Botany Teacher Waters Old Seeds On Bucket List

By Paige Herrin

A woodsy earthy smell of plants immediately welcomes all that enter the botany lab at UH Maui College. The room is a remarkable display of a vast collection of Native Hawaiian crafts and artifacts hanging on racks and on top of cabinets. Some are acquisitions of many years of study and some are the outstanding examples of past student projects. The procurement of such an impressive assemblage is a testament to Hawaiian ethnobotany teacher Gwen Morinaga’s diverse background in all things cultural.

Morinaga, or Kumu Naone, as she prefers to be called, has planted her roots as an instructor of Hawaiian ethnobotany at UH Maui College for eight years, but is beginning to feel the itch of becoming a student once again.

She is humble, unpretentious and has a cautious, almost childlike hesitation when talking about herself. However, her gentle eyes sparkle with passion when she talks about becoming a student again.

“I really prefer being the student. I just like to learn about everything,” Kumu Naone said.

She has vacillated between being a teacher and being a student throughout her adult life and the spans between various collegiate degrees are punctuated with an assortment of teaching gigs.

Her formal education is in agriculture and anthropology, making ethnobotany an easy choice to teach. Her father was a “plant man” for the City of Honolulu Parks Department and at an early age fostered within her a love of Hawaiian flora. Later on as a young woman, she was fortunate to be mentored by Harry Mitchell Kanae, a practitioner of ancient Hawaiian herbal medicine. Kumu Kanae would become her inspiration to teach when he told her: “If you don’t pass on what you know by kupuna (ancestors), you’re going to lose it.”

She has spent her lifetime in a world of cultural education from her native Hawaii home and all things related to Pacifica to several diverse Native American tribes across the Mainland.

Kumu Naone has a handful of formal degrees. She has attended four different universities across the country in the past 30 years, but her extensive education has not been gained strictly through a college. While living in Montana, she met an elder of the Dakota people named Lenore Red Elk. Here, she learned traditional Native American plant medicine and the Dakota language.

“[Lenore] took me under her wing. She was my other mom; my ‘ena uma,’” Kumu Naone said.

This inspired her to move to South Dakota’s Indian country, where she earned her master’s degree in American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota.

Kumu Naone not only appreciates conventional education, but also has great reverence for the spiritual and cultural studies of various civilizations. It is with this veneration that she has come to terms with developing a degenerative disorder.

In her 20s, while attending UCLA, she went on an archeology dig in the Malibu Canyon and became ill. Kumu Naone developed a crippling form of arthritis. The fingers of her hands are twisted. At the dig, she found an ancient burial item: a beautiful obsidian blade. She believes that she should not have messed with the ancient spirits.

“Because I was on that dig, it affected my health. I breathed in something and got an infection,” she said.

Higher education and cultural traditions are not her only inspirations. She has an innate interest in almost everything. Currently she is revisiting her love of music, specifically Latin Jazz, and refers to this as a bucket list item.

She has a renewed interest to learn to play Latin piano and the congas. This interest began in her childhood when she fell in love with Carlos Santana’s music.

When Kumu Naone was a very young girl living in the Manoa Valley, Santana came to Oahu but she was too young to go to the concert. This past March, she finally got to see him play live at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center.

“This was on my bucket list. Awesome. Awesome,” she declared excitedly.

Santana is not her only inspiration. Kumu Naone also feels “The Bern.” While politics hold little interest for her, she does feel a bit impassioned about the upcoming election and said that Bernie Sanders is her current inspiration.

“He is just about the people. [He] is what is good for everybody,” she said.

Kumu Naone has a few hidden talents. She is a beekeeper and currently has two hives with up to 20,000 bees.

Once, between attending the University of Southern California and UCLA, she worked as a stock clerk in a department store. There she met an Italian/African American showgirl who had been in the movies, Peggy Rubirth. During breaks at the department store, Rubirth taught Kumu Naone to tap dance.

For those who know Kumu Naone, this is not surprising at all.

“She has a lot of insight and wisdom,” said former ethnobotany student Fatima Madriaga.

Now, however, Kumu Naone has her eyes looking toward future horizons. She hopes to work in museum studies of American Indian arts one day, another bucket list seed that was planted long ago. She is not sure when that time will be, but she has regained a creative focus and is excited thinking of new opportunities.

Whether she tap dances across the country banging on the congas while wearing a traditional Dakota elkskin dress, one thing is for sure, Kumu Naone is a natural pedagogue and an insatiable neophyte and academia will always be an essential element of her spirit.