Typically, when ‘Iokepa and I return home after our annual book and speaking tour, our neighbors (effortlessly adapting to the Native Hawaiian ideal of community) rally to prepare for our homecoming. The folks just up the street pick us up from the airport and deliver us (and our collected mail) to the doorstep. The couple next door fill our fridge with essentials: milk, eggs, bread, coffee. The lovely lady around the corner dusts and sweeps and freshens-up three-months of neglect. Her coup de grace is the annual gift of a living, breathing, blooming orchid atop our coffee table.
This admonition, which sounds at first glance like a Kindergarten maxim, is the imagined airport sign with which ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani would greet every arriving visitor to these fragile Islands,. It conveys a singular Native Hawaiian request to the trampling hoards of tourists and settlers. it is his expectation that, “Don’t Take What’s Not Yours” just might cover it all. I am more doubtful. History speaks otherwise.
Cultural Practitioner (and husband) ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani pondered aloud over this morning’s coffee..“We have defined our cultural activism too narrowly - limited it to what we regard as solely Native Hawaiian issues. That’s confined our struggles against the rapacious state, federal, and commercial interests to:: burial grounds, ceded land, heiau, and, of course, the Mountain - Mauna Kea. We have fought long and hard for the freedom to teach our language, to dance our prayers, to speak our truth to power. But we’ve accepted someone else’s version of what’s a ‘Native Hawaiian issue.’ That has to change.”
Who has been listening to the warnings of the indigenous people - now or for how many generations? Who’s been listening to Native Hawaiian, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani these past twenty-six years? What have we heard? How have we responded to what we’ve heard?
‘Iokepa is decidedly not about money. Quite the opposite. He relinquished a fortune to immerse himself in the authentic experience of his ancestral forebears; he then lived for 17 years without a house, in tents on ka ‘aina – the land that breathes the truth of his people. He has traveled the American continent speaking to audiences about those earned experiences, and the rewards of heeding the wisdom of his ancient Grandmothers. He charges nothing – ever – for his work.
His is a simple, one-dimensional life-purpose: to awaken the inherited values and rituals of his people, primarily within his indigenous community which - under the barrage of foreign values - has too often forgotten. And secondarily, to share that culture with all peoples of this Earth. He lives his certainty that within his ancient culture lie the answers to 21st century traumas.
The Publisher of the Civil Beat - Honolulu’s distinguished news organization - provocatively suggests: “The future of Hawaii depends on you.” He invites - at this pivotal Covid 19 moment - “Ideas...solutions... “ and ”a “Call for conversation.”
Dear Pierre Omidyar, I accept your challenge.
Inscribed over the United States National Archives’ portal is this: “The Past Is Prologue.” I argue that the only path to the future for Hawai’i lies in its past - to and through its Native Hawaiians and their culture. Anything else is Miami Beach.
I am not casting my lot for Colonial Williamsburg or some Disney nostalgia for a sanitized, sentimental version of the Native Hawaiian past. I’ve seen one too many meaningless torch lighting ceremony, and bebop version of the Hula. What I celebrate is authenticity – not always pretty – but that which greeted the Western intruders when they injected their diseases and diminished the Native population by 75% in as many years.
Typically, we speak words thoughtlessly, hoping to pass along an acceptable approximation of meaning. More often than not, the significance or gravity escapes us.
I have spoken about the profound kinship between these Native Hawaiian people and their land - ka ‘aina. And yet, my oft spoken words now feel more superficial than a gaggle of drunk tourists at a commercial lu’au.
I am not a Native Hawaiian - not in full, not in part. I do not carry the blood that infects and inspires the species kanaka. All that I claim and carry is the proximate relationship to a deeply culturally-bound Native. ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani has been my husband for a couple decades.
I am a life-long writer. Words are my clay, my oils, my musical notes. I truly treasure the massage of syllables in the creation of message. For the past twenty years, the form and focus of those words, paragraphs, stories, and books have been directed at awakening a sleeping world to two things: the sacred and profound wisdom within the ancient Native Hawaiian culture - and the horrifying results of colonial occupation (read. the United States) on that culture and those Native people. That has been my sole intention - my only job.
But this week I confess to the limit of what my words can say - or even more - do. And never has that limitation been so apparent.
This week I encountered the visual artist Daniel Finchum’s newest project, “Bruises in the Garden” - and I am humbled.
My husband is a Native Hawaiian. ‘Iokepa’s words are quoted in this post’s title. He speaks them with a profound sense of grief - and a barely hidden anger. He struggles with those divergent sentiments. He knows that to speak his mind is to court accusations and dismissal as, “Another angry Hawaiian.” And yes, there is a great deal to be angry about.
But ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani knows that ears close when words are daggers. The last twenty-two years of his life have been about crafting words so that ears remain open, and hearts receptive.
