Kea Tawana

Much is unknown about Kea Tawana (c.1935–2016) until she began salvaging slate, glass shards, and timber from buildings in Newark’s Central Ward during the late 1960s. These materials eventually became the makings of the Ark, an 86-foot-long, three-story ship she began building in 1982 with the intention of making it her home. She told some people she had been born in Japan, the daughter of an American civil engineer and his Japanese wife, and told others she had run away from a Native American reservation at age twelve.

It is widely accepted that she worked itinerant jobs in the South before hopping freight trains to the New York state area. On the east coast, she worked in shipyards, on construction sites, and in theater rigging, acquiring all the skills she needed to build the Ark, a vessel she hoped to christen AKE Matsu Kaisha (Red Pine). After she was forced to dismantle her hoped-for home, she moved to Port Jervis, New York, where she lived until her death in 2016.