Daniel Anthony

Daniel Anthony

Founder, Mana Ai

“You got to analyze it, you got to break it down, and you have to be able to speak the value in the community. This is what wakes people up. This is what change is like.”

Caroline (C): Thank you so much for doing this, we’re excited!

Kepa (K): yeah, thank you so much for sharing your mana?o (knowledge) with us uncle Daniel! Um…

Daniel Anthony (A): Okay, fire away!

K: So, for this project if you could just introduce yourself, your first and last name, and if you could just tell us a little bit of a like snippet of your community activism, like your experience in it.

A:        All right, aloha mai k?kou. My name is Daniel Anthony, I hail from Wai?anae, O?ahu. I currently reside in K?ne?ohe in the Ko?olau district of O?ahu. Umm…you know what, I am a multi-generational community organizer. Community organizing and fighting against oppression is probably something that goes back thousands of generations in my DNA. I can tell you my dad is a community organizer, both my grandfathers are community organizers and have participated in the betterment of where the live, wherever they’ve lived. And I’ve been a part of a movement…a realization… I have been activated from birth. So, you know for me, I actually ran away from this responsibility. I didn’t want to do it. At some point in my life, I gave up fighting destiny. I just said, you know what, I always seem to be at the right place at the right time. I need to get over my fears about what if I do the right thing. What if I do what my na?au, what my heart is telling me to say? What if I just say it? What happens? And I stopped worrying about what would happen, and I started to just listen to that…that instinctual voice that’s inside of you. That’s the scary voice that tells you to do things when everyone else says, “DON’T DO IT!” And it has led me on an incredible journey in life. I think people would say it’s resistance, but I think that my journey is the opposite of resistance. I’ve stopped resisting. There’s the snippet

K:        Could you explain a little bit about how you specifically became involved with community organizing? For instance, I know that you started Mana Ai, right? And…

A:        All right, back to baby diaper days, kay?

K:        Yeah.

A:        In the diaper days, the only reason why my grandpa didn’t get arrested at Geothermal for protesting back in the 1980s was because he had his three-year-old grandson with him. So I’ve been through Geothermal, was some of the earliest protests I remembered going to. Hale Mohala was a center for people with Hansen’s disease… Let’s see, what else have I been a part of? My dad’s dad was the first resident physician in our community, and although he was a retired military doctor, he was instrumental in stopping the U.S. Army from bombing in Makua Valley. And this is a place that the military had been bombing since the 1940s. And so, I always knew which side of the line I stood on, whether it was housing development…whether, I mean here in Hawai?i, all we have are issues. And it’s really the people with money that want to develop that have no connection to the ‘?ina (land), verses the people that have no money because we’re connected to the ??ina, we’re rich already! You know?

K:        Yeah.

D:        So just about ten years ago, the University of Hawai?i patented a couple of forms of varieties of hybrid taro. And there was a huge, massive… I don’t even want to say protest. There was this awakening in our community that our sacred foods can be owned by no one person. They belong to us all. They belong to the earth. They belong to our unborn great-grandchildren. And so, as a family of taro farmers I felt compelled to participate. And during this week-long protest where we camped out at ?Iolani Palace I began to pose a question to all the elders, to the kupuna: “what does H?loa need?” And they basically all said, “We need farmers.” So about ten years ago, that started me on a mission to become a taro farmer, like a full-time taro farmer. And what I did was I had to basically reverse engineer what I would need to make in order to be a farmer, and I really needed to understand what type of taro farmer these kupunas were looking for. And so about eight years ago, after years of heavily researching this, going out, talking to farmers in the community, what I found out what everyone was asking for was low-wage farm workers. That’s what they wanted! They didn’t want a taro farmer. They didn’t want some independently strong, running off the ??ina people. They wanted some fricken b*** to go out there to pull weeds for five bucks an hour! That’s what they were saying. They didn’t really quanitfy that as that’s what they were saying, but you know ten years ago the price of taro was two cents a pound. And so, you know if you grow 100,000 pounds, harvesting thousands of pounds a week, 300 pounds of taro a day, you would only gross $60,000 dollars.

