For almost two centuries, every Native Hawaiian cultural practice was forbidden – at odds with missionary-imposed laws. The lyrical Hawaiian language was silenced; the masterful healing-arts were prohibited; 12,000 years of sacred ritual was banned – children were legally-mandated to be given Christian names, not Hawaiian. These laws were lifted in 1972, but the damage was done.
In their wake, the truth of this remarkable culture was distorted and shrouded from the indigenous people themselves – and, sadly, denied to the rest of the world as well.
For thousands of years, this had been a matrilineal culture that empowered and honored women leaders. Nightly, men chanted their celebration of all that was female, in accordance with each moon phase. They acknowledged that they were half their mothers.
Ho’oponopono, the sacred, community-centered, mediation ritual at the heart of the Native Hawaiian culture – was created by and fostered through women. In this way, the women diffused impulses that led to hostility. For thousands of years, there was no war.
It is the purpose of Huliau - The Return Voyage to awaken the Native Hawaiians to their rightful heritage, and to awaken the rest of the world to the empowering gifts of that culture.
Every Native Hawaiian ceremony and ritual began with a chant welcoming the ancestors.
‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani follows tradition here:
‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani
“We’ve all come from tribes – communities that knew how to care for each other, and for the natural world. Our survival depended on it - it depends on it still.”
‘Iokepa is a man of deep and proven faith - faith in his people’s birth-knowledge (ike hanau); faith in his ancestors’ wisdom (ke kahiko), faith in his own destiny and purpose. He comes from a culture that celebrates the connections: between people, and between every thread of our natural world. He lives and he speaks with the certainty that his ancient culture holds healing gifts for our warring world.
Within his name resides his destiny: “The best from the sky - who is the Creator - has chosen me, to work to bring the people together.”
INETTE MILLER ‘ĪMAIKALANI
Inette Miller - a Jewish woman, outspoken feminist, successful author, journalist and workshop teacher - surrendered her privileged writer’s life to join ‘Iokepa, camping on Hawaiian beaches with little food and no money – walking the paths of his ancestors.
She wrote the story of her overwhelming immersion into the authentic kanaka maoli culture in the book: Grandmothers Whisper: Ancient Voices… Timeless Wisdom… A Modern Love Story. The book won Book of the Year, Visionary Award. Her next book, The Return Voyage: 95,000 Miles on the Paths of Our Ancestors, continued the journey where the earlier book left off.
It has been for Inette, a faith-challenging rite of passage into Native Hawaiian culture. She has embraced it for the love of her husband, her belief in his people, and the certainty that every experience and gift of her own life and culture were the destined preparation for what is asked of her now.
Inette Miller has been a national and international journalist, lecturer, and writing workshop teacher throughout her life. She has published three memoirs and one collection of personal essays. Each memoir defines a pivotal, transformative life juncture, within late twentieth-century cultural currents. Her memoirs have been produced as feature film; translated into a half dozen languages; and honored with national awards. She is a member of the Authors Guild. Inette lives with her husband, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner, on the island of Kaua’i. She has an author’s website at: www.InetteMiller.com
This magnum opus is unputdownable. The author was a young newspaper reporter in the 1970s who decided to become a war correspondent so she could follow the man she loved who was shipping out to Vietnam. Wow. What a premise for a present-day movie, only unlike a contrived Hollywood story this one really happened. GIRLS DON'T is a gripping narrative of love and war and journalism in our time, and the reader becomes very involved in the parallel stories told here; hers and his. You care deeply for both of these special people, and so want them to make it. Buckle up. What a ride!
Bruce Henderson, New York Times bestselling author of: Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler. and Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War.
Inette Miller has the distance and detachment of a journalist trained to see the big picture—and the heart of a woman who understands what it is like to be “the other.” It is these differing perspectives that make Miller’s Vietnam War memoir Girls Don’t! so compelling.
Miller grew up in a time and place when women were generally expected to marry and have children. A job and a career came second to being a wife and mother. Miller does marry, but largely because in doing so she can go to Vietnam, a journey she makes precisely “because that’s not where girls were expected to go.”
Read in full: .https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/girls-dont-womans-war
Reviewer: Author Katya Cengel, whose most recent book is the award-winning, From Chernobyl With Love: Reporting the Ruins of the Soviet Union.
“Who is this man I followed, literally, to the edges of civilization, to the brink of life itself?
