I nearly passed over Mary Kawena Pukui without realizing she was already in my coin collection. When we started talking about her, I didn’t think I had that coin. Then I looked at the other side of the dollar in my 2025 proof set. There she was.
I had been looking at the Sacagawea side. Turning it over introduced me to someone else entirely. That’s a small discovery, but it’s a pretty good example of what is drawing me into collecting. Sometimes I don’t have to buy another coin to find another story. I just have to look more carefully at what I already have.
Mary Kawena Pukui spent her life preserving Hawaiian language, stories, songs, and cultural knowledge. Learning about her has left me thinking about the difference between knowing someone’s name and understanding why people remember them. A portrait gets my attention. The life behind it is what keeps me reading.
The Woman on the Other Side
The official name is the 2025 Native American dollar, and its reverse honors Pukui, a Native Hawaiian scholar. Those descriptions belong together, but they aren’t interchangeable. Native American is the name of the coin program. Hawaiian language and culture were the particular world of her work.
The U.S. Mint’s explanation of the design points out the hibiscus flower, her kukui nut lei, and the patterned muʻumuʻu she wears. Water appears behind her. The kukui leaves and nuts represent Hawaiian knowledge. Beside her are the words Nānā I Ke Kumu, which the Mint translates literally as “Look to the Source.”
I like how much thought has gone into those small details. Before I knew who she was, I might have seen a portrait and some decoration. Now the same image gives me something to ask about. Why that plant? Why those words? What kind of knowledge did she preserve?
It also makes me smile that the introduction was sitting in the holder all along. I was the one who hadn’t turned it over.
Her First Teachers Were Close to Home
Pukui was born in 1895 and lived until 1986. The Smithsonian’s finding aid for her papers describes her early upbringing with her grandmother, who had been a hula dancer at Queen Emma’s court and knew traditional medicine and midwifery. After her grandmother died, she continued learning with her parents in a household where Hawaiian was spoken.
She began collecting legends and proverbs while she was young. That part of her life interests me as much as the books that came later. A child’s attention to the people around her became part of a lifetime of work. The things older relatives knew weren’t simply background to her education. They were part of the education itself.
I think about how easily we can overlook knowledge that comes to us in a familiar voice. We may admire someone who has written a book while forgetting that an older relative can explain a place, a custom, or a way of speaking that isn’t written down anywhere we know to look.
Pukui’s life doesn’t mean every family story is automatically accurate or that every tradition belongs to everyone. What it makes me appreciate is the effort required to listen, learn, and understand the setting in which knowledge is shared. She brought extraordinary expertise to that work. It didn’t happen simply because she happened to hear a few stories.
The Words Behind the Dictionary
In 1938, Pukui began working at Bishop Museum as an ethnological assistant and translator. Her formal work there continued through 1961. She taught Hawaiian to scholars and helped others understand knowledge that they could not have reached as easily on their own.
With Samuel H. Elbert, she produced the Hawaiian Dictionary, first published in 1957. Her publications also included work on place names and, in 1983, ʻŌlelo Noʻeau, a collection of Hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings. The Smithsonian describes more than fifty scholarly works across her career.
Those are impressive accomplishments, but the word “dictionary” can make the work sound tidier than I imagine it was. A finished page gives us a word and an explanation. Getting to that page requires someone who knows how a word is used, who said it, and what can disappear when it is separated from its setting.
That isn’t a claim that I understand Hawaiian. I don’t. It’s one reason I appreciate the people who preserve a language with that level of care. They make it possible for someone else to begin learning without having to start from nothing.
When I look back at the coin’s invitation to look to the source, I begin to understand why it fits her. The source could be a speaker, an older text, a song, or knowledge learned within a family. Following it takes patience. It also takes the humility to recognize when somebody else knows far more than you do.
Her History Has Movement and Sound
One detail I was glad to find concerns films made in 1943. Bishop Museum describes footage of Pukui with her daughters, Patience Nāmaka Wiggin and Pele Pukui, demonstrating hula. George Bacon filmed them. One silent film concentrates on steps and hand gestures; another preserves a longer program of hula and song.
The museum explains that Pukui and Nāmaka studied with hula masters. Nāmaka danced, while Pukui learned the chants, rhythms, and accompaniment. That gives me a fuller picture of her than a list of publications does. Her knowledge wasn’t confined to a desk or a page.
I enjoy photographs, so I naturally pay attention when a story leads to an image. Here, though, a still picture would preserve only one instant. Movement can carry part of the knowledge. So can the relationship between a teacher and a student, or a mother and her daughters.
I haven’t watched those archival films as part of this visit to her story. Reading the museum’s account was enough to make me want to learn more. I like being able to say that honestly. Collecting doesn’t require me to arrive at a coin already knowing everything it represents. It can leave me with something worth coming back to.
The Work That Doesn’t Fit on a Coin
Pukui also translated older Hawaiian newspaper material. Bishop Museum’s Hawaiian Ethnological Notes catalog describes material drawn largely from Hawaiian-language newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of the translation work is hers. The catalog records sources and dates where they are known and identifies gaps where they aren’t.
That is the kind of work that can be easy to use without thinking about the person who did it. We find a readable passage, take in the information, and move on. Somewhere behind it was a person working through the language and trying to carry its meaning across.
Her papers at the Smithsonian offer another reminder that preservation often involves several people. That collection includes copies of writings and translations gathered by her son-in-law, George Bacon. The finding aid tells us what the collection contains and how it arrived. It doesn’t ask us to assume that every item is an original page in Pukui’s own hand.
I appreciate those distinctions. They let me see the people doing the saving, copying, organizing, and explaining. A surviving collection is often the result of someone deciding that a stack of papers deserved another generation’s attention.
A Different Reason to Keep Looking
My dad collected coins for years. As I begin collecting, I’m finding that the history is what pulls me in. Pukui’s coin has already given me an unexpected lesson in that. I thought I knew what I had, and I hadn’t even noticed both sides.
Now her name brings several things to mind: a grandmother teaching a child, a scholar preserving words, a mother sharing knowledge with her daughters, and people caring for those records long afterward. The coin has become more interesting because the person has become more real to me.
I’m also left with a question I want to keep close: what do we recognize as worth preserving while the people who know it are still here? It doesn’t have to become a large project every time. Sometimes it begins with paying closer attention during an ordinary conversation.
I started by turning over a dollar. I ended up reading about someone who spent her life helping knowledge pass forward. That’s a good afternoon with a coin collection, as far as I’m concerned.
Learn More
For a closer look, read the Mint’s description of the coin, the Smithsonian’s Mary Kawena Pukui papers finding aid, and Bishop Museum’s Hawaiian Ethnological Notes. Those institutions provide the context and guidance for exploring their collections further.
The 2025 proof set that includes Pukui’s dollar can be found on Amazon.
