Late afternoon light was fading to pastel Tuesday evening when the class began. The wide front porch of the Shipman House Bed and Breakfast looks out over a green canopy of trees, with Hilo Bay barely visible through the foliage.
“So. Let’s do hula,” Maile Yamanaka said. She stood braced by a walker, swaying back and forth as she began to chant in a powerful, sonorous voice that carried far beyond the porch.
Yamanaka, 65, was trained by the late Margaret Maiki Souza Aiu Lake (Aunty Maiki) alongside kumu such as Robert Cazimero. She’s taught hula all around the Big Island. She’s taught programs on Oahu, including one at Halawa Correctional Facility (“It was an experience, let me tell you,” Yamanaka said. “I was really impressed with the guys”).
For more than 10 years, she’s also been kumu hula at the Shipman House. But for the past several classes, one thing has been different.
Yamanaka walked the small group — just three people — through a couple of turns, then began to settle herself onto a blue cushion, a simple task made more difficult by the immobile prosthetic she wore on her right leg.
“It’s not flexible,” Yamanaka said as she removed the prosthetic entirely, putting it to the side and sitting cross-legged. She picked up an ipu heke and began to sing again.
Last New Year’s Eve, Yamanaka went to the hospital with a burst aortic aneurysm and was misdiagnosed with sciatica. She remembers being told to see her doctor the next day.
But Yamanaka went back to the hospital, where the severity of the matter was at last recognized. She was flown to Honolulu, where she stayed until Labor Day.
“Just last month, the … surgeon says life expectancy for a burst aortic aneurysm: six hours,” she said. “And I didn’t make it to Honolulu for 16 hours.” She folded her hands in front of her.
“I am blessed,” Yamanaka said. “I am lucky, I am most fortunate.” Her right leg had to be amputated just above the ankle. There was no circulation to the area, she said; instead, there was gangrene, and maggots.
An Air Force veteran, Yamanaka qualifies for certain health benefits with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, but her prosthesis is, she says, a “preliminary, temporary foot.”
Even with the preliminary foot, which is shorter than a real foot but still capable of bearing weight, she returned to Shipman to teach hula. There’s no fee for classes, just donations dropped into a woven lauhala basket. It was for love of hula that Yamanaka came back.
It is, she often tells Shipman House owner Barbara Anderson, the highlight of the week. Yamanaka lives at HOPE Services Hilo and doesn’t drive anymore, not with her temporary foot.
Ideally, she said, she’d like a “hula foot.”
“I cannot dance,” Yamanaka said. But, she added, “I’m really good at the tell-story stuff, the talk-story stuff, so I compensate.” That hearkens back to her early days when she returned to hula as a young woman. She started as a child, but when her teacher moved away, there were no more classes.
“Hula was my enjoyment,” she said. “I didn’t have hula (again) until college.” Yamanaka attended Grinnell College in Iowa for two years (“I had to learn how to wear shoes,” she said). During a fundraiser put on by the Hawaii Club, she was asked to perform hula, but couldn’t remember auana or hapa haole. All she could remember were the chants.
She took that as a sign that she should go back to Hawaii and begin her hula education again. Yamanaka looked for someone to teach her kahiko, and eventually was connected with Aunty Maiki.
“I was 19, 20, yeah?” Yamanaka said. “And all the ladies were 50-plus; I was the youngest of them all. I got chairs to the tutus, food to the tutus, made all their lei, made all their costumes …Aunty Maiki called it Gracious Ladies.”
“They knew all their words, all the songs, they can write the songs for all the musicians, but the thing is, yeah, these ladies couldn’t dance because they were not flexible,” Yamanaka said. “The most important thing is talk story, what comes from your experience … that’s how I learned hula. Gracious Lady style, tutu style.”
When Aunty Maiki began to teach the next generation of kumu hula, kahiko classes were $100 a month. Yamanaka knew she had to take the class, and worked three jobs to afford the lessons.
The hula community was like family, she said.
Yamanaka remembered competitions and performances, and working to master the chants so she wouldn’t be asked to leave the classes she loved.
When she started teaching, it was “casual this and casual that,” she said.
Anderson, W.H. Shipman’s great-granddaughter, owns the B&B with her husband, Gary, and began offering hula classes at the historic house in the late 1990s. Her great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Kahiwaaialii Johnson, “was known for her entertaining — her poi luncheons and (hosting) hula and choral groups,” Anderson said.
“So when we reopened (in 1997), people said ‘You need to have a halau here to carry on the tradition,’” she said. The first kumu was Aulii Mitchell. Yamanaka fell into the role. She’d come to ask about hosting an acupuncture retreat, not teaching hula. But life is full of curves and twists.
On the Shipman House porch, Yamanaka boosted herself off the cushion and onto a chair. She began to strum a ukulele; her right leg swung slightly in rhythm, and the small class continued to dance.
Hula classes at the Shipman House take place Tuesdays from 5:30-7 p.m.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
