ʻUMEKE OLA
Digital Archive
The ʻUmeke Ola Digital Archives
Is a curating archive which gathers historical and cultural materials in all media forms relating to Native Hawaiian Healing for the purposes of providing access to traditional cultural practices for the Hawaiian household.
This digital archive will serve as a bridge between the past, present, and future and to improve the overall health, wellness, awareness, and enjoyment for current and future generations of Hawaiian families everywhere.
Mana Ola: Navigating the Waters of Native Hawaiian Healing Wisdom
This archive will be composed of a collection of digitized documents from Bishop Museum archives and documentary videos of Native Hawaiian healing practitioners. HMO finds a pono balance of Native Hawaiian cultural approaches to dispersing ʻike in a digital platform. We have collaboratively created a system of documenting and tracing traditional healing knowledge by the Native Hawaiians for Native Hawaiians, the Indigenous Pacific, and Indigenous relatives around the globe. This archival project will become a source of cultural knowledge on traditional healing practices.
Serving ʻOhana Everywhere
The Hawaiian community in Hawaiʻi & diaspora share a desire to preserve cultural healing knowledge for posterity. The ʻUmeke Ola digital project emphasizes “lifelong learning” and encourages the development of cultural literacies to be utilized in the household. The hope for the future is to develop literacies of cultural health practices into common knowledge within the ʻohana unit. Seeing our cultural practices respectfully represented on archival websites supports a positive sense of identity and place in the world. We want the ʻohana unit to enjoy watching these videos and view the archival documents together and spark conversations of merging Hawaiian traditions of old to current ways of healthy living.
Working with the Community
We have gathered a group of Native Hawaiian healing practitioners to serve as consultants to develop cultural protocols and ethical data stewardship for curating and disseminating materials. These honored practitioners serve in an Alakaʻi position to assist HMO with the legal and cultural issues surrounding the curation of oral history from the perspective of a museum curator, online data archivist, non-profit entity & kanaka.