Kepa, you’ve pulled before. It takes you all day to pull 300 pounds! Brah, it takes you all day, it takes one person all day to pull 300 pounds. You pulled 300 pounds for 150 bucks for your whole work! That doesn’t include the planting, doesn’t include any of the other work you have to do. You can’t make it! You need minimum wage field workers. So, kind of the first step that we did in our own path was we reverse-engineered how much we would sell kalo (taro) for in order to make it as a farmer. And we came to the conclusion that you have to sell taro for $2 dollars a pound to have a good lifestyle as a taro farmer. And so we started paying farmers $2 dollars a pound. Now, it’s ironic that it should be through selling taro and buying taro and supporting farmers that you would get politically activated. But our goal wasn’t really to change any systems, our whole goal was to farm kalo. And if you wanted to farm kalo, then actually the system had to change. It had to evolve. Now the only problem at the time was when we paid $2 for taro … people selling a commercial commodity, at the cheapest price possible, produce a poor-quality product. And so, we were paying two dollars for taro that we should’ve only been paying for… It wasn’t even worth 10 cents. So it some significant number of years to build relationships with the farmers for us to get what we were actually paying for. Now in the midst of this, if you buy it for more, how do you make it? Like you want to do the right thing but how do you do the right thing in a capitalist society? Because in this society it doesn’t come down to the right thing. It comes down to your bottom line.

So our for-profit business Mana Ai, since 2009, actually went out of business three times. The first year we went out of business because of poor taro quality, we weren’t able to make ends meet, we were paying too much for poor quality. The second time we went out of business because the Hawai?i State Department of Health came and told us that our traditional practice, and our dream of doing things the way our a ncestors did it wasn’t legal. And the third time, we went out of business because the farmers ran out of taro, and our production supply dwindled.

So, all right, and I’m all over the place here because this is a really complicated story. So hang on… I never started pounding taro with the intent to have a business. I started pounding taro… well I’ve been pounding taro since I was 12 years old. And how I started pounding it publicly was when I was representing Native Hawaiian artists. And we’d do art shows. And everybody and their aunty from Russia were claiming to be Native Hawaiian artists, right? You move here from France, you painting Maui, you must be Hawaiian!

So, we’d be in studios where we would literally be the only kanakas (native people) in the whole place and people would look at us saying something like, “That’s not Hawaiian art!” And it was because the paintings we were producing had people in it. You know if you look at the “Waik?k? Hawaiian art,” there are no people in it. There’s the dolphin, a whale, a turtle, you know some birds, some invasive flowers, lots of invasive algae, right? Like, “Oh, paradise on paper!”
Well, we started pounding taro at art shows. To draw a line to where the kanakas are at! And what we found was that when you saw someone pounding kalo and then you saw art of people making food and doing Hawaiian activities, it just all of a sudden made sense! And then, what we experienced was that because nobody had been pounding taro for literally a hundred years on O?ahu in public, that everybody and their aunty from Russia and their cousins were blown away. And even I can tell you, still today… today there are people that tell me they’ve never seen poi made traditionally. “OH MY GOD, THIS IS AMAZING!”

Well, let me tell you, back then, 10 years ago…actually this is more like 20 years ago. Back then I met pure Hawaiians, born and raised in Papak?lea, had never seen poi made traditionally. It came to a point, with the taro pounding at art shows, that art shows were calling us up and where like, “Hey, we’ll give you guys a $2,000 dollar booth for free if you do a one-hour demonstration every day.” Like, the taro pounding became the art that people wanted to see.

In 2008 we had the market collapse. The Art market was tied to the Insurance market and the insurance market failed. Well in 2008 two major things happened. One major thing was the art market fail. The other major thing because the art market fell the major Native Hawaiian artist that I was working with…his wife used it as the main reason for us to separate because I wasn’t bringing in any money for them. And there was just no money to bring in. So I felt really burned and super angry, and I had a lot of issues to deal with. And so in January I went to this workshop called Papak? Makawalu. And at this workshop Aunty Pua Kanaka?ole basically said, “If you want to exist in your practice, you have to create goals and challenge yourself in your practice.” Over this four-day workshop it was basically like, what’s your practice and how are you going to challenge yourself? And I was like, well my practice this year is going to be ku?i ?ai (pounding food) it’s going to be m?lama H?loa, my goal is that I’m going to pound 10,000 pounds of taro. I just want to see if someone can do it!

