Petroglyphs in Hawaiʻi — kiʻi pōhaku, stone images — are often described in academic terms: ancient carvings etched into lava rock between 1000 and 1800 AD. They depict human figures, canoes, animals, symbols. They mark births, genealogies, voyages, sacred spaces. They are artifacts. Cultural resources. Protected sites.
But none of those descriptions fully capture what it feels like to stand among them.
“I ka wā ma mua, i ka wā ma hope.”
The future is in the past.
I first came to understand that proverb not in a classroom, but in a field of stone.
As a young adult, I was contracted to develop curriculum and art activities centered around a petroglyph field in Waikōloa. At the time, I approached the work as an educator — researching, planning lessons, considering how to make history accessible to students. But the land had other intentions.
The first time I walked across that vast pāhoehoe expanse etched with kiʻi pōhaku, I felt a shift. The air felt different. The silence carried weight. It was not empty — it was resonant.
The carvings did not feel like relics. They felt present.
Some figures were simple — linear forms chipped carefully into stone. Others felt layered with intention: births recorded, genealogies honored, journeys remembered. Standing there, time no longer felt linear. Past and present seemed to fold into one another.
It felt — and I do not use this lightly — like being among kūpuna.
There was a subtle pull, as though the stones themselves were inviting you closer: Come. Look. See what we marked here. I remember feeling not curiosity alone, but privilege. To be there. To teach from that place. To stand in dialogue with memory.
Kiʻi pōhaku are often explained as commemorations of life events or territorial markers. Some may have served navigational purposes; others may have marked ceremonies. Interpretations vary. But what does not vary is the relationship they represent — between people and ʻāina, between identity and place, between memory and responsibility.
My work in Waikōloa did not end my curiosity. It ignited it.
I began intentionally seeking out other petroglyph fields — Puakō, Kahaluʻu, Kaʻupūlehu. Each landscape carried its own cadence. The coastal stones felt different from the inland fields. Some sites felt expansive; others intimate. All of them held story.
A friend once traded me photographs she had taken on Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe. I remember holding those images carefully, aware of the layered histories of those islands — resilience, loss, reclamation. Even through photographs, the kiʻi carried presence.
Then, years later, at a small antique show, I found something unexpected.
In a tattered cardboard box labeled in fading marker, “dad’s junks,” lay a collection of petroglyph photographs from across the islands. They were loosely stacked, some curled at the edges, some annotated in careful handwriting. They were not junk. They were someone’s devotion.
They had mattered to “Dad.”
And now, standing there in the quiet hum of a community sale, they mattered to me.
I bought the box without hesitation.
At home, I added them to my growing collection — fragments of stone preserved in paper, captured light holding carved shadow. There is something humbling about becoming steward of something once cherished by another. A quiet passing of responsibility, even between strangers.
Sometimes I laugh at the thought that one day, when I am gone, my own children may open these boxes and label them “Dad’s junks” too.
Perhaps that is the rhythm of generational memory.
What one generation gathers in reverence, the next may not yet understand. And maybe, decades later, someone will pause before discarding it. Someone will open the box. Someone will feel that familiar pull — the quiet invitation of kiʻi calling them closer.
Because to walk among kiʻi pōhaku is not simply to observe art.
It is to be reminded that we are never separate from those who came before us.
The stones endure. The carvings remain. The dialogue continues.
I ka wā ma mua, i ka wā ma hope.
The future is in the past — and sometimes, it waits patiently in a box mislabeled as junk, until someone is ready to listen.