Keoni Mahelona leaves his home in Hawaii in pursuit of science.
Aloha. O Keoni koʻu inoa. No Hawaiʻi au. I tēnei wā, noho au i Taipā. Keoni Mahelona is a melting pot of diversity in so many ways -- ethnicity, education, hobbies, sexuality, and possibly personality hahahahaha. He's had a seemingly random journey through engineering, business, and science that's somehow thrown him into media. Today he works at a Māori social enterprise whose mission is to promote and preserve te reo Māori o Muriwhenua, and they use science and innovation to create the tools they need to achieve their mission. He hopes his story will encourage other Māori and Pacific Islanders to pursue a future in STEM.
This story originally aired on Dec. 29, 2017 in an episode titled “Home.”
Story Transcript
As a child, I was always afraid of sharks in the ocean. Any little sign that was there that could perhaps be a shark would really give me a fright. So if there was a black spot on the bottom of the ocean floor, I'd get a fright. If there was this cusp of a wave that could be a shark’s finish, I get a fright. Even when I didn’t see sort of gave me the thought that there could be a shark there and that just terrified me.
I struggled with this because, as a native Hawaiian, I thought, “Why am I afraid of sharks?” Because Hawaiians shouldn’t be afraid of sharks. Sharks are our protectors. You see, as a native Hawaiian sharks, can be known as aumakua. An aumakua is kind of like a kaitiaki. They're guardian. They're an ancestor who’s been reincarnated in this world to protect us.
And there's stories like this all throughout Hawaii. In fact, my great grandmother was known to swim, literally swim with sharks in Pearl Harbor, and that was before it was bombed and drenched and all that stuff.
So you’d think that I wouldn’t have any anxiety in the water around sharks when we got this rich history around sharks being our protectors. Even to this day, I still get a fright in the ocean. I do a lot of ocean swimming here in Aotearoa and I do hope that the Maori sharks talk to the Hawaiian sharks so when they see me they’d be like, “Oh, he's cool. He's Hawaiian.”
I don't know if it was, say, Jaws or news outlets publishing stories about people being eaten alive by sharks, but something instilled this sense of fear in me. And it angers me that my instincts in the water are governed by these western influences rather than the stories of my tūpuna.
We had a lot of great stories in our family, like rich stories about our history. Whether they're stories about our indigenous culture or stories that sort of like reason with the Western world, I hadn’t fact checked the stories of my tūpuna and I don’t intend on. But regardless, the stories really shaped my view of the world as a child.
So my grandfather was an engineer. He got into Notre Dame at the age of sixteen, so apparently he was pretty smart. When New York had its blackout in 1960-something, the story goes that my grandfather had this device. He went to the people in New York and said, “Hey, look. I've got this device and it can really solve your energy problems.”
Apparently, Big Brother, somebody didn’t like this so he was threatened over possessing this sort of technology. I just want to pause there because my grandfather sounds pretty cool, right? He's like this engineer. He's got this really cool device that could save the world, and he's being threatened. It’s sort of like the perfect grandfather you can want. He's sort of like Rick, from Rick and Morty.
But the threats got so bad that my grandfather committed suicide and I never got to meet him. So as a child, this story really intrigued me and I thought, “What was it? What was it that my grandfather invented? Was it a perpetual energy machine? Can I one day find his invention and like use it to save the world or get rich or maybe do both, because you can do that these days?”
So I was just always inspired by this story and it motivated me to want to be an inventor. I remember as a kid I had this one idea, and my dad loved it. It was this turbine, like wind turbine, that you would put on a car, because when you drive a car it creates a lot of wind. So it would capture this wind and then convert it back into energy. So it’s like this really cool device. Obviously I didn’t understand the Laws of Thermodynamics when I was ten.
But aside from those impractical ideas, we had a lot of practical creations growing up. My family, we were really rich in love and support but we were poor in material things so we just had to make things work. My sister and I grew up in what we call a shack. It was a house that my father built with his own hands. It’s one of those houses you just sort of keep adding on and adding on as you have the money to.
It didn’t have any rooms. The bathroom didn’t even have a door, which is awkward when you have guests over. And we didn’t have mains electricity, but we did have a generator.