And I had a lot of motivation, one of my biggest motivations were that I had a lot of my own internal pain, suffering that I had to deal with. And cleaning taro was the single most therapeutic activity that I could do. Cleaning taro was just like…just amazing. I can’t explain…Pulling off the impurities and finding the essence of the taro helped me to pull off my impurities and find my essence. And by September of 2009, I pounded 10,000 pounds of kalo.

And that kind of…you know…it’s like how Bruce Lee talks about the 10,000 punches. If you want to master something you have to do it 10,000 times. Well, in doing it 10,000 times I realized, after doing it 10,000 times, that I didn’t understand what I was doing! And so it put me into this full… 2009 was like, research, research, research I started going into the museum, I started talking with elders in the community. What I found out was, in taro pounding, everybody talked about knowing it, but no one actually did it. And they could talk about doing it, but they couldn’t actually do what they were talking about. And so during the course of the year, there were a lot of revelations. One of which was that I really wanted to take this to the next level. Like there really was a next level.

So my wife and I, in September, we started a business and we decided to go out into the community and hit the farmer’s markets. And a photographer at one of the farmer’s markets took a picture, sent it to the newspaper, and it got the front page of the newspaper. Well we come to find out that the Department of Health reads the newspaper, and the next week they come to the farmer’s market looking for me!

They told us that we couldn’t do this business because we used a wooden stone and yadda, yadda, yadda. We had to be FDA approved and… If we continued to do it we would be subject to $1,000 dollars per day fines.” We couldn’t even give it away because the Department of Health regulates the sales and distribution of all food. So at the time we did not have support, really didn’t have any money, it was basically… Actually, my best friend, and I, and my wife had started the business. And in December he was like, “Daniel, you need to dissolve me off of this.” We both decided we weren’t going to stop, but if I got busted and we had a business together he would get busted. And if he got busted, I would get busted. So we decided to split up so it would be harder to bust us!        In dealing with the Department of Health I recognized that there was a big loophole. I couldn’t pound it and sell it or give it to you, but I could teach you how to pound it. And if you pounded it, well then they couldn’t say s***. So in late 2009 we started our first community ku?i (process of food pounding). That community ku?i ran for nine months. We essentially had 3,000 people come and pound taro with us in that first year of our hard-core community education. And we literally built the awareness movement from the ground-up. We got people excited and inspired to break the law themselves! Make traditional foods. Right? I mean what we did was, instead of us trying to stop being criminals, we just turned everyone into criminals! Arrest us all!

Simultaneously, during this education period, the demand for pa?i ?ai (pounded taro) was so high that there ensued a black market. And one of the table restaurants came to us and said, “Daniel, keep this a secret, but we don’t care, we want to put this on our menu, this stuff is amazing!” So it just so happens that this restaurant is located right across the street from the State Capital, right in the major business district of Honolulu. So for, like, one year they were fully serving it to the Department of Health! In fact the Director of the Department of Health, it was his favorite dish! This is how ridiculous this is! So everybody’s eating it. Nobody knows it’s illegal, right? Nobody knows really knows that we’re making it. They just think that, “oh, I don’t even know how it’s being made! It’s just…magic!”

So in November of 2010, we do a Taro Festival. And in the newspaper article for this Taro Festival, it says in their menu that you can buy pa?i ?ai at this restaurant. Like this restaurant serves pa?i ?ai, and I remember the lady that wrote the article was the same woman that took the picture that got me in trouble! Okay, and she was like, “are you sure we should put this, Daniel?” And, you know I was at the point where…like…I’d been selling for almost a year, people had been eating it at this restaurant for over a year, thousands of people have made it like…for real. That little voice inside was like, Daniel this is not wrong. We’re at the point…let’s put this out there and see what happens.

