Ka moʻolelo o kā mākou ʻohana

My father, Palani Elua, learned kī hōʻalu from Aunty Alice at her home. Saturday after Saturday he would drive over with his guitar, and I would tag along — a kid underfoot, poking around her things while the two of them worked through a song. Over those years she took us in as hānai ʻohana: adopted, fed, cared for — chosen family in the Hawaiian sense.

As she got older, the lessons quietly became something else. We still brought the guitar, but the visits turned into making sure she was fed, comfortable, loved. She had given so much to so many haumāna; it was time for us to give back. That is what hānai ʻohana is — it is not a transaction, it is a long conversation, carried across generations.

This site is for her. It is also for every person she taught, named or unnamed, and for the music she wrote so it would outlive her. Everything we can imagine should be real, she might have said in her own language, had she put it that way.