How combining global and Hawaiian science restored Indigenous knowledge of Hawaiʻi’s original lauaʻe fern
By Puanani Anderson-Fung
ʻEliʻeli kūlana o ʻĀinaʻike. (Profound is the nature of ʻĀinaʻike)
– Pukuʻi #339
This ʻōlelo noʻeau (proverbial saying) is a personal favorite because it reminds me of the ʻeliʻeli kūlana (profundity) of the ʻāina ʻike (knowledge of the land) possessed by our Hawaiian ancestors.
Today, we are fortunate to live in a time of Hawaiian cultural revitalization and the restoration of Indigenous knowledge which had become very obscure over time — and some of it nearly lost. Many successful revitalization projects were implemented in the latter half of the 20th century, including the establishment of Hawaiian language immersion schools, the restoration of Polynesian knowledge of navigation, and the cultivation and preservation of Hawaiian kalo varieties, and other crops grown by our ancestors.
Recently, I was privileged to contribute to this effort, by restoring the identity of the first plant species to have been named “lauaʻe” by our Hawaiian ancestors. This lauaʻe is a native fern known also by the Hawaiian name peʻahi, and the global, “Linnaean” name Microsorum spectrum.
Please notice that I did not refer to the Linnaean name as “the scientific name.” This was deliberate, because, in my view, both Hawaiian and Linnaean plant names are scientific, for reasons that I will explain below.
I was inspired to study Hawaiian lauaʻe in the 1990s, after certain members of the Hawaiian community were made very uncomfortable by the findings of three fern specialists, each of whom listed our beloved lauaʻe fern, Microsorum grossum, as a species introduced to Hawaiʻi by humans, after 1900.
These respected kūpuna were convinced that the lauaʻe had been a part of Hawaiian culture “since earliest times.” I reasoned that since both opinions came from persons very knowledgeable about Hawaiian plants, both sides must be correct, and the only way this could be so, was if there were two lauaʻe — one, M. grossum, that was presumably introduced after 1900, and another that had grown in Hawaiʻi at an earlier time.
I soon learned that even though the Hawaiian–English dictionary published by Andrews in 1865 defined the word “lauae” as “an aromatic herb,” none of the Hawaiian plant studies that I read published before 1919, reported the very conspicuous, rapidly spreading M. grossum, among the ferns growing in Hawaiʻi.
Using clues from Hawaiian and English literature, I hypothesized that the first plant named lauaʻe in Hawaiʻi was likely M. spectrum.
After checking all of the herbarium specimens of this species — sheets of paper with a dried sample of the plant mounted to it — stored at the herbarium of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, I found one that had the words, “native name lauaʻe” written on the label — thus providing the only known written evidence at that time, that lauaʻe had originally named the native Hawaiian fern M. spectrum, before it named M. grossum.
I was surprised then, when I subsequently heard some college students express their belief that science was somehow a threat to the existence of Hawaiian and other Indigenous cultures.
I wondered, “hadn’t science just restored precious cultural knowledge of Hawaiʻi’s original lauaʻe plant?”
After decades of visiting, studying, and appreciating Hawaiʻi’s native ecosystems, and learning about the relationship our Indigenous ancestors shared with them, I was convinced that their perception of these places, and their non-human inhabitants, was scientific, emotional, and cultural — as it has always been for me – and that science existed in all cultures.
I realized then that most people, including myself at that time, did not have a clear idea of what constitutes science. This led me to research the topic, and to find a definition that I think describes science simply and accurately.
Following the perspective of Peter Medawar, a Nobel winning scientist, I define science as something that happens every time we humans explore (look closely at) nature (things not created by humans) for the purpose of understanding it better.
On the other hand, culture has been described as “the shared way of life for a group of people, which includes the beliefs, values, behaviors, practices, material objects, and systems of language and communication that they share in common.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).
Culture, then, can be viewed as our understanding of what it is to be “us,” and what distinguishes “us” — as a particular mākou and lāhui — from other human cultures. Meanwhile, science is our understanding of the natural world around “us” as viewed through a particular lens.
Using this definition, one can readily understand why I consider our Polynesian ancestors to have been experts in many types of science such as navigation, mariculture, aquaculture, horticulture, taxonomy, and medicinal healing.
There is, however, an important difference between what I describe as Indigenous science and global science.
Both are based on a profound, detailed, and intimate knowledge of nature in the environments shared with humans. The key difference is that Indigenous science incorporates its specific cultural and religious beliefs as part of their understanding of natural phenomena, while global science does not. Instead, the latter explains nature in a way that can be understood by people of all cultures, using observable, mostly quantifiable and measurable, facts.
The mystery of the Hawaiian name lauaʻe was, in fact, solved by pairing the Indigenous Hawaiian name lauaʻe with its global Linnaean names, and using the documentation that comes with Linnaean taxonomy as evidence that the name lauaʻe had been given to two different species of Microsorum over time.
Puanani “Nani” Anderson-Fung is a researcher at UH Mānoa working to conserve native Hawaiian ecosystems and restore bio-cultural knowledge using the wisdom of contemporary and Polynesian science. She will complete her Ph.D. in botany, ethnobotany and ethnolinguistics in May 2025.
