Kauʻi Zuttermeister: He would sit on a chair, and I would sit on a floor, and look up at him, and he would look down, and he would chant, and he, he doesn't speak English at all, all in Hawaiian, and he would tell me, well, in the old time, if you a favorite child, they call you baby.

So, he said, "Come, come, baby, come."

And I would go and sit and look up at him, and he'll say, "Now, when I chant, you try to imitate."

And, of course I understood a little Hawaiian, and I would sit, and he would chant, and he said, "Now you repeat whatever I chanted."

So I, I would repeat.

But oh, sometimes he would make me repeat one or two lines, I don't know, maybe 10, 20 times, and I used to get so bored.

I used to tell him, Uncle, are you punishing me because you make me chant, chant?

He said, no, no, you have to do it right.

If you don't do it right, then you cannot chant.

The day of my graduation, the uniki, after all, the you, we had to go to certain procedure to uniki, graduate.

He called me on a side with my cousin, and he told me, you know, baby, you know why I was making you do these chants over and over and over, I said, "No, I don't."

He said, 'Well, because I was giving you all my mana to you, and when you sit up this way, you will take all the mana."

And if you, if you don't have this mana, you will never be a chanter.

Narrator: The gift of Pua Haʻaheo to his niece, Emily Kauʻi Zuttermeister, was much more than a family heirloom.

It is a trust.

She is now called loea, the expert, the teacher of teachers, the single surviving recipient of a long line of hula tradition preserved over the centuries.

Kauʻi Zuttermeister: Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: Here at the Kēʻei, the pā hula of Hiʻiaka at Hāʻena Kauaʻi.

Auntie Kauʻi brings her master students to pay homage to the hula deity, Laka.

Kauʻi Zuttermeister: Chanting in Hawaiian.

The chant, in my chant, it says Kualono means they are up so high, and you could sit over here and look out into the, you know, the ocean and the mountain as your back.

In the chant it describes, and the birds singing.

This is a beautiful place to come to, and and, meditate.

You know, it's so still.

Chanting in Hawaiian.

In the olden time, they used to bring the young girls over here and train them to be hula dancers.

Some come at three years old, and some come from three years up to 15, and then they come up here to learn hula.

When we came before, this place was all full with uh, you know, kokoʻolau, ti, and those, that kind.

This whole place was full, but now, I don't know.

They clear the place that you know in the chant it says you're not supposed to clean this place, it should stay in the wilderness.

Hula Hālau: Chanting in Hawaiian.

Kauʻi Zuttermeister:  To enter the hālau, you must learn to chant, and there are certain chants you have to chant to allow you to enter, and there was this another person inside that would answer your chant, but when you're chanting and nobody, nobody answers your chant, you better turn around and leave, because they don't want you in there.

Narrator: The chant Kaulilua i ke anu o Waiʻaleʻale is one of the three oldest surviving chants from ancient times.

Chanter: Chanting in Hawaiian.

The first part, it tells about Waiʻaleʻale.

Mount Waiʻaleʻale is the wettest spot, I think, in the world, and I didn't go, but my daughter said the plants grow wild because they cannot control, I guess, the wetness.

But the only thing that she noticed was the lehua.

The lehua, instead of growing big like a tree, they were stunted, they crawled and they crawl on the ground, and that's what they call the lehua makanoe.

And she has a picture of that, that lehua.

Then, and it tells how cold Waiʻaleʻale is.

The second part is the part he was prophesizing about Hawaiʻi, and now I see that it's, you know, beginning to be a reality.

Kaulilua was composed by the one of the old time composers, and when they composed Kaulilua, he prophesies what Hawaiʻi is going to be, and in the chant it says the Ka mau ke ʻea i Ka mau ua ola, the life of the land is preserved by righteousness.

And then he said this in the song it says there's a coral, the coral is just like Hawaiʻi, and in this, the opening, you know, of the coral, all the different nationalities will come to Hawaiʻi, and when they come to Hawaiʻi, we will learn to sit, stay together, you know, live together as one.

And the chant tells about this man said that there's going to be a school built at Waʻahila with all, with all this nationality, and now I see at Waʻahila they have the East West Center.

