Gentle Rhythms—Becoming Kapa.The Arts of Marie McDonald: Kapa, Lei, and the Art of Lifelong Learning

By Catherine Tarleton

When Marie Adams McDonald was an art student at Texas Women’s University, she was required to take a course in Texas History.

“But I was never required to take Hawaiian History,” she said, “Even though I went to Kamehameha Schools.”  When she returned home to O‘ahu after graduation, she immersed herself in learning about her own culture. “I haunted the library, haunted Bishop Museum,” she said.  “I was so impressed, even in high school, with the artwork that came out of Hawaiians—particularly kapa. I consider that to be painting. Kapa-makers express themselves in color and two dimensions. Whatever idea inspired me I would go do it a little.”

Beating Kapa: the Rhythm of Life

Their work has a rhythm. Steady wood beating on the still-young bark cloth. In the studio, stamping on a kapa, already dried and prepped, Marie and daughter Roen Hufford worked as part of a team of 30 kapa makers statewide to complete kapa garments for this year’s Merrie Monarch, enough to clothe Hālau O Kekuhi for their Hō‘ike performance.

Marie unwraps a soft new kapa, wauke bark beaten to a pale, thin sheet, cream-colored like a fine writing paper, but moist, almost like a sheet of dough. It has a faint smell like freshly mown lawns. She explains it is in the fermenting stage, and replaces it carefully in the plastic wrap. “Plastic is my contemporary innovation to make it easier for me to handle,” said Marie. “Hawaiian women worked in groups. Most of us now do it by ourselves.”

A stack of wooden beaters wait to one side, well used, carved from dense native woods like uhiuhi, kauila, koai‘a. These make the “watermark” signature of Hawaiian kapa, which sets it apart from other Pacific bark fabrics. Inside the studio, she holds up a completed kapa for me to see; the light shines through, and there, like a secret, is a star shape, beaten into the fiber of the cloth. “Another difference, Hawaiians used natural colors,” said Marie. “The palette was complete—red, yellow, blue, green, black, brown, purple.”

“I feel if we are going to encourage and make Hawaiian kapa then we should stick to the teachings,” Marie said. “You can take off on the design. You can take off and express yourself on the design process but not in the manufacturing process. That’s how I feel as an artist, as an educator.”

In the studio, daughter Roen stamps intricate patterns to complete her kapa, using dyes the two women make from plants they grow. Roen says she doesn’t plan out the entire design in advance, that it evolves as she works, tells its own story.

“It’s also a family connection,” said Roen. “Connected through to heart because we are Hawaiian and you could say we honor my grandmother and her forebears.” She talks and works on the kapa. “Hawaiians were sensitive to the natural rhythm of life and observed how the stars move, how the plants grew. It passed from one generation to the next and gave one generation the knowledge of how to survive here and how to have joy in this place… to have beautiful things
to adorn their bodies, clothes and flower lei and to dance and sing and to eat well. And they did these things better than we can ever do.”

Flying Flowers

“I was half of a set of twins,” said Marie. “My mother’s maiden name is Māhoe, which means twins. And my twin brother did not survive, but people in my mother’s generation used to say—because I am the tallest girl in the family—that ‘Marie possesses the strength of her brother.’”

Marie grew up on Moloka‘i, where her father, originally from Pennsylvania, worked as a telephone superintendant. Her Hawaiian mother, an avid gardener, made the lei to adorn his hat, and she shared her love of flowers with her 10 children.

“When we were children we would get a toy at Christmas sometimes, most of the time clothes, and at the beginning of the school year we got shoes,” said Marie. “The girls made toys out of flowers, and dolls, a whole pile of dolls… We would ‘fly’ with the dolls from castle to castle, and when we flew from castle to castle (hibiscus to hibiscus) we made this sound ‘plitta, plitta, plitta.’”

Eventually, Marie did actually fly off to college in Texas, graduating with a B.A. in Art Education. She returned to O‘ahu to work for the Department of Parks and Recreation in Honolulu, planning arts and cultural programs under both Mayor Blaisdell’s and Mayor Fasi’s administration.

The department held an annual lei contest, begun in the 1920s at the Waikīkī Bandstand. “At first there were 300 entries or more,” said Marie. “And they employed Hawaiian teaching, but at the time they were only familiar with just the one technique of stringing, and the simple braid… I met some people from the Big Island who set and mounted in a braid technique. Waimea was known for beautiful lei-makers.”

The knowledge she gained and the people she met at the contest led Marie to further research in subsequent years, but most of what she learned, she taught herself. “I had to,” said Marie, “I didn’t know anybody doing it. I got to know Malia Solomon. She had a little Hawaiian village—it was called Ulu Mau—in Ala Moana Beach Park,” she said. “I had to learn by reading, and by quizzing people like Malia… I learned by myself, by trial and error,” she said.

In 1973, Marie and husband Bill McDonald moved to Waimea. Roen, who had just graduated from the University of Hawai‘i, helped them settle in, then went back, returning some years later with her husband Ken Hufford to create an organic vegetable farm. The family’s 10-acre spread, “Honopua” (hono, to stitch or sew, and pua, flowers), is an Eden for lei-makers and Hawaiian cultural artisans. “We planted everything except the grass, the kikuyu,” Marie said. “I would see something I like and I bring it home and plant it. Or somebody would bring me some interesting plant and I planted it.”

“I brought with me one start of wauke plant,” she said. Wauke, Broussonetia papyrifera, is considered one of the original 24 canoe plants brought to Hawai‘i by Polynesian voyagers. “When I left ‘Oahu, I decided to take the information I gathered from there and publish it and that was my first book, Ka Lei, in 1985,” said Marie. With beautiful photography by Roen, Ka Lei contributed to the revival of lei-making and is now highly-valued.

Not long after, she and Paul Weissich, then Director of the Botanical Gardens for the City and County of Honolulu, decided to collaborate on another book, one that illustrated different types of lei created before Hawai‘i was discovered by westerners. Nā Lei Makamae was published by University of Hawai‘i Press in 2003 and received the The Samuel M. Kamakau Award for the Hawai‘i Book of the Year from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association.

Marie has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts as a “National Heritage Fellow” for her work as a researcher, teacher, author, and lei-maker. In 2010, Marie was named the Alfred Preis Honoree by Hawai‘i Arts Alliance, as one of Hawai‘i’s most respected kupuna in the arts of lei and kapa-making, and for her support of HOEA: Hawaiian ‘Ohana for Education in the Arts, which was “established to increase the number, visibility and accessibility of Native Hawaiian arts and artists.”

Marie, a lifelong learner at 80-plus, is concerned about the quality of education in today’s classrooms. “I get so alarmed with what is happening to an education system where all the emphasis seems to be placed on math and science. Math and science are wonderful, but not at the risk of cutting art and music,” she said. “You can enlarge your math experience and science experience with art.”

And after so many years of hard work, teaching and study, why does she not sit back and relax, rest on her laurels, or her kapa, and enjoy her retirement?

“We are Hawaiian, we are art-trained and we are curious,” said Marie, “and we are living.” She returns to the unfinished work, picking up the gentle rhythm of kapa.