Well two weeks later, after the article came out, the Department of Health raided the restaurant. I’m talking like police and helicopters, swat team came in there, knocked down the door, came in and was like, “WHERE’S YOUR ILLEGAL POI! (poi = pa?i ?ai with added water).” [They] made the restaurant throw away 20 pounds of pa?i ?ai. Well, all right guys, so this is what happened. I got on the phone and I started calling the news. And I actually pushed the issue into the media. Because in that last year, every traditional event that we did, when the news saw us they would literally run over to us and be like “community poi making!” Well, when the news put two-and-two together, that the community had been eating this for over a year… nobody died! Right? I mean this is the way people have been making it for thousands of years, all of a sudden like some new bosses come to down and it’s “dangerous” for the community. Well this is what we found: people almost never fight for what they don’t have, but will fight you do death if you want to take something away from them!

And the irony was that the people that were eating pa?i ?ai at this restaurant, located right across from the State Capital, it was all the politicians and the business leaders in the community! They were also baffled that it was illegal. They were like, how is this possible?So, long-story short they did a news story on us, and the news thing went viral.

***Daniel Anthony takes a 5-minute break to drop off pa?i ?ai for a restaurant***

D:        All right, so fire away where were we?

K:        Okay, so we were right in the middle of realizing that all of these big business people, political leaders were eating pa?i ?ai. And I guess just for our reader’s uncle [Daniel], maybe if could just explain what pa?i ?ai is, you know? In your best words possible, and then explain from their how it came about to be as prominent as it is in Hawai?i’s community today?

D:        All right…so if we go back to the old school days of the old school days. Two thousand varieties of taro worldwide, 78 countries host it as a native food, why out of 2,000 varieties and 78 countries do only Hawaiians make poi? Because it was a secret recipe! Right? Poi-making and pa?i-ing, it’s essentially what it was. It was deemed simple, but sometimes the simplest things are the most difficult to stumble upon. It was a technological advancement in food preservation. The making of pa?i ?ai allowed for people to keep this cooked taro indefinitely weeks, months, or even years in a cool, dry place. Now you would say, well why would that be important that we could keep our food, our staple food, for weeks, months, or even years? Well if you’re trying to get to the most isolated place on planet earth in a canoe, you need super badass food! Right?

Think of it. Why did Western civilization take so long to cross the ocean? It’s because they had to have a cave to float across the sea filled with all their stuff! Because their food preservation practices needed…they didn’t have the practices that allowed for them to do it in a small boat. They had to build these massive things, and fill it full of their foods. And it was our ancestors that figured out how to make it in such a way, and how to store it in such a way, that you could achieve extra-long distances over the ocean. Now, I’m going to tell you guys a totally fictitious story. It’s an important story for me because the story was shared with me by the kalo.

So the story of Kalo comes from the Kumulipo (the Hawaiian Creation chant). Now there are many versions. But the ancestral story is that Papa, earth-mother, and W?kea, sky father, fell in love and had a daughter. Their daughter, Ho?oh?k?kalani, was so incredible that W?kea, sky father… his passion for her was so great that they had a child. Their first child was stillborn. And so it was buried behind the east corner of their home, and from his daughter’s teardrops out grew the first Taro plant (named H?loanakalaukapalili). Now the next child that they had was the first Hawaiian (named H?loa). And so therein lies this relationship between the older brother and the younger brother of which, if you take care of the old, he will always take care of you.

Now, ancestral stories are awesome. But if you can’t find a way to link yourself to the story then it might as well just be a grim fairytale. So, every time that I got to go teach a class, especially if in preschool, the teachers are all like, “What version of the story are you going to tell? Are you going to talk about the dad and the daughter having a kid because…AH!” Right? Right? I mean…doesn’t that sound weird? Wouldn’t that freak you out of your dad was like, “honey, you’re awesome, let’s have a kid!”
C:        Uh-huh.

D:        So, for six months, every day that I pounded a taro I posed the question to the kalo. For me, making poi is the ultimate meditation for someone with ADHD. I can actually be silent but make noise. Sit still but move. In my pounding I do my own meditation and traveling, and I asked the kalo every day, please H?loa help me to understand this story.Like, I want to not feel uncomfortable when a preschool teacher asks me what version I’m going to tell. And one day, like a vision, I just saw it. It was so crystal clear. And, it was the doings in this vision that made me think, all right, this is a worthy story!

