Just after 9 a.m. on a sunny school day, the seventh- and eighth-grade classes of Ke Ana La‘ahana Public Charter School of Hilo pile out of an old yellow school bus, sling backpacks over their shoulders and start trudging down the wickedly steep four-wheel-drive road into Waipi‘o Valley. Nobody says much. It’s early yet, and the students have a long hike into the valley ahead of them. A cloud of adolescent crankiness follows as they clomp down the hill.

Kulia Tolentino with students Zachary Kerr (left) and Ka'eo Mokiao-Lee.

They absolutely hate this road, says their teacher, Kulia Kauhi Tolentino, who has a gentle voice, a sweet disposition and uncommon determination. “Walking down’s not so bad,” she says, smiling sympathetically. “But coming back up— oh boy, do they grumble.” She makes them do this once a month. She would make them do it more often, but school budget cuts have curtailed her use of the bus.

The mood brightens a bit after the students stop halfway down the road and recite a Hawaiian genealogical chant, as they always do at the beginning of the school day at Ke Ana La‘ahana, which has a mostly Native Hawaiian student body. By the time they reach their destination forty minutes later, they’re chattering and horsing around as happily as if they were in homeroom.

But this overgrown corner of Waipi‘o Valley, in a narrow valley-within-the-valley near the base of the twin waterfalls of Hi‘ilawe and Hakalaoa, is no digitally connected classroom. There’s not even a road that reaches it, just a muddy foot trail. You might think it’s the middle of nowhere, but actually it’s the site of what was once the largest of Waipi‘o Valley’s four main villages, Napo‘opo‘o. In the overgrown forest understory, archaeologists have mapped out forty-three ancient house sites and an interconnected complex of some four hundred lo‘i, or kalo patches. Sometimes Kulia gazes into the forest and the trees fade away, the 1,400-foot double waterfalls rise overhead, the view of the distant ocean reappears, high peaked roofs of the grass hale (houses) return and the heart-shaped leaves of thousands of kalo plants fill rock-wall terraces that stretch all the way down to the river. “It looks like heaven,” she says.

In pre-contact times the villageof Napo‘opo‘o in Waipi‘o Valley was home to some 400 thriving lo‘i.

Kulia’s life’s work, she’s come to realize, is to make Napo‘opo‘o fruitful again. She leases six acres of the ancient village from the Bishop Museum, the second-largest landowner in the valley after Kamehameha Schools. She’s cleared about an acre so far and put more than thirty kalo patches back into use. The Hawaiians built their lo‘i to last, and there are hundreds of them lying dormant in the forest, just waiting, apparently, for someone to cultivate them again. Kulia has put out the word that anyone who wants to adopt a patch can, but she’s had few takers. When people realize the amount of work it takes to farm in a heavily forested location that’s not only off the grid but off the road system, interest usually fizzles. “We can’t bring in any machines,” Kulia says. “We have to do all the labor by hand.”

Still, she has her regular helpers, including students from Kamehameha Schools, Hawai‘i Community College and the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. A class of county firefighters-in-training came down once and pulled up stumps. Some of the help has come from far away, including a Maori cultural group from New Zealand and a class from Humboldt State University. Kulia’s friends and family get pressed into service all the time, and she once put to work some hikers from the Netherlands who were looking for a waterfall. “Actually, they were trespassing,” Kulia says. “They ended up coming to our school to sing songs and talk about their culture.”

Her most reliable helpers, however, are her seventh- and eighth-graders. Of course, being a reliable helper and not complaining about it don’t necessarily go together. Some of the kids would certainly rather be playing Halo 2, checking Facebook or cruising at Prince Kuhio Plaza Mall than sweating in a muddy lo‘i. A few always seem to call in sick on Napo‘opo‘o days. But some of the kids get into it. “The ones that follow you around like a puppy and constantly ask questions—those are the ones,” Kulia says.

And one thing Kulia has proved is that with proper nudging, even a band of ambivalent adolescents can get big things done. It has been 12- and 13-year-olds who have breathed much of the new life into Napo‘opo‘o. They’re the ones who dug the rocks and silt out of the ‘auwai, putting the dormant irrigation system back in play. They’re the ones who cleared the grass, ginger, vines and trees from an enormous eighty-by-ninety-foot kalo patch that hadn’t been cultivated in nobody knows how long. They’re the ones who made the kulolo and laulau from the kalo they planted and fed it to their schoolmates. You wouldn’t know it as they’re sighing and dragging their heels on the hike into the valley, but middle schoolers can really make things happen.