And so it says about the coral and all these other nationalities, and they meet at the East West Center, and they will all try to live together as one group in Hawaiʻi.

Hula Hālau: Chanting in Hawaiian.

Kauʻi Zuttermeister: Then the altar, the Hawaiian altars, will be broken, kamo moku eka unu, momoku means broken, unu are the, you know, the altars, it's going to be broken.

But Kauliloa is more important, because nobody, I can say that, that hula, the dance, nobody knows this is something nobody knows.

I have never, I tell my students, but no outsiders know this.

What I'm telling you, because it's a prophecy, Music: (Drumming) Kauʻi Zuttermeister: Of course, you know, over here, that, but at the altar used to be a tiki.

It's a rock formation, like this way.

It was this way, and I don't know when I brought my first group up here.

They cleaned the place.

When they cleaned, we had erosion, and the tiki, the rock all fell down.

It was a rock formation, and he was this way, you know, and he had eyes, nose, and his mouth, but I kept looking.

I couldn't see.

Narrator: Narrator: In the 1970s, the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts studied the teachers of the hula.

Of all the kumu and the masters five were designated loea, those whose knowledge could not be matched nor ever duplicated.

Kauʻi Zuttermeister: I am the only loea left.

There were five of us, who Kawena Pukui, ʻIolani Luahine, Montgomery, and Holt, and me.

These four are dead now, and I'm the only loea left.

When I'm gone, there will be no more loea, and we come down to the masters.

My, my standard of Hawaiian is above the masters of the hula.

I'll be very honest with you, I be.. I'm not going to hide.

I'm too old to play games.

I will tell you, if we don't watch out, that will be gone.

That will be gone, the ʻoli.

And it is so important.

Some of these young kids, they think they know it all.

They come to the kupuna for information, and what they do, they get smart with the kupunas, and once the kupuna close their mouth, that is the end.

Narrator: The ʻoli, the oral tradition, the most ancient element of Hawaiian culture, becomes mele when it has an accompanying dance to illustrate it, the hula.

In modern times, the word mele is used to describe many different things, among them music.

To understand ʻoli, mele, and hula, today we must look back through the centuries to what it was before.

Elizabeth Tatar: Elizabeth Tatar: Hawaiians and Polynesians had a different value system, different esthetics.

They do not have in their language a word for music as such, they have a word for poetry, mele.

Charles Kenn: The chanting, for example, today is referred to as music, but they're hardly in a sense of what we call, what we term music with musical notes.

They were chanting in a sense of telling a story using different modulations of the voice.

Pualani Kanahele: Well, hula was a way of keeping the stories.

The hula, or the movement of the hula, had to have a story accompanying it.

So, whenever you do a chant, if you're going to do a hula, you must have a chant with it.

You just can't do movements without, without chants, or without words,.

Therefore the hula was the accompaniment of the of the story.

The story was first of all the most important, and then the hula was the second most important, because it helped you remember what the event was, and usually chants were written because of important happenings.

Narrator: If ʻoli and mele are the history books of Hawaiʻi's people, then hula is the illustration.

But today hula is also performed to music, which came with the missionaries in 1820.

Wayne Chang: Now comes along the Western influence.

Okay, and what happened there, I think, is is they brought into existence a whole new way of looking at music, and it was a very studied, developed music that went through, you know, the full scale and pitches and meter and everything was very studied, and the Hawaiians, and not just Hawaiians now, again, all Polynesians, when they were introduced to the Western style, just embraced it.

Dororthy Kahananui Gillett: Lorenzo Lyons introduced the gospel hymn to Hawaiians.

See, before he came, Hiram Bingham had been working, he had been translating hymns at first with the help of William Ellis, who came from, was an English missionary, who came from Tahiti.

And Hawaiians were trying to learn the music that he wanted them to learn.

Somehow it didn't appeal to Hawaiians, I guess.

When Lyons came, he decided that the gospel hymn would probably appeal to Hawaiians more, and there were good reasons why they did.

Gospel hymns have a great deal of repetition.

Wayne Chang: And it's your simplest form of harmony, but it