Change is inevitable, whether we welcome it - or vigorously oppose it. 'Iokepa and I have attempted for these past twenty years to actively surrender to those forces. We look for guidance, and try not to let our whims impede the larger purposes. It's not always easy. We're human and the temptation to impose our own will is so very...enticing. I smile as I write those words, because I'm reminded of an acquaintance on our most recent tour saying: "I may not always be right, but I am always certain."
Okay, we get it, many Americans are deeply attached to the nice round number on our national flag - fifty states, fifty stars - and the unchanging thirteen colonial stripes. We celebrate, as the Fiddler on the Roof did, "Tradition!"
But over dinner the other night, some anguished, equally-colonized, indigenous Hawaiians offered a somewhat tongue-in-cheek solution to the flag issue, as a microcosm of their much larger heartbreak.
During the five Winter and Spring months when we are not home on our Island, it is pretty darned obvious how we fill our days. We drive through snow, ice, and sometimes sunshine to the disparate locales where we've been invited to speak - invited to share the empowering truth of the Native Hawaiian people and their ancient culture. We ask for nothing except the hospitality of our sponsoring hosts. We encounter widely diverse audiences. Every Return Voyage gathering is as unique as the faces in the front row. We're pretty darn agile.
Preamble to the Constitution of the Native Hawaiian Nation "We, the indigenous peoples of Hawai'i, descendants of our ancestral lands from time immemorial, share a common national identity, culture, language, traditions, history, and ancestry. We are a people who aloha Akua, aloha 'aina, and aloha each other. We malama all generations, from keiki to kupuna, including those who have passed on and those yet to come. We malama our 'aina and affirm our ancestral rights and kuleana to all lands, waters, and resources of our islands and surrounding seas. We are united in...
At this very moment in time - yesterday, today - the Native people of Hawai'i are choosing their course. These inveterate ocean voyagers are: summoning the strength of their ancestors; owning the cultural practices that were outlawed for a century; and reclaiming their birthright connection to the land, the ocean, and to every living bit of creation, Churning in, around, andamong the original inhabitants of these tiny Islands is a veritable ocean of potential change. It has caused many of our friends to scratch their well-meaning heads in confusion; ask for an explanation; beg for understanding.
This is the one story that I've been struggling to tell, More to the point, it's the one piece that I've been painfully trying to shrink to website-size. It is the incredibly exciting story of the Native Hawaiians cohering into a formidable traditional nation - and reclaiming the culture (the world) that was stolen first by Calvinist missionaries, next by their sugar cane baron sons, and finally by Capitalism and it's off-spring tourism - the rape of indigenous peoples across this earth. And now, the kanaka maoli - the aboriginal Hawaiian people - are re-discovering that which unites them.
I am not young. I have lived long enough to know something about massive throngs of mostly young people marching shoulder to shoulder down city streets, adrenaline pumping, boisterous chanting, punctuated with fists and V-signs - protesting. I have marched; I have protested. My first memory: the University of Wisconsin, 1967, assembling under a shower of tear-gas, when, ironically, Napalm and Agent Orange manufacturer, Dow Chemical, stepped on campus to recruit their future scientists-researchers. Chemicals heaped on chemical protesters.
Let me begin with an acknowledgement: Almost eighteen years ago, I arrived on Kaua'i for a ten-day vacation from Portland, Oregon. I journeyed here for much the same reason that almost every other visitor flocked to the Hawaiian Islands - sun, beach and respite. Two days later I met, a handsome Native Hawaiian, 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani. Six months later I packed up home and family and joined lives with this man. So the ground that I stand on to deliver this passionate diatribe is neither higher nor more holy than any other. I truly cringe at the "close the barn door behind me" defense.
I have lived in Hawai'i for seventeen years now. I have, for every one of those years, been profoundly engaged with my husband's indigenous people. And yet I have been blind-sided by what was flourishing directly in front of my apparently, shortsighted eyes. Of course, I knew about Hawai'inuiakea - the School of Hawaiian Knowledge - created in 2007 within the stereotypically western educational system that is the University of Hawai'i
Hawai'i is many things to many people. To my parents back in the early '60s, it was the most romantic interlude of their 58 year marriage. (So much so, that when I broke my mother's heart by falling in love with a Native Hawaiian that moved me 6,000 air miles from Baltimore, she resisted...but she understood.) To many a tourist, it feels like such a calling that they wind up packing up their homes in California or Oregon or Minnesota and relocating permanently.
Exactly as they are doing elsewhere on the continent this week, here in Hawai'i Americansare casting early-voting ballots in primary elections. We are voting for state offices - the governor, the legislature; we are voting for federal offices - the U.S. Senator. Unique to the Islands, we are voting, as well, for the Board of Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs - the only governing body for all things and anything Native Hawaiian.