Inette Miller is a Jewish woman, a writer, a level-headed single mother agreeing to a rite of passage that demanded she walk naked in someone else’s homeland – trek the blurred borders of magic. She was mute that first year, but she is no longer shy about telling her story. This is the story of the human possibilities of spirit. It is equally the story of the human path, burdened with fears and doubts. She went on vacation for a week, and she stayed for a lifetime.
What Does Happily Ever After Look Like?
‘Iokepa is a Native Hawaiian, who relinquished “everything I’d worked for all my life” to embrace his aboriginal identity and reawaken his ancestral culture.
Inette is a Jewish woman, who surrendered a privileged writer’s life to join him, camping on Hawaiian beaches with little food and no money, and walking the paths of his ancestors.
Together, they packed all they owned into three suitcases and began their ancestor-driven Return Voyage across America. Their message: what Native Hawaiians lived for 12,000 years – ritual practices that prevented war – have profound implications for the 21st century.
“…a grand yet unconventional love story, but it is so much more.”
“A different world is possible when we cultivate respect, kindness, devotion, ancient wisdom and great aloha in our relations.”
“Perhaps we all have a Grandmother who would whisper to us if we would only be available to listen…”
“ ‘Iokepa and Inette are humorous, loving, generous voyagers who have the great gift of maintaining a light touch, not taking themselves too seriously.”
“Faith often seems mired down by thoughts of religion, but in this book, faith is something deeper and more encompassing.”
“Turning the last page felt like saying goodbye to a dear friend.”
It’s been 27 years since ‘Iokepa surrendered a life of work, play, and abundant comfort. That many years since he’s swapped all that might be measured by a bank account, personal ambition, or the accumulation of possession for the intangible goal of faith in his ancient Native Hawaiian culture.
To all of us who have arrived and drunk deep of the gifts of these Islands and the Native Hawaiian people who have tolerated and embraced us – tourist and settler alike – this is a time for gratitude. And that gratitude is not equivocal.
Blame has no place on these Hawaiian Islands.
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.”
I live in a nation I no longer recognize.
Simply hearing those words, without a glimpse at the uncolored gray in my curls, you know. We all know that a perpetually glorified. generationally narcissistic “Boomer” speaks.
We will know that - without a single requirement for actual accomplishment - each of us born in the fifteen years of incredible prosperity following WWII saw our birthdays heralded on the cover of Time magazine and our whims and opinions catered to by corporate America. All this attention was owed to the singular fact of our birth numbers - a fact to which we contributed nothing at all. We were born. And ever after we were celebrated. Hence, I am forever a Baby Boomer.
We, the good people of 21st century America, are a people who stand among one-another at arm’s distance. (We did not need a pandemic to make it literally so.) We are also a people who did not need a January 6 insurrection to come to view half of our very own population as the other.
And that speaks only to the connective tissue between human beings. The distance to the rest of the Earth’s living creation is out of sight and touch.
Despite Native Hawaiians narrating their own history (in daily opposition to the colonial missionary version) – still here, even on Hawai’i, even now, when these disempowered indigenous are reclaiming voice – so few of us have reached out to understand. Or to pry open our ears and hear the deeply-felt emotional, cultural, and historical kinship these people live and breathe with their distant Polynesian cousins. Or what that even means.
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.
For each of the past sixteen winters (excepting the pandemic), we have taken our empowering Return Voyage speaking and book tour on the road. Coast to coast, we have shared our stories at varied clubs, churches, bookstores, universities and conferences.
We continue to welcome invitations (on Island or off) to speak to your preferred audience, in your chosen venue, at an agreed upon time. As always, we do not charge for our appearances. Contact us with your questions.
Gratefully, we’ll determine availability.
We are the proud, generous, faith-filled people who inhabited these Islands for over 13,000 years. Our aboriginal ancestors were born from the heart of our Creator and set down on these Islands to assume human responsibility for its stewardship.
Before colonization, the nation of Lāhui (now Hawai’i) embraced a culture that insisted on the interdependence among and responsibility for every thread of Creation – human and natural.
These were a people whose ancestral wisdom guided their every breath; who welcomed strangers with open arms, open hands, and open hearts; who could imagine neither ownership nor greed, gender separation nor warfare.
When freed from foreign strictures, they live this still.
Language is my preferred milieu (I am, by vocation, a writer). Language is equally my nemesis. Every year the good folks responsible for dictionary inclusion of hitherto unlisted words determine their choices. At some point in an unremarkable, modern history, an academic phrase gained wider usage and “Cultural Appropriation” was endorsed.
But only in recent years has that phrase become a cudgel. Writers, visual artists, and all forms of creators now struggle with the moral implications of stealing from a people or a place they were not born to. I am no exception.