If you notice people in Vancouver today showing off their “aloha spirit” — not just wearing flowery leis around their necks or practicing their ukulele skills but demonstrating true kindness and patience and treating everyone like family — there’s a good reason why.
By proclamation of the city council, today is officially Deva Leinani Aiko Yamashiro Day in Vancouver. Deva Yamashiro, better known around town as Aunty Deva, is the Hawaiian native who moved here and anchored a thriving and growing Hawaiian and Polynesian community, a nonprofit cultural foundation and the super-popular “Three Days of Aloha in the Pacific Northwest,” an annual summer festival of music, dancing and cultural education in Esther Short Park.
There’s even more to celebrate: Deva Yamashiro has also won a 2017 Governor’s Heritage Award from Gov. Jay Inslee for her contributions to culture as a “master traditional artist” and recognized “tradition bearer,” according to the nomination criteria. She’s one of six statewide winners to be honored at a ceremony and dinner at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma on Nov. 14.
All of which grew from the humblest beginnings, according to her sons Kaloku and Keawe Holt, who told The Columbian their mother’s life story just after they — and about 50 more Aunty Deva fans — packed into the Vancouver City Council chambers Monday night to hear the proclamation making today, her 62nd birthday, a citywide observance.
Yamashiro did not attend the ceremony due to ill health; before the official proceedings began, the group of 50 circled up in the lobby of Vancouver City Hall to sing and pray for her recovery — and to thank the city for honoring her.
After a hardscrabble early life, they said, everything changed for her when she arrived in Vancouver.
Poor village
Deva Yamashiro was born in 1955 and grew up in a poor village in Hawaii, her sons said, and that’s where they grew up, too. There was little opportunity for any of them there. Yamashiro worked as a bartender but also had a taste for travel; when she visited the mainland, her sons said, it opened her eyes to greater possibilities in life.
Eventually she moved with her boys to Nashville, Tenn., where a cousin operated a Polynesian event-production business — offering musicians and dancers for hire — which was a good fit for Yamashiro’s exceptional skills; as a young woman in Hawaii she had studied hula with renowned teacher Victoria Holt Takamine and danced in several Merrie Monarch Festivals — the premiere hula festival in the world, often called “the Olympics of hula.”
“Hula is the heart of Hawaiian culture,” Kaloku stressed during the interview.
But life in a Nashville “ghetto” wasn’t much better than life in a Hawaiian one, her sons said. They moved around frequently, sometimes living in motels, while Yamashiro worked as a night-shift waitress. By now Kaloku was a high school student and on the basketball team; his mother somehow never missed a game, he said, despite having to scrounge up the ticket price, $3 apiece for herself and her other son. The brothers also remember ashamedly spilling cans of loose coins on Taco Bell counters to pay for their meals.
“The money never seemed to add up to the bills, but somehow we survived. I don’t know how she did it,” Keawe said. That was a frequent refrain during this interview: “I don’t know how she did it.”
Bridge
In 1995, Yamashiro moved her family to Vancouver — because it’s where her brother had relocated and started a business. She and her sons (plus another relative and two dogs) drove a U-Haul across the country in three days, enjoying views of a vast and varied landscape they’d never seen before, the boys remembered.
Vancouver was a dream come true, they said: it was clean, it was green, it was welcoming. “Something about Vancouver was fascinating,” Kaloku said.
Yamashiro started out working for her brother; she wound up waitressing overnight again, at Shari’s in Fisher’s Landing. That’s where her sons recall kindly managers letting the family sometimes inhabit the restaurant — sleeping in the booths, watching TV in the back rooms.
Their mother won such treatment because she was “always great with people,” Keawe said. She knew all the customers’ names. She was unfailingly friendly and hardworking.
Meanwhile, she also started teaching hula here and there in the area — at Portland Community College, the University of Portland and eventually at the Evergreen school district. Networking with other instructors and students led to her founding of the Hawaiian cultural organization that eventually became today’s Ke Kukui Foundation — her way of reaching Hawaiian and Polynesian children “who never would have known their own culture, otherwise,” according to the city proclamation.
Today, Ke Kukui is a thriving nonprofit agency that hosts everything from Hawaiian language, history and hula classes to that huge “Three Days of Aloha” festival, which draws thousands of people to Esther Short Park every year — some from as far away as Hawaii itself. The foundation also consults with agencies like the National Park Service about its educational programs and archaeological projects at Fort Vancouver, the site of a mostly Hawaiian “Kanaka Village” during its historical era.
Yamashiro noticed that there was “a divide” between Hawaiians in Vancouver and Portland, her sons said; as with many other local folks, they seemed to find the Columbia River and the Interstate 5 Bridge a barrier.
“Mom noticed that and she said, ‘I’m going to be that bridge,’ ” Kaloku said. “She wanted to have a place where everybody could gather and share the aloha spirit. She wanted her two boys to share that aloha spirit even though we were growing up on the ‘outside.’ ”
And, he added, she wanted to extend the aloha spirit to all children who are growing up “on the outside” — whether they’re native Hawaiians who’ve moved away from their birthplace, or whites and others who’ve never even been there.
Everybody needs the aloha spirit, Kaloku said.
During the city council ceremony on Monday, Keawe said that designating an official day for his mother is “reassurance that all of us that were transplanted from the islands to Vancouver are going in the right direction. This is huge for our community.”
Yamashiro, who wasn’t at the ceremony, sent a lei she made herself for Mayor Tim Leavitt, as well as a few words of her own — thanking “each and every one of you” and saying she simply wanted to be remembered for “bringing Hawaiian culture to the children of Vancouver.”
