There are some projects you make, and then there are others that end up changing the shape of your life. Living Like A Hawaiian became that for me and the heart of all my cultural immersive voyaging.
What began as a deep curiosity of Native Hawaiian language and overall culture, slowly transformed to be something much heavier and more meaningful than I had ever imagine. It was never only about filming Hawaiʻi, and it was never going to be satisfied with postcard beauty, surface level living, or the easy version of what people think the islands are. From the beginning, the heart of this journey was to learn directly from the source, through people, through relationship, through place, and through the truths that live underneath the image so often sold to the world.
By the time the film was complete, I understood more clearly that Hawaiʻi had not just left me with a story to tell. It had asked something of me. It had stretched me, humbled me, wrecked me in certain ways, and also helped shape the direction of everything that would come after.
How Living Like A Hawaiian Took Shape
Living Like A Hawaiian did not come from a casual idea or a simple desire to make another travel piece. It’s roots were planted across the Pacific Islands on a voyage in 2018 that spanned: New Zealand, Tonga, Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and a standalone trip to Palau. It involved growing closer to Hawaiʻi, from trying to understand what it means to be present in a place that so many people consume without ever really listening to, and from the realization that if I was going to create anything here, it had to be rooted in more than aesthetics.
By the time this documentary began to take shape, I already knew that a project like this would be insanely complex. It carried a heavy history, too much pain, trauma, and ongoing struggle. The deeper I moved into this work, the more I understood that this was not just about putting together compelling visuals or collecting interviews. But also about learning how to hold space and a platform for stories, voices, values, and realities that are too often ignored, overshadowed, or romanticized by upper layers of what most claim is, “the REAL Hawai’i”.
That was part of why this film became so intense to carry as it asked me to slow down, to pay closer attention, and simply to place myself in the spaces of Kanaka Maoli. It was opening through trust, through humility, and through the long process of learning that there is no real entry into Hawaiʻi without also encountering responsibility. To understand Hawai’i through them.
The Voices and Relationships That Gave This Story Its Heart
If this documentary carries any real mana, it is because it came from the voices within it, the people who entrusted me with their words, their time, their perspective, and their ʻike.
Living Like A Hawaiian was never meant to be a film where I stand above the subject and explain Hawaiʻi back to the world. The film flows with and through people with the understanding that that is where the truth of Hawaiʻi lives. It lives in voices, in lived memory, in cultural practice, in the way people speak about land, family, the ahupua’a, and kupuna. It lives in the lāhui, in the everyday, in the way Hawaiʻi is carried by those who continue to protect it, question it, fight for it, and love it.
That is one of the deepest lessons Hawaiʻi gave me. A place is never understood through scenery alone, no matter how breathtaking it is. You begin to understand it through relationship, through listening, observing, living, through watching how people think, how they speak, what they defend, what they grieve, and what they continue to perpetuate. That is what gave this documentary its heart, and it is also what gave my Hawaiʻi chapter and One Ocean, One People its depth.
Aloha ʻĀina, Water, and The Sources of Life
One of the strongest theme through Living Like A Hawaiian is the understanding of aloha ʻāina. Not as a slogan stamped on businesses or something symbolic or decorative, but as something lived and felt through the relationship between people and the land itself.
Hawaiʻi cannot be understood without land and water. They are not a backdrop of the mountains to white sand beaches. They are the heart of the story, part of the fight and struggle, and part of what is constantly at stake. With the documentary intentionally created in two parts it introduced elements of culture that all stem from vai (water). Though as the story transitioned into part two, it became clearer and clearer that Hawaiʻi holds immense consequence. There is sacredness, nourishment, memory, and continuity in the land and sea, but there is also contamination, pressure, misuse, and the ongoing weight of what happens when a place is taken, abused, packaged to market to tourists, and overrun without care for what it already is.
That tension had to remain in the film because leaving it out would have meant leaving out something essential. Hawaiʻi is not only a place of spiritual language and cultural beauty. It is also a place where those things are constantly being tested by what is happening on the ground to the very streams and ocean that are just as effected. The deeper I went into this documentary, the more I felt that aloha ʻāina was holding the whole thing together.
Language is the True Heart of Hawaiʻi
The initial cultural component and layer that kickstarted the documentary was language. As I once ignorantly assumed on my initial years in the islands was that, “the Hawaiian language was dead”. And my oh my was I wrong. ‘Olelo Hawai’i is the native tonge of Hawaii and while dominated by English, Tagalog, and Japanese, the Hawaiian language lives and thrives amongst community. It’s in educational spaces, hula, Merrie Monarch, and in film such as Jason Momoa’s Cheif of War.
Language alike most other Oceania language are not literal like English, but contextual. It carries stories, genealogy, history, place names, relationship, and the deeper architecture of how a people understand the their world. In the film, and in my own journey through Hawaiʻi, it became increasingly clear that cultural survival lives directly in the language.
