Pu’uhonua Society and Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana
I Ola Kanaloa: 50 Years of Aloha ʻĀina
Kaho’olawe Aloha ʻĀina
3rd Space
Honolulu, HI,
September 17, 2026 from 6-9pm
My time on Kahoʻolawe was truly special, and it continues to stay with me.
During the trip, my students were paired with a group of students from a Hawaiian language and culture immersion school in Puna. On the surface, our students could not have seemed more different. But over the course of several days, as we worked side by side on ʻāina rehabilitation projects, shared meals, and were invited to take part in their practices, those differences began to matter less. What emerged instead was a sense of connection, curiosity, mutual respect…and friendship.
More than anything, though, I left the island with a renewed perspective on what it means to be an educator. I teach multimedia and digital media, but I came to realize that my role is not simply to teach students how to make things with technology. I want to create opportunities for them to challenge the ways they see the world.
I still have a hard time putting into words how deeply that trip affected me. But it brought me back to one of the main reasons I chose to become an educator in the first place: to inspire curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to see beyond what we already know.
Something extraordinary happened there as well. I saw a shooting star, the first I had ever seen in my life. It was such a fleeting moment, but somehow it felt connected to the experience of being on Kahoʻolawe. There was something about witnessing something so beautiful and unexpected in a place carrying so much history and loss. For a moment, it felt like a wish for something I never thought would happen was actually happening.
At first, I felt like protecting that experience, keeping it for myself as a special memory. But the feeling stayed with me, and eventually I felt compelled to create something that could share a small part of that experience with others.
On our final day, I recorded one long, uninterrupted shot of the ordnance board, which documents the bombs that have been exhumed. I felt it was important to document something that a general audience might not necessarily want to see.
For someone unfamiliar with the history of Kahoʻolawe, it would be easy to imagine an exotic, untouched landscape, inaccessible compared to the other inhabited islands. I wanted the film to interrupt that expectation. Instead of giving the viewer something beautiful to look at, I wanted to confront their expectations with something difficult: the evidence of what has happened to this land.
The only action in the final shot is the light of the setting sun cast upon the bombs on display. The light slowly disappears, and nothing else happens. The bombs remain. Evidence of a history that is still physically present in the land. Even today, there are unexploded ordnances embedded in Kahoʻolawe, making parts of the island unsafe for the public to freely explore.
What I found interesting was that, as a viewer, we know what should follow a setting sun: a rising one.
That became important to me. The setting sun carries both despair and hope, the recognition of what has been lost alongside the possibility of renewal. In a place where the land continues to heal, the act of watching the sun disappear becomes, in its own quiet way, an acknowledgment that darkness is not necessarily the end.
-J
Photo: Drew Broderick