A deteriorated outrigger canoe rests on a sawhorse beneath the jagged peak of Olomana, in the Windward Oahu town of Kailua. In a warehouse courtyard surrounded by a fifteen-foot fence crowned with barbed wire, a high school student puts a router to what remains of its hull. Beside her, Ryan Olivares watches, guiding her, telling her when to stop.
"Where's the piece of wood for this?" asks Olivares, pointing to a hole in the rotting koa hull.
"Stay over here," says the student in her thick pidgin.
"OK, grab 'um. We go clamp 'um up."
Teacher and student epoxy the nose of the nearly forty-year-old waa, the Hawaiian word for canoe. It's pretty beat up-pieces are missing, the tail nearly gone. Other canoe repairers considered it unsalvageable, not worth the effort. But Olivares had other plans for the canoe that nobody wanted. He saw its potential, just as he sees the potential in the kids he mentors. Most of them are youth incarcerated at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility (HYCF); others come from Olomana School, an alternative-education institution serving youth who need academic and credit recovery or are disciplinary transfers from their home district school.
Olivares was given three years to work with the students on getting the waa back into the water. But apart from the canoe's condition, there was another hurdle: While Olivares is a master woodworker-fashioning traditional Hawaiian items like papa kui ai (poi-pounding boards), niho oki (shell- and wood-cutting tools) and makau (fishhooks)-he had never worked on any kind of canoe before.
Olivares was working construction in 2005 when a friend asked him to volunteer at the nearby detention center. Olivares didn't have much experience outside of construction, but the instructor gave him free rein to craft with the students. "I got addicted," Olivares says.
He spent more and more time volunteering and eventually picked up a part-time job. At the same time, Olivares earned a degree in career and technical education and became the detention home's lead woodshop teacher. "I see myself in these kids," he says. "I wasn't no criminal, but I was a knucklehead. I know what these kids is going through."
Growing up, Olivares had a hard time paying attention in school. In those days, few options were available for students who weren't cut out for the classroom. He spent summers on Kauai with his uncle, who taught him to work the aina, the land. Olivares grew his food and made home-cooked meals from scratch. Sometimes, he says, his summers ran past the start of the school year because putting his hands in the soil interested him more than sitting in a classroom.
One day while working at the detention home, an inspector came into Olivares' woodshop class to look at the machines. Finding many of them unsafe, he cut the power cords. "I said, you know what? I still going teach the class," Olivares says. "I can make it all by hand." That's when he started learning traditional Hawaiian woodworking.
Eventually he transferred from the detention home in Kapolei to the Olomana Youth Center in Kailua, all under the umbrella of Olomana School. Together with the faculty, Olivares helped design a dual-credit program with Windward Community College, teaching technical skills while remaining rooted in Hawaiian studies. His students use traditional tools and techniques as much as possible. Once they exhaust all other options, they may use power tools. Every year, Olivares' students compete in regional woodwork competitions, and every year one if not more of his students places in the top three.
About forty years ago a group of HYCF youth and staff raised $6,000 to purchase a koa log from Hawaii Island. Together, the HYCF boys, their teacher and master canoe builders Wright Elemakule Bowman Sr. and his son Wright Bowman Jr. transformed that log into a traditional, six-person racing waa named Adam Haleloa o Kaukana o Kamehameha Ahai, in honor of one of the men who selected the tree and mentored the youth working on the project.
When Olivares started working with at-risk youth to restore the waa (canoe), he knew little about canoe repair but was skilled at other traditional Hawaiian crafts, including making makau (fishhooks), ie kuku (bark cloth beaters), niho oki (tooth cutters) and other implements.
While Olivares encourages students to use traditional hand tools whenever possible, sometimes you just need a little extra power. Here, the first female HYCF student to work on the canoe removes a rotted section of wood.
Bowman Sr. was instrumental in revitalizing traditional Hawaiian woodwork. He's best known for his koa craftsmanship and his work on the renowned Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokulea, a replica of the type of traditional Hawaiian waa last seen more than six hundred years ago. The canoe first set sail in 1975 and has since navigated all around the world without the use of modern instruments, navigating by the stars. Bowman and Hokulea breathed life into a dying art and sparked a wave of cultural pride throughout Polynesia.
When Bowman and the HYCF crew finished the waa, it was valued at $12,000. It was the only koa waa among thirteen canoes in the Na Opio Canoe Racing Association's high school races in 1985. However, managing a canoe club at HYCF proved difficult. The story goes that the canoe was found abandoned in Waimanalo and returned to the correctional facility, where it sat for years, exposed to the sun and rain of the Windward side.
Despite the fact that it couldn't be picked up without falling apart, the waa is "priceless," says William K. Richards Jr., president of the Friends of Hokulea and Hawaiiloa. Koa trees can grow over one hundred feet tall, and the curving grain protects the wood from splitting while being carved. While it grows bountifully in Hawaii (and only in Hawaii), trees tall enough and straight enough to carve a waa from a single log are exceedingly rare today. Add to that the dwindling number of kalai wa'a (canoe builders), and you begin to understand the value of such a waa, even in its disrepair. When it comes to the number of people who can walk into a forest, chop down a tree and build a canoe, "we're down to about six," says Richards, "and they're getting older."