On the day I visit, some of the students clear brush while others strip wild coffee plants and mac nut litter from two small lo‘i, then fill them with huli, or baby kalo. After the work is done they head to the po‘owai, the porous wall of rocks stacked across the stream to divert water into the ‘auwai. Some pull snacks from their backpacks, some wade into the cold water. Others just relax on the bank in the sun. Two eighth-graders, Buna Santos and Desmond Lewi, kick back on a smooth, warm boulder. They agree that Kumu Kulia, as they call her, is a popular teacher. “She likes doing outside stuff, planting kalo and things like that,” says Desmond. “We don’t always want to do it,” says Buna, “but at the same time we do, because first of all it’s about our grade, and on top of that it will help us learn more about our culture—how our ancestors used to survive off the land and how they stayed alive and stuff.”

Tolentino and her students weed the lo‘i.

Kulia’s connection to Waipi‘o Valley stretches into the ancient past through her Hawaiian father’s side of the family. She spent a lot of her small-kid time in the valley on family fishing and camping trips. Her interest in kalo farming, though, didn’t blossom until she hit the ripe old age of 11, when her grandfather brought her a garbage bag filled with huli while her father was enduring a long hospital stay. She planted the huli in the backyard and showered attention upon them, even danced the hula for them at night. Raising kalo, it turned out, was therapeutic. “That took away a lot of worry,” she says. “It helped me get occupied and took a lot of things off of my mind.”

When Kulia started taking her students to Waipi‘o in 2002, they would camp out over the weekends and lend a hand to some of the valley’s kalo farmers. Before her father passed away, he would help on these overnighters, cooking food, sharing stories and carrying the students’ backpacks down the road in the back of his truck (the students still had to walk). School budget cuts have killed the campouts, but those were fun times. In addition to helping with the kalo, the kids got to fish at the beach. They hunted for prawns at night using torches and spears. They cooked food in an imu. They explored the sprawling valley, learned the Hawaiian place names and soaked up stories about the night marchers, about the cannibalistic shark-man, about the heiau (temple) where the giant supernatural tongue came down from the sky to claim warriors slain in battle.

These days Kulia’s students go to Napo‘opo‘o once a month, but their teacher usually gets down there two or three times a week— and even that doesn’t feel like enough. Her dedication to Napo‘opo‘o might strike some as a bit crazy given the circumstances. She works full time as a teacher. She’s got three young kids of her own. The drive from her home to Waipi‘o is about a hundred-mile round trip, and the kalo farming is a strictly not-for-profit endeavor (which wouldn’t cover her gasoline if it did generate revenue). Most people would have called it quits by now, and nobody would blame her if she simply walked away and let the forest reclaim her lo‘i. But she can’t do that. Really. She’s tried and it doesn’t work. Waipi‘o Valley won’t let her go.

In fact, it won’t even let her take a vacation without staying in touch. She hops on a plane to O‘ahu, picks up a magazine, and what’s on the cover? A big shot of Waipi‘o Valley. She goes to Alaska for an indigenous peoples conference, catches a performance by an Alaska halau (troupe), and what song do they dance hula to? “Waipi‘o Paka‘alana.” She visits Honolulu, has a chance meeting with an old man from the Big Island who knew her family, and what story does he tell? The one about making ‘okolehao (liquor) with her grandfather using ti leaves they gathered in—yep—Waipi‘o Valley. “Something always reminds me of my responsibility,” she says, “always, always, always.”

On the quad-burning hike back out of the valley, I catch a demonstration of the grumbling that accompanies the slog up the hated road. The students get PE credit for coming to Napo‘opo‘o, and they certainly earn it on this road, which climbs a thousand feet in just one mile. Some of the kids complain loudly and comically. One boy bellows that he can’t go on, that he’s going to wet himself and then he’s going to die. “You’re over halfway there,” Kulia says. “The hardest part’s almost over.” Like everyone else she’s huffing and puffing and sweating, though she’s also smiling. And it’s a smile of perfect contentment. The students won’t be back to Waipi‘o for another month. But she’ll be back tomorrow.