​THE HAWAIIAN LEGACY FOUNDATION

Eddie and Myrna's main focus has always been the children of Hawaiʻi. Eddie’s three teachers—Mary Kawena Pukui, Pilahi Paki, and Sam Liʻa—instilled in him a lifelong mission to teach children about Hawaiian culture through his music and the life stories and music of others. Over the span of more than three decades, the Hawaiian Legacy Foundation has reached more than 500,000 children by providing public and private classrooms across Hawaiʻi with its ten award-winning documentaries, study guides, and school presentations.

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Today, the Hawaiian Legacy Foundation is working to continue Eddie and Myrna's educational mission by creating teaching tools that engages educators and students with the documentaries, raw footage, and other materials from the Kamae archive. Our main goal is to create a digital songbook for K-12 and post-secondary classrooms and work with educators to integrate it into their lesson plans and curriculum.

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The Eddie Kamae Songbook: A Musical Journey was just finished and will be available free online May 1, 2022.. It features 34 of Eddie’s most precious songs that foster an appreciation and love of music as well as an understanding of the history, traditions, and thoughts about Hawaiian music and its composers. The songbook is completely online and each song includes many materials found in the Kamae archive.

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We hope that the K-12 lesson plans created around the songbook will be multi-disciplinary and will immerse students in a wealth of Hawaiian traditions, cultural practices and wisdom passed on through kūpuna. We want the lesson plans to be aligned with the DOE Nā Hopena Aʻo (HĀ) Framework to help educators achieve the “Hawaiʻi Promise” in the DOE’s “Five Student Promises by 2030.”

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We hope the ten films with study guides, Eddie Kamae Songbook, and teaching program will encourage early literacy and family interaction about Hawaiian music, history, and culture.