Kānaenae Together by Mauliola Endowment

To address increased levels of stress by COVID we have committed to providing daily access to authentic Hawaiian practices for our diasporic and self-isolating community members. We are committed to consistently sharing Hawaiian chants of well-being and Hawaiian lifeways to increase Hawaiian language contact time, which reduces stress daily.

Our solution is hosting a virtual portal where our members gather around Hawaiian practices. Through curation of Hawaiian language well-being chants and daily opportunities via Zoom, Facebook, or our app, our community learns to ritualize a moment in time that releases stress. Virtual time spent together also imparts fellowship in isolation and assists in the development of positivity collectively through affirmations of traditional knowledge.

Our approach can be adapted for any Indigenous Peoples to support daily language use, daily life ways, and reduce stress in communities. 

Connection to land and family are critical for Native Hawaiians. Though in the 2010 census 527,077 Native Hawaiians were recorded where 237,107, nearly half, are living on the continent. Land and family relationships have been disrupted by population collapse, high costs of living and is further exacerbated by COVID stay-at-home orders. There are limited to no Native Hawaiian well-being resources available online to help cope with stresses in a culturally sensitive approach.

Historically, our Native Hawaiian population has been decimated by the introduction of foreign illnesses and epidemic waves starting in 1778 with venereal disease-causing infertility and downward decline of our population. By 1800, our population dropped by 48%. Next were cholera, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, and leprosy dropping the population 84%. Now we are 6% of the population, 21% if including part-Hawaiians.

Research from the University of Hawaii identifies Native Hawaiian communities, across the Nation, are being impacted by rates of COVID positive cases greater than those reported for African Americans and American Indians.

To address continuing generational trauma by disease we provide comfort and alleviate stress in an appropriate cultural manner delivering actionable cultural support tools focused on health and wellbeing to a live community online. 

To reinvigorate Hawaiian cultural practices, at home and abroad, we will build an introductory asynchronous online module course on foundational Hawaiian ritual content.

The module will provide support to new onboarding members by clarifying the mission of Kānaenae Together and how it works, what Hawaiian chant is, at least five chants with translations, discuss multiple meanings of the composition, providing insight into utilizing natural processes (e.g. wind, rain, moon) as constant reminders and solutions to overcome unease, as well as breathing and chant exercises to support enunciation.

Collectively the group learns, and practices traditional healing Hawaiian chants live via Zoom. Our daily ritual begins with breathing exercises, then execution of chants, followed by ritualized drinking of water, and ends with breathing exercises. There is an app available for those not able to gather live online. With this project we aim to stimulate reciprocation between our members and their environment to bring positive healing affirmations to them and their families.

Through the chants of our ancestors we enable our community to call upon the omni-present energies of our environment to invoke healing declarations, to delineate a calming space, and to replenish the body, mind, and spirit.

The three women who lead the Kānaenae Together gorup are all Native Hawaiian. When the initial gathering began, the target population was Native Hawaiians, particularly cultural practitioners. However, after awhile the group also accepted anyone who felt that they would directly be impacted in a meaningful way improving one's mental outlook of the day or the Covid19 situation and now has included the Black Lives Matter movement. Native Hawaiians know racism and oppression well. We support anyone who experiences trauma from the George Floyd murder to the daily images that are seen everyday in media. Since 1779, Native Hawaiians historically have been impacted negatively by epidemics that have decimated the Hawaiian population.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused anxiety amongst the Hawaiian communities. Native Hawaiian families, sheltering in place, with age ranges from newborn to 79 are participating.

We have participants from Hawaiʻi, Tahiti, New Zealand, California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington DC and New York. There are a total of 203 members on our Facebook site which include Lomi Lomi (massage/healer) practitioners, Native Hawaiian Healers, pre-school teachers - university professors, Native Hawaiian artists, Native Hawaiian spiritual leaders, Native Hawaiian musicians, Native Hawaiian business owners, hula practitioners, natural resource managers, ecologists, Native Hawaiian Comprehensive Health Workers, farmers, fishermen, Techies, entrepreneurs, and retirees. Since starting, our community has expanded into including others from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. We also accept all who feel despair and need relief or a reprieve even if only for 20 minutes a day.

Our solution benefits anyone who feels they need to connect to simple daily ritual just to get through another stress filled day.

Kānaenae Together supports language and cultural revitalization through the sharing of ancient Hawaiian chants.  The original uses of our ancestors and how the healing concepts they were created for can be used today, the pronunciation and translations of Hawaiian words, and the community support of other indigenous learning opportunities among our members with each other. 