Richards was called to take a look at the HYCF waa. He has nearly fifty years of experience sailing traditional Hawaiian waa and was asked to make the connections to get it repaired. That's when Olivares' name came up. His skills and experience, coupled with his background in supporting at-risk youth, made him the ideal candidate to get Adam Haleloa o Kaukana o Kamehameha Ahai back into the water. But no can, he said.
"At first I said, 'I don't want to do this. I don't know how to work on canoe,'" Olivares recalls. Richards, who sat in on one of Olivares' woodshop classes, told Olivares they would "work it ou
"Work what out? I just told you, Uncle, I no like do this," Olivares remembers telling Richards. But Richards pressed, telling Olivares, "Don't make any decisions right now."
The waa, Adam Haleloa o Kukana o Kamehameha, was originally carved by students and mentors like Wright Bowman Sr. (seen in the photo above, top left) at HYCF in the mid-1980s from a single koa log. By the time Olivares and his students started working on it, it was considered unfixable by most kālai waa (canoe builders).
Olivares spent many hours of his free time on weekends and after school working on canoes with Perry at the Kupuna Shed. After two months Perry presented him with a container holding shavings from the first canoe Olivares worked on. "I have no idea what it means," says Olivares, "but from that day on I was like, OK, I guess I'm working on canoes now."
"When Tay can leave him alone to work on a canoe that's going to be up in a museum, he pretty much graduated," says Richards. "Now the real test is, how well can you teach it?"
Before any of Olivares' students start working on the waa for the day, they walk around the whole canoe by themselves and talk to it, look at it, introduce themselves to it. There are only three rules, says Olivares. "No swearing around the canoe, and happy thoughts. If somebody makes a mistake, no be grumbling, no scold nobody."
At the Kupuna Shed, Olivares learned that if it can be fixed, it's not a mistake. It just means there's more work to do.
The waa sits on the five-hundred-acre campus of the Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center, home to Olomana School, HYCF and four other organizations known collectively as the Opportunity Youth Action Hawaii hui. Together they aim to transform youth incarceration by applying indigenous knowledge. The waa restoration is only one of the projects on campus that seeks to reconnect Hawaii's at-risk youth, who are disproportionately Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, with their cultural identity.
For Olivares, repairing the waa isn’t only about teaching vocational skills—it’s about connecting youth with their Hawaiian roots. “These kids know more about rappers than they know about themselves,” he says. “It’s an easy way to connect with the kids, that canoe. It’s part of their culture.” Above, Olivares and Olomana School senior Kelii Makaio-Kalai repair the hull.
"The canoe is one easier way for teach," says Olivares. "Instead of sitting in one class, I can teach math through this, history through this, science through this. And, it kind of helps them take one pride in their culture. These kids know more about rappers than they know about themselves. It's an easy way to connect with the kids, that canoe. It's part of their culture."
"What I like best is learning how our kupuna [ancestors] built canoes and seeing how hard it was to put a canoe together back in the olden days," says Kelii Makaio-Kalai, a senior at Olomana School who's working on the canoe. "And we're actually using power tools, too."
"You going work on the canoe this summer?" Makaio-Kalai asks Olivares as the two line up the frame for the router.
"Yeah, gotta figure out the funding," says Olivares. "But you know me. I'll work on it for free."
"Straight up. Shoots. Let me know," says Makaio-Kalai. "I'll come by."
Since taking Olivares' courses, Makaio-Kalai says he's become interested in a career working with the aina, like gardening, farming or woodwork. "I love being around [Olivares] because it's learning about all the things I'm interested in, too, just all our traditions," he says. "He's kind of like me in a way: How we think the same, we're not always sure about something, but we'll get the task done. He's more like a father figure to me. A good influence."
While Olomana School students face challenges in conventional classrooms, Olivares reminds them that intelligence is more than just getting an A; it's about applying what they learn. "Actually repairing something that you probably couldn't think was repairable is kind of an amazing feeling," Makaio-Kalai says.
“Actually repairing something that you probably didn’t think could be repaired is kind of an amazing feeling,” says Makaio-Kalai (seen above). Working on the waa, he says, connected him with his Hawaiian ancestry—his mother paddled and his grandfather was a woodworker, and the canoe gave him the chance to combine those traditions. “There’s not too many places you have the opportunity to actually do this,” he says.
For Olivares, restoring this waʻa isn’t about saving just one canoe. It’s about preserving an art, an indigenous technology once used to explore, to feed people, to transport goods and to sustain a nation. Working so closely with youth who have been estranged from their culture, Olivares knows the dangers of allowing these traditions to slip away. “We in trouble,” he says, referring to the Hawaiian nation.
Until the work is done, Olivares will post updates to his Instagram (@ao_mau_woodworks), but he has no interest in paddling the finished canoe himself; his passion remains in woodworking, he says, in honoring his teachers and playing a role in the small but growing group of kālai waʻa.
And as for the future of carving canoes? “Hopefully, one of these kids picks it up,” he says.
