The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is honored to welcome the Brothers Cazimero as its special guests at Celebrate Hawai‘i, the NMAI’s third annual Hawaiian cultural festival. The Brothers Cazimero have created their own unique sound and are continuing traditional Hawaiian music with a contemporary twist.

The long weekend of activities begins with a Hawaiian dinner feast and a special screening of Na Kamalei: The Men of Hula. After the screening, director Lisette Marie Flanary and producer Kumu Hula Robert Cazimero lead a moderated discussion.

The festival offers a weekend of demonstrations, including hula lessons taught by local halaus and an explanation of the fashions worn by dancers. The outdoor amphitheater presents traditional Hawaiian games of guessing (no’a), top-spinning, and konane, a game similar to checkers, taught by Ani Lokomaika`i Lipscomb.

A food demonstration by Daniel Kapapaloa Anthony at the outside fire pit allows visitors to pound poi, from the root of the taro plant, and to view traditional preparation of this dish. A special station in the museum’s Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe features several Hawaiian dishes including pupus (appetizers) and a pork main entrée. Outside the museum in the cropland section of the landscape on the south side of the building, a “canoe garden” is in full bloom. This garden displays some of the foods that made the journey from the Polynesian Islands across the Pacific to Hawai’i and includes bananas, yams, coconut, paper mulberry, shampoo ginger, and turmeric.

Other demonstrators include Hawaiian lei makers Marie McDonald (designated by the National Endowment of the Arts as a “National Treasure”), her daughter, Roen Hufford, and Bill Char, who has taken top honors in the Honolulu May Day Lei Contest multiple times. He teaches this art and family tradition at several Hawaiian schools. Marques Hanalei Marzan, from Kalimukele, Hawai‘i, is a cultural practitioner and artist who studies and creates many different types of Hawaiian fiber arts. Reviving ancient designs and styles, Marzan says, “I perpetuate the voices of the past through my work of the present.”

Kapa artist, Dalani Tanahy, demonstrates kapa (bark cloth) beading and stamping. “I can see that there is still something deeper that sets this group of not only artists, but cultural practitioners, apart,” says Tanahy,  “and makes us able to sit for those long stretches of time doing something that you measure progress in quarters and halves of inches.”

Parents and children may stamp their own bookmarks with traditional designs. Storytellers in the Resource Center on the Third Level enthrall audiences with tales of Hawaiian life and experiences.

The U.S. Botanic Garden, National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian horticulture department transform the museum into a Hawaiian oasis. Dr. Samuel M. ‘Ohukani‘ohi‘a Gon III, historian and Hawaiian plant expert with the Nature Conservancy of Hawai’i, presents a talk focusing on the environment and indigenous plants of the Hawaiian Islands. This festival brings the best of Hawai’i to Washington, D.C.

Saturday evening culminates on the museum’s Welcome Plaza with the legendary Brothers Cazimero kicking off the fourth annual Indian Summer Showcase, a seasonal series featuring extraordinary indigenous talent from across the hemisphere.