We are currently scaling to broaden the native cultural education model of Kānaenae Together by creating and testing quality K-8 family-based math and science curriculum based upon ancient Hawaiian knowledge found in chants and other sources.

Our healing applications have been well received by our community of over 200 participants.  As we grow and survey our community, and test our applications and formats, we hope to expand our healing and educational tools to provide comfort, ease, and self-help applications to corporate and community organizations around the globe.  

We are currently serving just over 200 people after initial operations 16 weeks ago. In one year we are aiming to serve 40,000 through targeting private organizations such as businesses and schools. In five years we are hoping to serve 400,000 across the nation by partnering with government agencies to provide cultural strategies to combat stress within the civil service population. These numbers reflect benefit of direct users and does not include indirect benefits felt by families. Our goal is to impact at least 1,000,000 individuals to reduce stress and create comfort. 

Our goals in the next year are to organize ourselves structurally, create asynchronous course content, amend our app to address input from our users, and market our solution firstly to Native Hawaiian Organizations across the Nation, then local health hubs, followed by large businesses. We see ourselves building an online social network focused on health and well-being through Hawaiian chants. Besides our daily gatherings we are gearing up to release various courses that are grounded in our meetings to first address new students, then we will expand to other relevant Native Hawaiian content such as study of the atmosphere and time from a Hawaiian perspective. In the next 5 years we will have an app specific to teaching Hawaiian atmospheric indicators and tracking of time which we will develop for use in schools from K-12 and University. These resources are aimed to reconnect all people with the movement of the day from a grounded point of view. Critical to our success will be our public relations and social networking strategies. 

Our barriers currently include legal, cultural, technical, and financial barriers. Though we have a product and our operative we are still incorporating our articles of organization. This area is untouched in our understanding so we are cognizant about our model because others are starting to follow our examples. 

Cultural barriers include being a marginalized people and therefore a marginalized culture of daily rituals. We know from audience feedback that Kānaenae Together gatherings have provided a safe environment for families and community to join and participate in a daily ritual of common core values such as radical aloha, radical acceptance, and collective compassion for one another. These core values are universal truths that anyone can connect to and participate in collectively.

Our current app is created on a no-code platform. At some point we will transfer to an app created with code to provide requested features such as offline accessibility to our members. Additionally to create the actual courses we will need to train in storyboards, editing, and packaging.  

The financial barrier is more about learning how to structure our products to keep up in business. Support in approaching this area would be greatly appreciated. 

Our greatest barrier is internal organization. 

To address legal barriers we are meeting with a lawyer and drafting our articles of incorporation in the next month. We will also address issues inclusive of intellectual property and proprietary information. 

To combat cultural barriers we will continue to practice radical aloha and radical acceptance for all who find us and agree to uplifting one another in our membership. 

To address technical issues with the app we will be maximizing the resources available in the current platform so if we do decide to transfer to a coded app we have a more than minimum viable product to share with an engineer for conversion. Related to product of our courses we have reached out to an international Native Hawaiian public relations firm for guidance. 

We have three Native Hawaiian women founders who work on content creation, communitication, and technology. We are expanding slowly by including legal, public relations, and in the future employees to assist in day to day operations. Two of us are located on Hawaii Island and the third lives in San Francisco. 

Our leader Kalei Nuuhiwa is a cultural practitioner from Maui who has learned from elders of the Protect Kahoolawe Ohana, a group that removed military bombing from the island of Kahoolawe, and has published the first Master's research paper in Hawaiian language about Native Hawaiian relationships with the moon calendar. She is currently completing her PhD from New Zealand expanding on that topic with a focus on ceremony. In 2019 Katie Kamelamela earned her Botany PhD in research Native Hawaiian gathering practices across the islands and was recognized as a 2nd place winner for her app related to this research the same here. She has been training with Native Hawaiian tech social entrepreneur Purple Maia Foundation on how to create apps with no code technology for one year. Susie Kagami is a previously a Native Hawaiian music organizer who previously owned her own company coordinating events important to Hawaii residents while in California. 

Collectively we all contribute unique experiences to organize this endeavor. 

We currently do not have any formal partnerships. 

We would like to partner with Apple, specifically Tim Cook, in order to include indigenous philosophies into the upcoming of Artificial Intelligence engineering. Apple has a model that allows work from home, they choose to invest in their workers as well as identify the best way to financially assist both their people and the government.