So Papa and W?kea are the version of Romeo and Juliet. They live on an island. They love each other. Their parents hate each other. Now if you live on an island, and you want to spend time with your sweetheart and not get in trouble, where do you go?

C:        Pound taro?

D:        Sailing! Right? You go sailing because once you get over the horizon nobody can see you! And you can’t see them! Well, Papa and W?kea are ancestral sailors. They always have to go beyond the horizon to spend time together. Well, one of such of their expeditions, a little too much lovemaking, not paying attention, they get caught in a storm. And they get swept out to sea. The storm clears and they’re lost.

Papa begins to cry. And as she cries she sings a song about the stars above her home, a song that her grandma had shared with her. W?kea realizes, that if they sail in this direction, the stars line up to Papa’s song. And they make it back home! You see, for Hawaiians, you can “birth” other things than children. When Papa and W?kea gave birth to Ho?oh?k?kalani, ho?o to make, h?k? star, lani in the heavens they “birthed” star-sea navigation. W?kea’s desire to navigate by the stars consumes him. Right? This is basic science. You sail out during the daytime, as far as you can, and you sail back at night using the stars, going back further and further and further. Guess what? You [in all of that sailing] run out of food. Right? You can store as much coconut as you want, but it’s the starch foods that waste. So in the beginning [W?kea] takes raw food, and he tries to prepare it. And then he tries to cook it, but then it rots. And then he starts to clean it and he comes across pounding… the misshapen form of H?loa.

Through his desire to navigate by the stars, [W?kea] births a new food with this passion. It is Pa?i ?ai (pa?i = hit/pound, ?ai = food). Now the irony is that he buries it in the eastern corner…From Kahiki (ancestral origin of Hawaiians) to Hawai?i, you sail east.

K:        Oh my God.

D:        The burying of H?loa is a map to Hawai?i! ?Umeke K?mau, okay, what is the star K?mau? It’s the North Star. H?k?pa?a (the steadfast star), the original name for H?k?pa?a is K?mau! So in this story, it’s actually the celestial map to find Hawai?i! Papa and W?kea then leave with this sacred food. The next child birthed is the first Hawaiian. This food truly becomes a technological advancement in food preservation. It’s so sacred and so secret that literally, up until now it’s been a secret from the world! Right? We make it in a way that we can ship it any where in the United States, using priority mail, without refrigeration! Today, in 2014, we can duplicate the ancestral recipe at the same rate.

So that story super-inspired me because it really locked in science, technology, and culture. And made the story something that, today when I share it with kids, I say, “Kids, any time in your culture where there is a story that makes you feel weird, that is a book-marker that you have to investigate. You have to un-weird it! Because your ancestors are leaving a sign!” And if you’re like, “oh that’s a weird sign,” then you’re just an idiot! Because they did that to spark something that questioned, why? It’s not why does it make me feel weird? For me, I believe that the power of our ancestral stories helps us only when we ask it to. Only when we investigate it, only when we take the story and realize that the story was told for countless generations, and like links on a chain, until we can find how we link into that story…it’s just a story.

Once you get that link then you become a part of that story, and that’s what our ancestors want. They don’t want you to tell the story. They want you to live it and become the story. Because that’s how your kids live it and that’s how the story will live on! When it makes sense then you’re proud of it! So, now I’m super proud of this thing where my ancestors got together, because it wasn’t daddy and daughter. It was Daddy and Mommy that had such a profound notion that they birthed a whole new way of looking at the stars.

So, um…all right, so we totally sidetracked…

So politicians ate [pa?i ?ai], business people ate it, they wrote in the newspaper, they did a story on KITV4 News. It was like, “Illegal Poi-making, why can’t Hawaiians make poi traditionally?” Well, the political group, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, one day over a water cooler conversation, they basically said, “you know, how do we feel about this? Does this office want to take a position on this?” And so the people that were talking said, you know we should ask the practitioners in our community. So OHA, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, called together a meeting of all the major poi makers on O?ahu, all the traditionalists. And basically we had a meeting and at the end of the meeting one of the elders said, “OHA what you guys going to do about this?” And the Office of Hawaiian Affairs was like, “AAA-EEE-III-OO?” And they were like, “um we can’t take a position right now, we’re just here to fact-find.” So the elder was like, “Screw you guys. Gangy, [referring to greater audience] what are we going to do about this?” And there started our political party, the Legalize Pa?i ?Ai ?Ohana (food pounding family).

