Peleke Flores is the Director of Community Engagement for Mālama Hulēʻia, the nonprofit organization stewarding the Alakoko Fishpond on Kauaʻi. In this conversation, he shares his journey into traditional Hawaiian aquaculture, which began with stacking rocks in the river as a child and evolved into large-scale fishpond restoration, education, and cultural preservation. Peleke explains how traditional fishpond systems offer lessons in regenerative aquaculture and community stewardship, as well as how we can move past a profit-based mindset towards a sustainable approach to agriculture.
Q: Can you share a bit about your personal connection to Alakoko Fishpond? What brought you into this work?
I came about this work in college, but as a young adult, I was raised around water. Not so much fishponds, but more in taro patch up in the mountain, or making salt and nearshore light fishing. When I was growing up, I tried to learn about the function of our ahupua’a system—that’s the land division from the mountain to the sea. It shows how the resources from the top of the mountain and the freshwater go through traditional food systems and end up in the ocean. Each of them connects to each other on a wider scale and helps amplify food resources.
Growing up, I never really knew how fishponds worked. But once I started learning, I began to understand how all the systems connect and how each part supports the next. When you break it down, there’s actually a whole matrix of fish ponds that are categorized under local fish traps, fish pens, and fish ponds. And then all depending on their salinity, whether it be freshwater, brackish water, or salt water. Then they’re further categorized by style, based on where they sit on the land. The materials used to build them also vary. Some ponds are made from sand, some from stone, some use natural reef systems or lava rock, and some rely on springs. Each style of fishpond was innovated, by our ancestors, off of Mother Nature’s natural designs to hold, trap, or amplify aquaculture resources.
Q: What have you learned from studying the historical records and restoration practices of traditional fishponds?
A lot of the people that used these systems either passed away or got pushed out. Some places that used to be fishponds or holding pens are now swimming holes or developed areas. As we read and translate maps from the old kingdom days, we’re learning where ponds used to be, which ones have been demolished, and how they were built. That helps us understand and fine-tune how we approach restoration today.
The model that’s been pushed over the last hundred years was a government structure. It focused on how many pounds of fish you could harvest per acre, per year. But that never really worked, because traditional fishponds weren’t meant to be about money. If you go back 300 or 400 years, the system was built for survival. It was about feeding people on this little rock in the middle of the ocean, not about profit.
A lot of those modern efforts failed because the fishponds couldn’t meet that kind of demand. Not all ponds were meant to grow fish to harvest. Many were nurseries that boosted baby fish and released them into the ocean. When people tried to grow more fish inside the pond, like they do with cages around the world, disease spread faster. You had to work harder and bring in food for the fish. But our traditional ponds were self-feeding and self-recruiting. The brackish water and nutrients created a bloom that fed all our baby filter feeders. Those babies multiplied and flowed out to feed the nearshore pelagic fish. That’s how we used to feed whole villages with big seasonal net gatherings.
Q: What does your day-to-day work with Mālama Hulēʻia look like? Can you walk us through some of your responsibilities and your approach to stewardship?
Around September, it’ll be seven years since I started with this restoration project. Phase one focused on removing 26 acres of invasive mangrove from the 600-to 800-year-old fishpond, which we completed in the middle of COVID. That work exposed the original wall underneath. Then we went into phase two, in which we are currently restoring that traditional wall.
I run workshops with the community. We have about 60 people from the community who are committed to learning the traditional dry set masonry to help focus on the restoration of the wall. About two years ago, we had about 2,000 community members come down and help us with the beginning of rebuilding the foundation of the wall, which hadn’t happened in probably 100 years or more. We get people involved—putting their hands in the soil, in the water, on the rocks—and learning how to work together. Whatever your title is outside, when you come onto the wall, everybody’s on the same line. It’s about honing in, learning together, and kind of traveling back in time to how the village used to work.
Our crew is small, and we rely heavily on community engagement. We may not be feeding people directly with fish, but at least we’re feeding them knowledge.
Q: What lessons from traditional Hawaiian water systems should modern agriculture and conservation adopt?
When we’re working with the federal government, there’s a lot that we’re trying to balance. The traditional fishpond management system is not as productive as modern society expects and it really pulls the people away from the environment and the animals. But the modern way of doing things is not working either.
We’re now showing the federal government that because of our grassroots initiative groups doing restoration in places, the bird counts are going up, fish counts are going up, plants are coming back. That’s because of the engagement and maintenance of the people, the culture coming back in.
Q: Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say the fishpond is an “amplifier” for the ecosystem?
The Department of Aquatic Resources (DAR) was trying to figure out why the wild fish population is decreasing. They said it was due to global warming, pollution, and overfishing, and suggested blocking off a certain fishing area. If we’re going to put a ban—a kapu—on this fishing area, when do we lift it? What is the goal? If you cannot show the goal, it’s hard for the fishermen to support it. People are scared that if we ban fishing here, we’ll lose the cultural connection to that area too. DAR came back with old stories about how the ocean used to bubble with fish, using our own oral data.
I remember my great-grandmother telling me when she was little, she went fishing with her great-grandfather and saw the fish balls. But she also said her great-grandfather saw more than she did. So yes, the wild fish population has been going down, but we don’t know exactly why. I think part of the reason is the fishponds.
Traditionally, fishponds were self-feeding, self-recruiting. When you have 39 acres full of bloom, you can feed a lot of babies without trying. That’s the system making its own food. Then we have gates made from wood laths. Anything as small as a finger can go in and out. Bigger fish stay in or out depending where they are. Babies flow out to the estuary.
If we say one million baby fish are in the pond, half of them go out. Not all survive, but many do. That’s food going back into the wild. The pond doesn’t replace the ocean. It feeds it. There was a survey that said 288 fishponds could be restored. If each one releases half a million fish, that’s over 100 million fish back into the ocean.
That’s what I mean by amplifier. The fishpond helps make food and send it out. It’s not just about growing fish inside. It helps restore the health of the ocean around it.
Q: What traditional practices helped sustain abundant fish populations—and what can we learn from them today?
The wild fish population is depleting inside our waters. We use our oral data to track back which fishing practice those stories came from. The story is, fish balls used to be bubbling in the ocean. That story had to come from a specific practice, because it showed up everywhere.
For us, that was the hukilau, a mass village fishing gathering. The net would be in a canoe, paddled around the fish balls, while someone on the mountain watched and raised a flag when they saw the shadow ball. People would come down, help pull in the net, and divide the fish for everyone to eat.
Instead of just focusing on overfishing, pollution, or global warming, I believe the missing piece is the ahupuaʻa system. It comes down to understanding what the function of the fishpond was. It was to release food into the shoreline to help attract those pelagic fish in and feed them consistently around the island. That is what kept the feeding going. That is what kept the population strong in those areas. That is the part we are trying to bring back—not just the structure of the pond, but the function, the practice, the relationship. To restore the abundance, we have to restore the system that created it.