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The food isn’t the focus of this luau—but it’s still a highlight.
Thirty minutes south of Hilo on the island of Hawai‘i, I turn off the highway onto a small road, then again, onto an even smaller road, before slowing to a stop where the map indicates. Spotting a white tent over a patch of gravel just across the street, I figure I must be in the right place. Despite the lack of hula dancers, slack key guitar music, or a stage, I am here for a luau.
Commercial luaus began not long after Westerners started regularly visiting the islands, and have been an essential part of vacationing in Hawai‘i for decades. Too often, they embody the worst attributes of Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, treating Native Hawaiian culture as a spectacle to be consumed like their hotel-kitchen buffets of roast pork and pineapple dessert.
Iopa Maunakea chants, instructs, and talks story as he leads the luau.
This luau, Imu Mea ‘Ai, aims to flip that dynamic—and more. Native Hawaiians make up just 10 percent of the state’s population, but 44 percent of its incarcerated people, a statistic deeply intertwined with the tourism industry, how it presents Hawaiian culture, and how rarely those whose culture (or a version of it) is put on display profit from the industry. Imu Mea ‘Ai counters this by creating deep connections between visitors, locals, and formerly incarcerated Native Hawaiian men as they work together to build an imu—the traditional oven in which food for a luau slowly roasts underground.
Imu Mea ‘Ai founder Iopa Maunakea needs neither stage nor microphone when he comes out in a T-shirt, blue camo shorts, and work boots to greet the 20 or so people attending today’s event. The only music during the four-hour experience came from our voices as we recite oli—Hawaiian chants—that Maunakea teaches us; in place of the swinging hips of hula dancers’ skirts, we swing shovels and move the earth.
At this luau, guests put in the work for their meal.
Uhōla ‘ia ka makaloa lā
Pū`ai i ke aloha ā
The makaloa mat has been unfurled
Food is shared in love
We dig and dig, creating a four-by-four-foot pit in the red-brown dirt. I work alongside John, a transplant to the island hoping to build an imu on his own land; and a group from Moku o Keawe Mālama nā Kūpuna, an organization that supports local elders struggling with nutrition and isolation.
Attendees at Imu Mea ‘Ai include all ages and people from all over—including locals.
We get instructions on imu building from Kapoli, Charles, and Carlos, all from Men of PA‘A, a nonprofit organization focusing on reintegration for Hawaiian men recovering from incarceration or addiction. Maunakea, now a retired surveyor, founded it two decades ago, creating the program he wished had existed when he came out (and in, and out) of the justice system. A few years ago, as Maunakea looked for a new way to bring money to the program, he saw an opportunity to bring together multiple parts of the organization’s values—service, job skills, and preserving Native culture—through a new kind of luau.
Even as visitors flock to commercial luaus, those growing up on the island have long struggled to practice their traditions. Maunakea’s mother joins us for the meal, telling a story about imu bans on land around the state. “I went to Kamehameha Schools, and they did not teach us to be Hawaiian,” she says. “They taught us to be anything but.” Maunakea grew up watching other people benefit from the resources of his home and from his family’s traditions.
“My mission now is to see how we can bring those tourism dollars into our community,” he says. To flip the luau gaze, he flipped the whole event. Instead of the guests arriving to a prepared performance of the culture, they would work alongside the locals to create the experience.
The event is staffed by and supports partner organization Men of PA‘A.
From the seat of her walker, a woman named Catherine helps ball up old grocery bags, throwing them into the pit as kindling. We pass two types of wood along a line of people—kiawe, the mesquite that burns hot and quickly, and ‘ōhi‘a, which burns long and slow—to William Bennett, a Florida man attending with his two teenage sons, who stacks them up into a pyramid. “I wanted the intimate experience, the knowledge,” he tells me later of why he chose Imu Mea ‘Ai. “I wanted to ask questions; I wanted to be able to be hands-on.”
On top of the wood, we lay down pohaku, the lava rocks that hold the heat from the fire and keep the imu hot. After each step, we take a break in the shade of the tent, for water and iced tea, for oli and rambling storytelling by Maunakea, complete with group participation.
Along with the food from the imu, the meal includes homemade local specialties like a fern salad.
Mahalo e nā kupuna lā ‘eā
Mahalo me ke aloha lā
Mahalo me ke aloha lā
Gratitude to our ancestors
Gratitude with love
Gratitude with love
Most tourist luaus center on a celebratory reveal of the meal exiting the oven, but at Imu Mea ‘Ai, the main event is building the oven itself. When our imu is complete, we move across the field and begin the entire process in reverse, dismantling the oven built the previous day. Beneath the hot stones, the burlap, and the ti leaves, we uncover our lunch. “This is the best stove. You put all your love in there,” Maunakea tells us.
Kapoli tears apart the chunks of pork to ready them for serving, while the rest of us help set out a spread of vegetables roasted in the imu—carrots, cabbage—and local foods like fish cakes and fern salad.
The afternoon wraps up with a feast from the previous group’s imu, a symbol of the regenerative nature of the event.
Though the feast we indulge in at the end of the afternoon is the element most like the classic commercial luau, it also represents so much of the idea behind Imu Mea ‘Ai—it celebrates what came before and how we created something for those who will come after. Our feast doesn’t come from the oven we built, but from the one made by the previous group. As we eat, Maunakea tells us a bit about that group. Tomorrow, the next people—a tour group from China, apparently—will use our imu, and he will tell them about us.