And so, this was in December [2010], we actually got together every single week from December through May. Where we strategized, implemented, [and] executed a political strategy to bring awareness. We wrote two bills. Our house bill got killed. Our Senate bill was going to get killed, but we found out why and we went through a process in which basically it was the poi mills that were against us. And they had political clout. We ascertained who specifically it was, and then we emphasized our political muscle on them. And in less than a year the governor signed the bill.

Now you know what’s messed up? Remember I was telling you about the Insurance market crash? And how I was tied into the insurance market. Well, when the governor signed the bill…this is so weird… I’ve been doing the same thing in my garage, and what use to be illegal…after some dude signed a piece of paper all of a sudden it was okay! Now think about how silly that is! Some guy signs a paper and all of a sudden I’m not getting a thousand dollar a day fine, and in fact, when he signed the paper the single significant thing that happened was that the insurance company would give me business insurance. Prior to that I couldn’t get insurance for my business.

Dude, it was all about liability! And I told them I was from Wai?anae. My ability to lie was WAY better than their liability insurance. Now this is how sad the State of Hawai?i works: bill passes in 2011…it actually wasn’t implemented and actually put into the books in the Department of Health ‘til February 24^th of 2014. Now 2011 governor signs the bill, what do I think? I think, yeah, I’m going to start selling pa?i ?ai! So I ramp up, I do everything under the bill, all the requirements, I start going back to Town Restaurant…brah…next thing you know I get a call from the Department of Health! Their like, “Daniel, we see you selling pa?i ?ai.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s legal!” Then their like, “actually it’s not, we haven’t implemented the law.” Then I told them, “dude, I just went through fighting all these people, having a political movement, and now you’re telling me it’s invalid?” They said, “yeah, basically.”

Well, it just so happens that in 2011, Hawai?i hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). And by the State of Hawai?i to do three bills there, and the three bills that I was doing…

***Anthony accidentally drops his phone and loses his train of thought***
D:        All right, completely threw me off from what I was talking about. Help me remember where I was at.

K:        So you were talking about how you were pounding pa?i ?ai, and the bill wasn’t implemented yet, and so it was still illegal…

D:        APEC comes to town, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Obama…big time… State of Hawai?i hires me. I get hired by Dan Inoye (Senior U.S. Senator from Hawai?i) to do Senator Dan Inoye’s private dinner. Hired to do the Grand Opening…like major 10,000 people event…Anyway, I told the Department of Health, “dude I just took deposits for APEC! What am I suppose to do?”

Let me tell you. I’ve never seen any state official take a bigger turn. They looked at each other and were like, “Oh no! Hold on!” So they ran into the back room, they came out 15 minutes later saying, “We got a solution, Daniel!” So I go, “what’s your solution?” This is how messed up it is… They said, “Pay us $250 dollars so that we can take an insurance policy out on you. It’s called a variance.” Now how does this whole thing tie into f*** INSURANCE?

Okay! This is the fraud of America! I paid off the Department of Health $250 dollars. I operated from 2011 to 2014 under a “Legal Variance.” Okay, let me tell you guys after this situation I take NO from NOBODY. They tell me no, I say bring your boss, bring your attorney, how much is it going to cost me? I will pay for the insurance. Like all these things boil down to liability! Well, between my ability to lie and my ability to pay for the insurance, we can find a solution here! I don’t even care anymore… I’m over it!

So needless to say: Politics played a huge role. Finding out what these guys really want, which was to get paid. We were able to overcome major hurdles…I existed as the only legal poi maker – traditional poi maker – from 2011 to 2014. Basically we created a non-profit in 2011. Everything that we were losing money on because I was running my for-profit business like a non-profit…just losing it…We put [those monies] into the non-profit and basically all of the things that made money stayed in the for-profit.

