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Our ohana in Hawaii are confronting a challenge that our kupuna never anticipated: How to teach our kanaka keiki how to be Hawaiian when more and more of them live far away from the islands their ancestors called home. 

What is Hawaii without the descendants of the people that made Hawaii Hawaii? For more than a century we’ve been getting closer and closer to finding out.

My ohana is home for my father’s memorial services in Hilo this weekend. We had hoped to “double up” and take advantage of this together time by enrolling my rising sixth-grade nieces in Kamehameha School’s “Explorations,” a program intended to develop Hawaiian cultural identities. 

Sadly, Kamehameha doesn’t accept every Native Hawaiian child who applies to its programs, even though the first line on its “About Us” page promises otherwise: We champion every Hawaiian learner to explore their potential to lead our lahui and inspire the world.

I think Princess Pauahi, with the incredible financial resources now at the institution’s disposal, would have wanted to avoid turning away children and disappointing ohana.

But I recognize that I’m just adding to the voices of people who think they know what best to do with the princess’ bequeathment to the generations that came after her.

However, the true responsibility for instilling identity belongs with our ohanas, not Kamehameha Schools. It’s the kuleana of ohana to guide and connect them.

For our ohana, the first step for landlocked children is time on the water paddling or playing in waves. They come from saltwater people. 

The next, and more important step, is trying to instill the spirit of aloha. 

My first “textbook” would be the children’s book .

Kama and Nani, the children in the book, follow their grandfather’s direction to share their extra mangos with their neighbors. The children receive a trove of mahalo gifts and learn the power, and importance, of sharing.

The academic term for their efforts is a local system of autonomous exchange. “Too Many Mangos” is such a better shorthand.

We’ve lived in our house for almost a year and my son and I have been pulling up our lawn and planting and planting. He’s specializing in canoe plants in the front yard, while I’ve been nurturing a contemporary vegetable garden, starting a fruit orchard and a grove of flowering plants for lei. 

However, we are not at the place, yet, where we have an abundance of produce. I’ve been struggling with a velociraptor-like pack of wild turkeys and the hulis of kalo he planted are close to producing good size corms, but not quite there yet. And while we do have blossoms, we don’t have trees overflowing with plumeria or puakenikeni. Yet.

The easiest connection to Hawaii for Hawaiians outside of Hawaii is food and music. Both of those have evolved as Hawaii has welcomed more and more people of different cultures to our islands. 

As the cousins, aunties and uncles spread across the lanai on Monday morning, we flipped through treasured cookbooks of family recipes and delicious memories. 

Growing up outside of Hawaii, our ohana usually had a box of chocolate covered nuts in our freezer as small delights.

Top of the list was wanting to have something for the keiki to share with our neighbors. 

I want them to know that we aren’t entirely grocery-store dependent here in Hawaii. Yes, we import an embarrassingly large amount of our food, but we can still plant and grow unlike anywhere else.

Fortunately, we do have something to share: macadamia nuts. Our tree has been producing nuts at a substantial rate this spring and summer. 

Everyone has been husking sun-dried nuts and then cracking the shells. We toasted the nuts in the oven and decided to make macadamia nut shortbread cookies. It is a favorite of my ohana. 

My mom used to keep rolls of uncooked dough in our freezer and slice off a few discs when she needed cookies. My dad told me that his uncles worked in the mac nut factories when he was growing up in Hilo. At the end of a shift they’d collect the stray bits of nuts (what they called “rubbish”) and sweep them into bags that they’d take home. His aunts would then make these cookies. 

Growing up outside of Hawaii, our ohana usually had a box of chocolate covered nuts in our freezer as small delights. On a reporting trip to Eastern Congo two decades ago, a warlord we were interviewing shared that he planned to put conflict behind him and harvest macadamia nuts like they did in Hawaii on a tract of land he had seized. I’m still shaking my head at that notion.

Now there’s a mac nut tree outside my bedroom window and I’m a fan because this is something we can share. And the importance of sharing in Hawaii is the lesson I want my nieces to learn. 

I’m sad they won’t get to join in the Kamehameha “Explorations” program, but I’m glad they’ll get the joy of baking and sharing cookies with their grandmother using ingredients that they harvested and prepared with their own hands. 

These are invaluable lessons of ohana and sharing — important elements in developing Hawaiian identity.