GFF Grace Cajski Explains Her Project that Explores Hawaiian Fishpond Aquaculture

Grace Cajski was a 2021 Global Food Fellow. To learn more about the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s Global Food Fellowships, please visit this page.

Growing up in New Orleans, I loved going to the water with my father. We’d kayak. We walked along the bayous and boated across the lake. My father is from Oʻahu, and, in the summer, we’d go back to his childhood home. There, we sailed, explored, and visited with family and friends. One of whom was Vernon Sato, my father’s old neighbor. He was a phycologist and aquaculturist. In his retirement, he wrote a book about Moliʻi fishpond, an ancient Hawaiian fishpond. Sometimes, he’d take us there. 

Nine hundred years ago, the Hawaiian population was growing into the hundreds of thousands. They invented fishponds, loko iʻa, to feed their community. It was the first aquaculture system in the Pacific Rim. Chiefs, or aliʻi, designated a kiaʻi loko to care for and operate the fishpond. Caring for a fishpond was an art, and the knowledge it took to understand the pond and its creatures required years of apprenticeship. When the West colonized, when it forbade most Hawaiian practices and converted communal land into private property, this artistry was lost. 

In the past fifty years, nonprofits and community groups have been working to revive fishponds. They have removed invasive mangroves and rebuilt the kuapā. Now, they are contending with problems like pollution and invasive species. Additionally, the aquaculturists who operated the ponds a generation ago are aging, and their knowledge will soon be lost.

If these problems can be resolved, fishponds could salvage Hawaii’s ecosystems. And, they could help solve the anthropocene's defining problems: resource scarcity, ecosystem decay, and climate change. 

During my gap year, I became fascinated with fishponds. Particularly, I reflected on how humans know the natural world: I realized that we know it through work, and that the food chain is what fundamentally connects us to the ecosystem. Beyond observing nature, sustainable food systems are how humans play a role within the environment and are part of natural ecosystems. 

I wondered, how are ancient Hawaiian aquaculture practices relevant to solving the environmental and social issues associated with the anthropocene today? Who are the figures behind this movement? And, can these revived practices inform other aquaculture projects? 

During April of 2021, I received a Global Food Fellowship from the Yale Sustainable Food Program to write about the fishponds and the community around them. I hoped to delve into the aquaculturists' stories and their work. I planned to bring their philosophies and knowledge to a wide audience with my writing. Through my project, I also planned to explore solutions, illuminate challenges, and celebrate Hawaiian culture. 

I embarked on my project in June of 2021: I spent thirty-five days on Oʻahu and spoke with more than forty fishpond caretakers, scientists, nonprofit leaders, civil servants, community members, conservationists, and educators. I visited fishponds, aquaculture facilities, and nonprofit offices. I snorkeled in search of seaweed, and I removed mangroves from a fishpond. I typed transcripts of my interviews with elders and fishpond leaders, and sent them to the University of Hawaii's Center for Oral History. 

​​I am grateful to have had the opportunity to witness and take part in such work, as well as to have connected with so many inspiring figures. I am humbled by the privilege of hearing their stories, and telling them.

To learn more about my research, you can read my article about fishpond aquaculture for ECO Magazine here, and you can read my blog post for the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication about how climate change is threatening fishponds here. I have work forthcoming in Oceanographic Magazine, and I will be presenting the project at the American Geophysical Union Fall 2021 Conference. 

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This project was also supported by the Yale Law School’s Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP), the Yale Environmental Humanities Program, and the Yale Summer Journalism Fellowship.

Mapping the "Grandparents' Garden"

What’s in a history of a garden?

I first learned about the Grandparents’ Garden** through fellow Yale Sustainable Food Program student and friend, Addee Kim. We were at our friend Lauren Kim’s Knead 2 Know talk on urban food forests in Taiwan, when Addee mentioned the Garden during the Q & A session. At the time, I had just formally accepted my summer internship with the Yale Farm, the beginning of a (hopefully!) lifelong engagement with food systems, food justice, and sustainable agriculture. I knew I wanted to do my independent project on the Garden, even though I had never been there, let alone walked past it.

When Covid-19 outbreaks worsened across the United States, I struggled with finding ways to connect with the gardeners. People were already on edge, so a stranger walking over and striking up a conversation would likely cause alarm or at the very least, discomfort. Given that many of the gardeners were elderly, I hesitated to conduct ethnographic research face-to-face in the first few weeks of my internship. What follows is a mental and visual roadmap of the many, many conversations with people— from my housemates Emily Sigman and Steve Winter to our next door neighbor Caroline Posner (one of the few younger, non-immigrant gardeners)— that eventually led me to meeting several gardeners, who have their own sections below. This project would not be possible without them, their patience, generosity, and openness to a complete stranger. Aside from those who have a direct connection to the Garden, I am incredibly grateful to Jacquie Munno, Sarah Mele, Erwin Li, Abby Lee, and Mark Bomford for giving me insightful guidance throughout this project period.

This project is ultimately the culmination of my journey among a web of interrelated people and communities. My time in New Haven this summer has also given me time to experiment with gardening and growing. I like to think that by doing gardening every day across the street from the Grandparents’ Garden, I was engaging in an indirect form of “participant observation.” By learning and experiencing the challenges of growing vegetables from seed with limited knowledge and resources, I could also manage to understand some of the challenges and delights that my neighbor gardeners were experiencing.

A link to the full zine can be found here.

**The “Grandparents’ Garden” is an informal name, one that I choose to use throughout this zine for ease of reference. I borrow this name from Addee, and from local news articles that highlight the elderly demographic of the Gardeners.

It is important to note that not all of the gardeners are necessarily grandparents, and even more so, that the Garden is living and transforming even as I conduct my research. Even my usage of the term “Grandparents’ Garden” (rather than “the garden” or “my plot”) denotes my status as an outside observer looking in, since each gardener has their own ways of naming and thinking about the Garden.

Vegetable Kingdom with Bryant Terry

Photography by Noa Hines '21.

Indigenizing the Local Food Movement with Elizabeth Hoover

Indigenous communities around the U.S. have long sustained their unique relationships to culture, land, and one another through food. As part of our Chewing the Fat series, the YSFP invited Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, Associate Professor at Brown University, to speak more about her research on indigenous foodways.

After recording a podcast with YSFP student Amy Zhang ’21, we hosted Dr. Hoover for lunch on the Yale Farm with Yale students and staff (thank you to Sanctuary Kitchen for catering!). The group gathered also to workshop a chapter from her forthcoming book, From “Garden Warriors” to Good Seeds: Indigenizing the Local Food Movement (University of Minnesota Press). In particular, students explored the relationship between food and gender norms through terms like “rematriation”, and asked questions on how climate change affects indigenous food systems and ways of living.

That afternoon, Dr. Hoover began her widely attended public lecture with stories of road trips; for years, she’d driven around the U.S. to meet with various native tribes and communities. Through these travels, she’d documented their seedsaving, farming and other cultural practices, explaining how stewarding seeds has transformative implications for food sovereignty. Seeds, after all, were gifts: they offered both biological and spiritual nourishment to people. YSFP Deja Chappell ’21 moderated the conversation that followed.

The Native American Cultural Center (NACC) hosted Dr. Hoover for a dinner with NACC students and community members. Along with other NACC student staff, YSFP-NACC liaison Catherine Webb ‘22 prepared buffalo creek squash soup, a hominy-bean salad, and sunflower seed cookies. The recipes were inspired by chef Sean Sherman’s Sioux Chef cookbook.

Elizabeth’s visit was co-sponsored by the Native American Cultural Center and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

Photography by Addee Kim ‘22.