We focused on education. Since 2011, our organization has put out 700 poi-boards into the community. We just did a critical analysis on how do you value a poi board? Because we deal with a lot of institutions that don’t know how to value this stuff because nobody’s had one in a hundred years! So we broke it down we said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen we’re going to break this down for you guys in a way that is irrefutable. We’re going to break it down culturally, through Hawaiian cultural values.” In which in Hawaiian culture, the single most valuable thing that you have is your time. So a poi board that feeds a family of four: dad eats 10 pounds of poi a week, mom eats 10 pounds of poi a week, each of the kids eats 5 pounds each. That’s 30 pounds a week. So the cultural value is that the 30 pounds a week takes the family 3 hours a week, times 52 weeks, it’s 156 hours of family making food together…traditionally! Now if your family went from 0 to 156 hours that is phenomenal! That is social growth on an unprecedented scale! Now wait because it doesn’t end there! At an average of 30 minutes a meal, that’s 550 hours a year of eating together, combined, that is 700 hours a year!

Now if your family was not practicing your culture, was overweight, unhealthy, socially depressed…this is like the silver bullet for our culture. It’s people in every household, spending time practicing our culture, eating from the land, enjoying our time together! Now that’s the traditional side. That doesn’t even accumulate how many hours the person had to put into making it. That’s just looking at the result of a poi board and making poi.

Now on the Western side we all know that these people value money. But let me tell you, after hurricane Katrina hit, how much was your money worth? ZERO! What was worth something? FOOD! If you had food and water you were golden! Right? That lemonade stand on the corner was selling $200 dollar cups of lemonade!

On the financial side that 30 pounds of taro a week, equivalent of 120 pounds a month, equivalent of 1400 pounds a year at $3 dollars a pound is equivalent of $4300 dollars per board per year, forever. Now, just last night I wanted to see…like…all right we put out 700 boards, what is that worth?

 

We put the equivalent of 1.7 million dollars a year forever in local taro sales and consumption.

 

That’s just what our organization did! Now I’ll be honest our organization has only received $10,000 dollars in grant funds. You tell me what social organization, for $10,000 dollars, has created over one million dollars a year of economic gain in the community! Bam! Guess what, you got to analyze it, you got to break it down, and you have to be able to speak the value in the community. This is what wakes people up. This is what change is like.

So yes, here we are today. I have a struggling business. I have a struggling non-profit. I don’t really care about writing grants…I totally should be writing grants because I guess there are all kinds of monies to do what we do. My theory is this: if you like what we’re doing give us money! Don’t ask me to write you a report…and do a dance for you! Because I’d rather be cutting trees and making poi boards and getting awareness and inspiring people in our community. I’m sure at some point I’ll meet some young Hawaiians, that like to write, that want to write Uncle Daniel some grants!

K:        **Chuckles because he knows Anthony is referring to him**
D:        Hahaha! I don’t know if you know any of those guys, but what really…you know earlier this summer, a lot of people were…you know basically telling me that, “you know Daniel, you really need to look at what you’re doing. All you’re doing is creating more competition for you…like you’re teaching people how to compete, business-wise, against you. You haven’t copyrighted anything you haven’t patented anything, like… what’s your future? You have no 401(k), no investments, no retirement…” And enough people that I respected were telling me this, and I usually have an I don’t really care attitude, but it was on my mind a lot. And I realized that…you know what my investment strategy is? Inspiring the youth! That’s my investment strategy.

Kepa, if Uncle (referring to himself) is an old man living homeless in a shed, I did not do my job to inspire the next generation. I believe it is fully within my power to inspire SO many young kids to K? i ka Pono (Stand for what is right)! To go back and look at their ancestral ways, as a way of sustaining them for “Infinity and Beyond!” Sorry Buzz Lightyear I had to quote you…That will ensure that I will never for one moment in my life experience any type of fear of not having enough. That…the value we’ve forgotten that our kids cannot eat money. You can hoard as much money as you want, but I would rather inspire and then reap the rewards of an activated community.

There’s my 401(k).