A Song for Kalaupapa: Bay View Girl's Mele Aloha ʻĀina

"He mele no Kalaupapa" as printed in the newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, 1921. Special Collections, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

In 1921 the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, the longest-running publication of its kind, printed He mele no Kalaupapa ("A Song for Kalaupapa"). It opens: "He mele he inoa no Kalaupapa / Aina kaulana puni ka honua" — a name-praising song for Kalaupapa, a land famous around the world.

A song of homeland

The song is a mele aloha ʻāina, one of the mele (songs or chants) that praise a person's homeland and show close knowledge and love of it. In early Hawaiʻi, mele were how Native Hawaiians celebrated and remembered the stories of their gods and the great deeds of their leaders, and they have long drawn people together in joy and in hardship. After American businessmen overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, mele aloha ʻāina became a powerful way to voice anguish and bitterness, and to tell stories of rebellion and resistance.

What sets this one apart is its credited author, "Bay View Girl." Bay View was a group home for people with Hansen's disease, also known as leprosy, on the remote Kalaupapa Peninsula on the north shore of Molokaʻi. Nothing is known about her. But that she wrote the song while living at Bay View suggests a love of the place that went beyond physical pain and forced separation from home and family.

Exile to Kalaupapa

From 1866 to 1969, first the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and then the territory and state of Hawaiʻi banished more than 8,000 people with Hansen's disease to the Molokaʻi settlement. At least 90 percent were Native Hawaiians. The disease appears in records as early as the 1830s and probably came with migrant workers. To late nineteenth-century officials facing an epidemic with no known cure, expulsion and isolation seemed the only answer. For those sent away, young children among them, it meant losing their families, their homes and the lands where they were born.

Girls from the Bishop Home raising money during World War I. NPS photo/KALA.

At the first settlement, Kalawao, conditions were deplorable. The first patients struggled to build shelter and grow food while petitioning the Board of Health for supplies, materials and medical care. Volunteers came to care for them. Father Damien arrived in 1873; he helped build houses, organized schools and founded the Baldwin Home for Boys. As the population grew, Mother Marianne Cope arrived in 1888 to run the Bishop Home for girls and women.

Bay View Home

Bay View opened in 1901 for elderly, blind and disabled patients. As a group home it eased some of the pain of isolation through community life, such as meals in a shared dining room, and residents had round-the-clock nursing care. It was rebuilt after a fire in 1914 and improved over many decades.

Forced quarantine ended in 1969, after new drug treatments made patients no longer contagious, but many chose to stay: Kalaupapa had become home. Bay View housed patients until 2007. Kalaupapa National Historical Park was established in 1980, and the home now provides offices and housing for park staff and volunteers.

Bay View Home. NPS/Michael Langhans.

If Bay View Girl was a patient, she was probably an elderly woman rather than a girl. How long had she lived there? Had she come as a child, taken from her parents? Former patients who have written about their lives stress the turmoil and fear, and above all the trauma of being separated from family. Bernard Kaʻowakaokalani Punikaiʻa, a former patient, wrote that this story of separation belongs to most of them, indeed to all of them, and that it comes from the heart.

The song

A recording made for the park on October 30, 2023 has park ranger Mikiala Pescaia singing the mele. Sadness and longing fill her voice at first, echoing the thousands of exiles who yearned for home. As the song goes on, a strength builds, rising with the faint sound of waves behind it, carrying both the beauty of the land and the shared resistance of those banished there.

The words, as printed in 1921:

He mele he inoa no Kalaupapa,
Aina kaulana puni ka honua,
O ke ku kilakila a Hapuu,
Kuahiwi kaulana, moku a o Hina.
Alo ana Nihoa au i ke kai,
Oni ana e ka lae a o ka Ilio,
Kau aku ka manao no Hoolehua,
I ka papa konane a Kaikilani.
Nani ka waiho mai a Waileia,
O ka hoapili a o Waihanau,
Hu mai ke aloha no Kalawao,
Aina i ka nuku a o Waikolu;
Ekolu no pua o ke onaona,
Kikonikoni lua i ka puuwai,
Kau ana Kalae i kuu maka,
I ke ala kikeekee i ka pali,
E o mai oe i kou inoa,
E ka papa konane a Kaikilani.
Hainaia mai ana ka puana,
He mele he inoa no Kalaupapa.
>
BAY VIEW GIRL, Kalaupapa.

In the English translation on the NPS page, the song moves across the landscape the singer sees: the majestic cliffs of Haʻupu; Nihoa bobbing in the sea as the point of ʻĪlio comes into view; thoughts of Hoʻolehua and the kōnane board of Kaikilani; the valleys of Waiʻaleʻia and Waihānau side by side; a swell of aloha for Kalawao and the lands at the mouth of Waikolu; Kalae high above a zigzag trail up the cliffs. Three sweetly scented blossoms make her heart race. The song calls on the kōnane board of Kaikilani to answer to its name, and ends where it began, with a name-praising song for Kalaupapa.

The coast looking into Waiʻaleʻia Valley, named in Bay View Girl's mele. NPS photo/Hailey Shchepanik.

Love of place as resistance

Former patients have spoken of Kalaupapa's beauty as well as the pain of isolation. Olivia Robello Breitha, who lived there for most of her adult life and later became an activist on Hansen's disease, wrote in her memoir that the place she had once felt as a prison had become a paradise to her. Bay View Girl's song lingers over that paradise feature by feature.

In writing it, she joined a community that kept fighting to improve its lives. Its members supported and cared for one another, and made the outside world see the people of Kalaupapa whole: their dignity, their creativity and their many talents. Writing a mele aloha ʻāina was itself an act of resistance. Her love for the land around her shows that she had made a new home and a new family at Kalaupapa, not to replace the ones she lost, but to endure and to build a life again.

Sources

• Nicole Martin, "Bay View Girl's Mele Aloha ʻĀina," National Park Service, Home and Homelands Exhibition: Resistance: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/home-kalaupapa-mele.htm
• The article cites Eleanor Nordyke and Martha Noyes, "'Kaulana Na Pua': A Voice for Sovereignty," The Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993); Anwei Skinsnes Law, Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory (University of Hawaii Press, 2012); and Olivia Robello Breitha, Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa (Pacific Historic Parks, 2016).
• The NPS article spells the memoirist's name "Robella" in its text and "Robello" in its link and notes; this page uses "Robello".
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.