So we lived in a hole. I mean a literal hole, not a figurative one, because we sort of had this TV antenna and it had to be put up on a hill just so it can pick up some stations from the nearby island. And one station that we could pick up it just so happened to have Star Trek.
So as a young kid, I started watching Star Trek, and it was like TNG, this is was sort of ’92, ’93 and it was shit. Deep Space Nine came along and it’s cool. It looks a little more realistic. They're using models and stuff in their visual effects. And then there was this thing Voyager, and I started watching Voyager and I fell in love with Voyager.
I know there's a lot of Voyager haters out there, and I’m adlibbing now. They gave me a time restriction and I’m totally going to go over it. But how many of you have actually watched Star Trek: Voyager? Well, that’s all right. It’s really frickin’ good.
Go onto Netflix and binge watch Voyager. There's some really great storytelling there. You can learn about how to run a company and work together as a team. You'll learn great words like “licentious.” Tuvok used that word. It’s a great word. I just learned it three months ago. And sexually promiscuous. We’ll get to that part later.
So I really fell in love with Voyager and it was critical that every Monday night at seven we had gas in that generator so I could watch my program. And my dad knew this. So I'd be there watching my program and, all of a sudden, the generator it makes this noise when it’s running out of gas. It sort of goes dididididididuh. That’s like it’s operating normally. And then it kind of goes didididididoo – didididididoo – dididididi, and that was a sign to me that this generator is running out of gas.
So I would wait for a commercial break, run outside and scream at the top of my lungs, “Dad, the generator is running out of gas!”
The program would come back on so I'd run back inside to watch Voyager and then it’s going dididididoo – dididididoo – dididi… so it gets more frequent and I’m like, “Oh, my God, the generator is gonna die.” So I would just scream and scream until, finally, my dad would top the generator.
And he always had a spare can of gas ready for me on a Monday night. Sometimes he'd forget. And when he forgot he would actually siphon gas out of the car just so I can watch my program.
So in hindsight, I actually had a really exceptional and loving upbringing. My family showed that to us through their reactions. Those sort of stories really helped me to see the greatness and the resourcefulness of my family. But there were a few stories that weren’t so great and I think it was those negative ones that sort of really had an effect on me.
So my dad always drove this junk. The junk is like a really crappy car that he could make go because he was a self-taught mechanic. This car had a hard time going up the hill and he said it had something to do with the gas filter.
So he had this little thing he'd do where he'd get like this spanner and bang the bottom of this car just to get the gas filter working again. I don't know. Maybe he couldn’t buy a new one. Somehow this worked.
So one day we’re driving up the hill and, sure enough, the car starts dying. So we pull over. The spanner is not in the car and he makes me run up and down this hill to look for a stone just so I can climb into the car and just bang this gas filter so we can get going again. That’s the sort of thing that I had to experience and I hated it. I was so embarrassed I just dreaded like one of my friends would see me on the side of the road. Like, “What’s Keoni up to?”
And I would make my dad take me to school early in the mornings so that my friends didn’t know that we were poor and that we had this junk. And my sister didn’t like to go early so sometimes he would take her later and bring me earlier just so no one would see us like show up in this junk car, but sometimes we just didn’t have a choice. Dad would just have to take us to school at the right time and the car would make so much noise everyone would know, “Ah, here comes the Mahelonas. Late again.”
So I remember this day really clearly. My sister and I we looked at each other and we said, “Look, we do not want to be poor when we grow up. We don’t want to live in a shack. We don’t want our parents to live in a shack so let’s go to school, get really smart, get a good education, get a job and like do well.” And we did just that.
But since then, my life has taken many unexpected turns. I had this dream as this young brown boy of inventing the warp drive. This is that Star Trek influence. And that really propelled me into high school and wanting to do science and wanting to do engineering. I wanted to be astronauts because astronauts go into space, but I sort of thought you had to go to the Air Force Academy to do that. And who the hell wants to go to the Air Force Academy?
But then I realized, “Hey, engineers can go into space, especially ones from MIT,” so I was like, “I gotta go to MIT. That’s the only way I’m gonna get into space.”
