The Hawaiian Islands are overwhelmingly populated by folks who followed their dreams to the tropics. It's hard to blame them. Rainbows are are an hourly fact of life; sunsets against the Pacific take away words and breath. Pristine white sand beaches are ubiquitous. Hot lava pours into blue water. This is the stuff of fantasy. The number of movies filmed on the Islands attest to it. Largely, the new settlers come from the western half of the United States: from California, of course, and Colorado, Oregon and New Mexico.
Last night, 'Iokepa's daughter gave birth to her second son. We got the phone call from Honolulu at this motel in Oklahoma City. It was a quick and easy birth. The baby is strong and well. But we know that our new grandson is much more than just that.
We call these past eleven years our, walk of faith. On the tropical Hawaiian Islands, that has meant sleeping on beaches in tents (thirteen tents and eleven air mattresses); eating oranges, avocados, and mangoes that fell from tree to ground (on the street side of the fences)--and being led, always, by the ancestors.
“It’s not that we have a right to life, but rather we have a responsibility for life.”
Several months ago, ‘Iokepa and tall, imposing Tiokasin GhostHorse shared a conversation across the radio waves in New York City, on Tiokasin’s First Voices: Indigenous Radio. This morning, after a particularly intimate and probing gathering, I am remembering the prominent Lakota’s words.
It did not feel good,” Maxine Hong Kingston wrote in Hawai‘i One Summer, “To be a writer in a place that is not a writing culture, where written language is only a few hundred years old.”
The rich oral traditions are lost to our Western world. We’ve made false idols of the written word. We assumed that what was written carried a weight, that what was spoken did not.
