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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, March 26, 2001


Lauhala weaver has a style all her own

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Staff Writer

On the bus recently, someone tried to help 89-year-old Esther Westmoreland carry a bag. Indignantly, she shrugged her would-be helper off.

Esther Westmoreland found that a pasta maker is great for softening her lauhala leaves, much better than an iron roller. The 89-year-old learned how to weave while in reform school when she was 16.

Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

"They thought I was an OLD LADY," she grumbled later to her apprentice, Wendy Roylo Hee, who could only smile and sympathize, tempering her own instincts to offer such help.

Westmoreland has never been a pushover. In fact, it's probably pretty good advice not to mess with her.

"Did I tell you about my sailors?" she asks Roylo Hee as the two bend over an exquisite lauhala mat they have been weaving together for a year in the rec room of Roylo Hee's Enchanted Lakes home. "They came to my class at Bishop Museum and wanted to learn to make a pillow, and then I didn't see them for three months."

When the two showed up again, Westmoreland was less than polite.

"Where the hell you been?" she demanded.

The forthright language. The blunt tongue. The "smoke breaks." Not the conventional image of a Hawaiian kupuna. But Esther Kakalia Westmoreland is no typical tutu. Raised through her late teens in a reformatory for girls — running away from "lickins" at home — she has led a tough-talking, occasionally hard-drinking, unconventional life. And while it may show, so do the exceptional skills she has acquired since she learned to weave lauhala in her teens.

Westmoreland is perhaps the only weaver of her generation still teaching. She tried to retire a few years ago, but was overcome by boredom.

"I think she's really concerned that if she and other people with talent similar to hers don't teach these things, then a lot of the Hawaiian crafts and cultural activities will be lost," said Joan Bedish, executive director of the Kapahulu Center, where Westmoreland teaches Monday and Tuesday mornings. "She's generous in sharing her time and talent with anyone willing to learn."

In turn, the seniors pour in, including a woman in her 70s, who flies in from Japan just to learn lauhala from Westmoreland, although neither speaks the other's language.

"When Auntie Esther was here full time, Kazuko was here full time," Bedish said. "I don't know how many hats she made."

But Auntie Esther teaches on her own terms. If you don't listen up, you get the Westmoreland warning: "Once I tell you what to do, if you're not going to listen, you go teach someone else."

Westmoreland sits on the floor with her legs stretched in front of her, coaxing the end of a piece of lauhala under the folded piece next to it with the edge of a dull knife. Her hands are quick and sure, despite the bandage on one finger. Once tucked, the ends are sliced off, fast and clean, with the sharp blade of a pocketknife that rests next to a small screwdriver. When the lauhala is not behaving, the screwdriver goes into action to delicately pry up an edge.

Like all artisans, Westmoreland has a style all her own. A pasta roller softens and flattens the leaves; a handmade wooden frame fitted with X-Acto blades slices the leaves into skinny lengths.

"In San Diego, I had an iron roller but it folded the leaf and I got fed up. My friend was watching TV and saw this pasta roller and sent me this one. I went everywhere — JCPenney's, Sears, Liberty House — and said 'Get this machine. I'm a lauhala weaver and this is GOOD.'"

Reform school rascal

The tools Esther Westmoreland uses to weave lauhala include a pocketknife, a screwdriver and X-acto blades.

Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

It's a sunny morning in Kailua, and master and student are completing the last sections of the mat that's being created through a State Foundation on Culture and the Arts' apprenticeship program designed to keep traditional Hawaiian arts alive. The mat will be on display April 17-May 11 at the Koa Gallery at Honolulu Community College.

"She's really a tradition-bearer from a previous time," said Michael Schuster, folks arts program coordinator. "She comes from a time when lauhala was used. She has a perspective on it, not as a decorative or exotic object, but as a daily useful object in peoples' lives."

She's also a rascal, he adds.

But when she learned to weave at 16, halfway through her four years in reform school, it wasn't seen as any kind of life work. In fact, the school prepared her poorly for the future, she says.

She learned to weave, to peel onions the right way — leaving the thin yellow membrane that contains the vitamins, she says — and was once asked if she wanted to learn how to clean house properly.

"Gee," she replied, "I don't do that for my mother. Why should I clean house for them?"

