20 for the Next 20: Leon No‘eau Peralto, huiMAU

Leon No‘eau Peralt0
Executive Director, huiMAU

Hui Mālama i ke Ala ʻŪlili is both a nonprofit dedicated to the resurgence of Hawaiian ancestral knowledge and a community-based land stewardship in Hāmākua on Hawai‘i Island.

The seed that grew into huiMAU was planted in 2003, when Leon No‘eau Peralto was a freshman in high school.

“I had a culture class and our final project was to interview one of our kūpuna,” he says. He drove from Hilo to Hāmākua, where his grandfather lived and worked on the same ranch in Koholālele for most of his life.

“He was looking out over these pastures in the uplands, lamenting how many koa and ‘ōhi‘a trees that were once there had died and turned into grass. He was no longer able to see or hear all of the native forest birds he remembered from his childhood,” recalls Peralto.

It wasn’t just the ‘āina that was becoming unrecognizable.

“He longed for that lifestyle he knew growing up that was tied to the abundance of the ‘āina. People lived off the land, which was hunting and farming for our family, but for other ‘ohana it may have been fishing. Things started to change with new land ownership and increases in development.”

That conversation profoundly shaped Peralto. He double majored in anthropology and Native American studies at Stanford University, then earned his master’s in Hawaiian studies and a doctorate in Indigenous politics from UH Mānoa, where he met his partner, Haley Kailiehu, and fellow Hawaiian activist Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua.

Peralto says he and Kailiehu realized “that if we’re going to prevent further disturbance and desecration of our sacred sites, we need to organize as a community, and really invest in the future through educating our youth and restoring the health of our ‘āina.”

They founded huiMAU in 2011. Their first project was clearing invasive guinea grass to create a 30-by-30-foot garden of native and canoe plants. They now have a 5-acre farm, where a multigenerational community project is dedicated to sustainable food cultivation and native ecosystem restoration.

huiMAU’s food distribution program opened a community hub and store in June 2023. This year the nonprofit plans to expand its selection of organic food and deliver groceries to kūpuna. The ‘āina- and culture-based educational programs reach 30% of Hāmākua’s youth ages 5–17.

“Every time I return, the ‘āina is thriving and their capacity to feed and care for their community is extending,” says Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua. “It’s a tremendous inspiration.”