So I worked my ass off through high school, got in MIT and then this other college came up. It was called Olin. It was sort of a new sort of risky college. I actually flipped a coin because I couldn’t make up my mind. I did think some other things through but the coin just sort of validated my decision, if you will.
So I went to Olin. I didn’t know what degree I was going to do. I ended up deciding on mechanical engineering because the professors were kind of cool, some of them were pretty hot, and it was the sort of safer multidisciplinary degree to pick.
So how did I go from this young, brown boy who wants to invent the warp drive to just plain old chocolate mechanical engineer? It’s as if the more I learned about science and engineering, the more I realized my wildest dreams were very likely improbable. That really affected me.
But throughout my journey and my careers, there would be these perturbations in my reality, these inexplicable things that would happen that would just make me think, “Is there more than just science that’s going on here?”
So when I first came to New Zealand on a study abroad, I had déjà vu left and right. I would see people that I thought I knew, but I didn’t. I had never seen them before. And later, I would sort of meet these people, I would meet their families and get to know them and they‘d be a really important part of my time here in Aotearoa. This was just happening over and over again. So later on in life I thought I might come back to New Zealand to study and live.
And again, I had these signs. Like one day, my dad, he was ill with pneumonia and he just gets up and he's like, “I gotta go to New Zealand. I gotta go to New Zealand.” So my mom rings me and tells me this story out of nowhere.
I was living in Boston at the time working at a robotics company and I would just be walking down the street or like working in my garden and I'd get this whiff, like something would just trigger my brain and remind me of New Zealand. There was no mānuka around, there was nothing in Boston that could possibly be New Zealand, but I would just have these connections. monecu
Then one day I had a dream. In that dream I was actually here in Wellington and I met this Maori boy. He actually turned out to be the man of my dreams. And so I thought, “Hah, maybe I’m doing the right thing. Maybe I need to go to New Zealand.”
So I came back to New Zealand. I was studying physics at Victoria. I notice Victoria is here so I won’t say much about that, but it was a tough time. I was like, “What am I doing here? It’s Wellington.” My flat mates kind of wanted me to move out.
I was sort of pursuing somebody and, one day, I just was at a barbecue and I met this Maori boy. I took him for a ride in my bike, and it’s a really great story so buy me some beers afterwards and I'll divulge. But basically after two weeks I moved in.
So here I am an indigenous scientist. I make decisions based on facts and data and good research but I also make decisions based on the inexplicable things that somehow have a sense of meaning to me. I think that’s really important. I think a lot of scientists you can be quite hardnosed and data-driven but I think, if you can take those risks, it can really add to research and innovation.
And I have this story that I tell myself, and maybe it’s to help me justify my life choices, as this kōrero that I say that, “Things happen in a roundabout way.”
So I came here to New Zealand to study nanotechnology so I could become this like filthy rich entrepreneur. That didn’t happen. Then I started working on some water technologies, which involved nanotechnology. I thought, “Hey, water is sort of like the next gold. I could really do a lot of good with this technology.”
That startup died in three months. It was painful.
Then my partner needed some help at his organization that he works at, which is Te Reo Irirangi o te Hiku o te Ika. We’re a iwi radio broadcaster. When I started working there, I saw opportunities everywhere.
So right now, our sort of new project, and I might kind of launch this tonight, is we’re going to use machine learning to help us revitalize te reo Maori, to accelerate the speed at which we can revitalize te reo Maori.
So here I am revalidating to myself that maybe I was destined to be here in new Zealand to work on this project and that everything that happened along the way has sort of led up to this. I’m not this filthy rich entrepreneur and I won’t be able to buy back the land in Hawaii so I can give it to my people, but I’m learning that these sorts of technologies are really important to indigenous people to help us to revitalize our sense of identity and sovereignty. And while America still occupies our country, I see a lot of value in what we’re doing today. That makes me happy.
I don't think I would have been here if it wasn’t for taking those risks. If it wasn’t for that story that my grandfather or my grandmother might have been doing something that didn’t seem very factual, I don’t think I would have been here today and I wouldn’t be working on this really cool project. So yeah, I think I’m pretty content with things right now. I’m still working on that warp drive thing, so thank you.