Despite the tenuous vocational beginnings, Westmoreland's pluck landed her in daring places. During the war, she ran a sewing operation at the Lualualei Ammunition Depot, overseeing production of cloth bags for the smokeless powder for the battleship guns. But she has also worked in laundries across the West — "You can always get a job and quit when you want" — picked strawberries with sharecroppers and once won enough money gambling in Reno to buy 10 acres of land in Madeira, Calif.

"It was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter," she complained, and sold the property two years later.

Once she posed for famed painter Madge Tennant, whose oils and drawings immortalized Hawaiian women and their voluptuous features the way Gauguin's work did the Tahitians.

She never saw the painting for which she was the model. "That's why I say I was a dumb-dumb," she says.

Nor did she see the snaps a professional photographer took of her in the 1930s leaning against a palm tree wearing a grass skirt over her clothes and with a hibiscus tucked behind her ear.

"He wanted me to take my skirt off underneath. I said, 'Shut up, you.' "

Married three times, she lost her first husband in action in World War II, and kicked the other two out, she says. She asked her last mother-in-law if they were related to Gen. William Westmoreland. "She said we were the lower-class Westmorelands, and the general is the upper-crust Westmorelands. There are all kinds of Westmorelands. California is full of them."

Weaving her magic

Through her life, Westmoreland's skills as a weaver have paved her way. One time she hitched a ride on a steamer to the Kohala coast of the Big Island and stayed with the grandmother of the Cazimero Brothers. For three months she helped out on the land, taught the women how to weave and produced six mats as a thank you.

"She covered everything with lauhala," Westmoreland said, "except the kitchen."

In the late 1980s, Westmoreland wove an extraordinary mat for the Heritage Room at the Kamehameha Schools. It took her a year working alone at Kawai'ahao Church to complete the 32-foot-by-16-foot mat in a rich, golden shade.

While this new one isn't nearly as big, it's a one-of-a-kind design patterned after a mat that took her breath away 70 years ago on Kaua'i.

"In the '30s, I was traveling in the Islands, and everywhere I'd meet weavers and we'd talk lauhala, and they'd show me what they had. When I got to Kaua'i, I saw that big lauhala mat with a border and I said 'Whoa! I wish I could make one like that,' and (the weaver) said, 'You will.' "

A lifetime later, those words are finally coming true. But Westmoreland is already girding for criticism.

"There are going to be a lot of people who don't agree with the way this mat is made," she says toughly.

"Anybody say anything, you send 'em to me," she tells Roylo Hee. "I'd tell 'em 'Did you weave a mat before? Do you weave now? NO? Then get off my butt.' "

The lauhala — thorny for the border and thornless for the interior — all comes from Hawai'i, and much of it has been gathered by the two. It was a feat. While processed lauhala ready for use is being imported from the South Pacific, the fiber has been weakened by boiling. Yet the prized long leaves of Hawaiian lauhala, best for mats, are getting harder to find, she said, and the location of some of the best trees is kept secret.

Take the rare red lauhala. There are trees that bear the rosewood-colored leaves on the Big Island but Westmoreland doesn't know where, and no one's telling.

"Stingy," she declares.

Sharing knowledge

Because of the increasing scarcity and the cheap imported mats from Asian countries, the weavers' trade is no longer attracting young people, Westmoreland said.

As a result, she fears much will be lost. That's part of the reason she's been working with Roylo Hee. She'll take another apprentice next year to weave something even more unusual: a four-part screen from four different fibers, lauhala, bullrush, sage and fan palm.

"She knows what it's like to be a gatherer, what it means to produce something from start to finish," Schuster said. "She knows methods that very few people know from a tradition more than a thousand years old. There are very few mat weavers left.

"And she has said, 'It has to go on ...' It's so important for her to see the continuity."

Just as important is tradition. "Auntie said, 'The day it's pau, I have to sleep on it,' " Roylo Hee said. " 'For all the mana.' "

Even into her 60s, Westmoreland was climbing trees along the Pali Highway next to Castle Medical Center to pull off the pliable dead lauhala leaves that hadn't yet fallen. But she's given that up now, even though she claims to have few aches and pains — not even a cough from smoking.

Her secret? "The gel of the aloe," she says. "Rebuilds your innards."

Although she has no children of her own, she spent 15 years helping a brother raise nine keiki after his wife died. That's what took her to the Mainland through the '60s and '70s — "chasing after them," she says.

Nowadays she travels by bus back and forth to her apartment in Waikiki, harrumphing if anyone calls it "the haole place."

"So what," she snaps. "Big deal."