On the afternoon of October 13, 2026, a small group will gather inside the Kahului Public Library on School Street to do something that predates the building, the street, and the library system itself: weave lauhala.
The class runs from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. and is free, but it is not a casual drop-in. According to the library's event listing, this is an advanced session — some experience is required — and it is capped at just seven attendees, with registration mandatory and one reservation per person. Latecomers may forfeit their spot. It is, in other words, a class built for people who already know their way around a strip of prepared hala leaf and want to go further.
The instructor is Leiana Sing-Keliikoa, who will be accompanied by special guests. A 2025 Maui Now report on abandoned sites around the island described her as someone who grew up in the Paukūkalo Hawaiian homestead community in the 1980s, near Wailuku, close enough to the old National Guard armory that she could see it from her front door. She brings to the library not just a craft technique but a lifetime rooted in the same Central Maui soil where the hala tree grows.
That the class is happening at all is part of a larger story about the library itself. The Kahului Public Library was designed by the architect Noboru Kobayashi and opened on February 9, 1963. It serves as the regional library and Federal Depository for Maui, and its grounds and courtyard are planted with native Hawaiian species — a deliberate choice that makes the building a fitting host for a class about a plant woven into Hawaiian life for centuries.
The library's recent history has been anything but quiet. It closed its doors in August 2020 for a comprehensive renovation: a new air-conditioning system, upgraded restrooms, new flooring, fresh paint, improved lighting, updated furniture, and redesigned signage. The work was supposed to wrap up by December 2023, but the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted manufacturing and supply chains, and the departure of key personnel pushed the timeline further. The library finally reopened to the public on July 12, 2025. The lauhala class is part of the programming that has followed — an effort the library describes as actively working to preserve, promote, and perpetuate Hawaiian culture by collaborating with local cultural practitioners.
To understand why that mission matters, it helps to understand what lauhala actually is. The word refers to the leaves of the hala tree, Pandanus tectorius — lau meaning "leaf" in Hawaiian. The hala is one of the most useful plants in the Pacific: its fruit is eaten, its trunks used as building material, its leaves for thatching. But in Hawai'i, it is the leaves that carry the deepest cultural weight. Woven lauhala, or ulana lau hala, has produced mats, pillows, hats, fans, baskets, containers, and even the sails that helped carry Polynesian navigators across the ocean centuries ago.
The weaving itself is only the visible end of a long process. Before two strips ever cross, a practitioner must know the plant well enough to select suitable leaves, remove the unusable portions, soften and flatten the material, and divide it into consistent widths. The finished object reflects plant knowledge, material judgment, structural design, and patient handwork all at once. As one overview of the practice puts it, lauhala weaving brings together family teaching, community relationships, and care for the landscapes that provide hala.
That last point is not incidental. The tradition is ancient — remains of lauhala recovered from Hawaiian burial caves show patterns almost identical to those woven in more recent times, suggesting the craft has been practiced in essentially its current form for a very long time. But it has also declined over recent decades. Native coastal forests of hala are now considered rare in Hawai'i. Researchers funded by the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center have been studying whether the revival of weaving — and the care for hala groves that accompanies it — might help restore the plant's abundance and, in turn, contribute to climate resilience along Hawai'i's shorelines, where hala helps hold back erosion, inundation, and salt spray.
That research points to something the weavers themselves have long understood: the practice and the plant sustain each other. A class like the one at Kahului is a small node in that cycle. Seven people, two hours, one afternoon — but the knowledge passed hand to hand is the same knowledge that has been passed down for generations, and the library's stated purpose is to keep it moving forward.
For anyone interested, the details are straightforward: October 13, 2026, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., Kahului Public Library, 90 School Street. Free, but advanced, and registration is required — with only seven seats, it will fill quickly. The library also notes that anyone needing an auxiliary aid or service for effective communication, or a modification of policies or procedures, should contact staff as soon as possible, with advance requests 48 hours or more before the event encouraged but not required.
It is a modest listing on a busy events calendar. But it is also a two-hour window into a craft that predates the islands' libraries by centuries — and one that a handful of Maui practitioners are working, one small class at a time, to keep alive.