The documentary took the time to introduce Olelo Hawaii’s role in Kapa (Tapa), voyaging today on the va’a, and most importantly through Hula, the very thing that started my whole voyage of immersion across the Pacific. The deepest level of immersion was the honor of spending time with the Niihau community of Ni’ihau. Where I got the opportunity to immerse in the language in church, shell lei making (pupu), church, and the day to day.
Struggles Challenges, and Realities of Modern Hawaiʻi
Hawaiʻi holds beauty, joy, intelligence, resistance, contradiction, pain, and cultural strength all at the same time. The film held space for all of that in form of storytelling. It needed room for the true beauty of the islands culture, but also for the lived realities of displacement, over-tourism, military occupation, sovereignty, environmental harm, and the ways Hawaiʻi continues to be changed by forces that do not always honor the people from whom it comes.
That complexity is part of why the documentary took so much out of me. There is nothing easy about trying to create a piece that holds beauty without reducing Hawaiʻi to the surface level imagery, and that speaks to struggle without flattening Hawaiʻi into struggle. I knew the film had to stay human, grounded, and layered. I wanted it to breathe with the same tension Hawaiʻi itself carries, where the land can be breathtaking, the culture can be profound, and the reality can still be deeply painful.
The Continued Fight and Resilience of the Lahui
For all the tension and difficulty the documentary carries, it also moves toward something that is still alive, still rooted, and still being carried forward.
Hawaiʻi is not a relic of the past & Kanaka Maoli culture is not something confined to museums, visitor impressions, or fragments of the past. It lives through people, through ceremony, through chant, through language, through hula, through relationship, through practice, through resistance, and through the way ʻike is still being protected and passed on. One of the greatest gifts of this documentary was being able to witness and feel that continuity in ways that left a deep imprint on me.
That continuity is part of why the film rises the way it does. It does not end in emptiness. It does not end in despair. It returns to something deeper and more enduring than that. There is an oceanic and ancestral thread running through Hawaiʻi that cannot be reduced to modern pressure alone. It is still there. It is still moving. It is still shaping the people who carry it, and it is still shaping anyone fortunate enough to encounter it with real openness.
The Legacy of Living Like A Hawaiian
A month after the release of Living Like A Hawaiian, I found myself looking back at just how much the film had taken out of me. Revisiting the complicated journey behind it brought back a lot of hardship and pain. There were months where I carried headaches, anxiety, and a level of exhaustion that made it clear just how much of myself had gone into this work alone. I applied to grants while patiently waiting for translations and preparing to voyage to American Samoa. That is important to say plainly, because this documentary did not come together lightly. It cost me something that had enough value to give back to Kanaka Maoli in a way that honored so much they had given to me.
At the same time, the film was already taking on a life bigger than the one I had first imagined for it. Tens of thousands of eyes had seen it, whether once or multiple times, and what I had once simply called a project was being embraced by many as a film or documentary. Coming back to it numerous times after stepping more fully into American Samoa was strange in its own way because I had already tried to move forward mentally and spiritually from everything it took to finish. However, Hawai’i like stated in the conclusion of the film, stayed with me like it continues to do so today.
It also became clear to me that Living Like A Hawaiian was not the end of something. It was an umbrella that held far more within it than one documentary could ever contain. Niʻihau language, sovereignty, kapa, and so many other branches were still there, waiting to be explored more deeply. Around that same time, I had even interviewed a practitioner in American Samoa that tied siapo and kapa together, which only reinforced what I was already beginning to understand more clearly: these projects do not stand alone. They are interconnected amongst each other of a wider web I now know as One Ocean, One People.
In that sense, the legacy of Living Like A Hawaiian was not simply that I finished it. Its legacy was that it helped sharpen what I am here to do as I voyage around Moananuiakea, and beyond.
Why Living Like A Hawaiian Still Lives at the Root of My Voyages
Looking back now, I can say plainly that Living Like A Hawaiian remains one of the dearest projects of my entire journey. Not because it was simply completed, but because of what it opened.
It deepened my understanding of what cultural storytelling really asks of a person. It showed me how much relationship truly matters with the people of the destinations. It proved that if I was willing to go all in with heart, effort, and respect, the work could carry far beyond a project, short film, or documentary. It strengthened my path into the wider Pacific and helped others understand more clearly what I value and what I am trying to do through this voyaging life. It opened the door to the hearts of Samoans across the archipelago, eventually to the heart of Tokelau and onward to Wallis and Futuna and beyond.
Most of all, it rooted me more deeply in the understanding that Hawaiʻi was never just one chapter I passed through for nearly five years. It became one of the root chapters – chapter one. What I learned there, what Kanaka Maoli entrusted me to witness, and what the documentary came to carry still moves through literally everything I do today.
Living Like A Hawaiian was never only a film about Hawaiʻi and a tribute to Kanaka Maoli. It was truly a honorable means to show just how much Hawaiʻi changed me, challenged me, and helped open the road I still walk now. And that road and journey carries into the hearts of everyone that opens up their spaces to me, as Kanaka Maoli have.
As I conclude this peice, I reiterate alongside the documentary that while a hui hou is known as goodbye in Olelo Hawai’i. It still remains as,
a hui mau. See you, always
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