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.

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.

For the last six months, we were on the road with our new book, The Return Voyage; we drove across the American continent and spoke out on behalf of my husband's people. We return home to witness the budding fruit of years ofloving-labor on behalf of the sorely oppressed Native Hawaiian people, and their inspiring culture.

September will mark seven years since 'Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I took this low-tech, low-profile, ancestral-driven show on the road.  That is seven years since we packed up our ten years of grooming on the beaches of Hawai'i and took the Hawaiian Grandmothers' wisdom and our stories to those willing ears and hearts across the United States. In these years, 'Iokepa has repeated his Grandmothers' words often. He's been nothing if now consistent.  When the good folks in our audiences raise their hands and ask, "What can I do to help?," he has answered always, "When you hear something positive happening on the Islands, please offer a prayer for the Hawaiian people."

I have written about destiny.   ‘Iokepa has spoken of it.  He calls it the promise we made when we took on life.  Yet there is persistent bewilderment among moderns who have refused it. Echoing the Hawaiian grandmothers, I have written: no one of us is born with the same destiny; we’re gifted with individual and cultural gifts to help realize our specific promises.

 We’ve been off Island long enough to see (without blinders) the changes. After more than a full year away, it has felt important in these past months to explore our old haunts, to revisit the paths we’ve walked together for fourteen years, the beaches where we’ve sunned and surfed, and the mountain where we’ve slept to the accompaniment of bird song. So when there is sufficient money for gas, and leisure time too, we do just that. We revisit; we reminisce.

There was a time on our Island, not very long ago, when there were independently owned bookstores.  But maybe thirteen years ago, the chain store Borders set up shop in the dead center of the Island.  One by one the independents dropped off the map.  It is pretty near impossible for an independently owned small store to compete with the mega-store and its deep discounts.

There are two distinctly competing versions of this story.  Both are equally true.      In both stories, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I have just returned home to Kaua’i – the northwestern-most Island in the Hawaiian archipelago – after more than a year on the American continent.  In both versions we loved touring the U.S. with our new book and in both versions we were yearning for home. In the first version:  last Thursday, we put up our great-in-the-rain-and-cold, but less-great-in-the-tropical-heat donated German tent.  It is our fourteenth tent in thirteen years without a house on the beaches of Hawai’i.

The material and successful life that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani surrendered fourteen years ago - to take up arms (heart and soul) against the deception, the greed, and the oppression visited upon his people and his nation - included a house on a lake, seven cars “and a hot rod.” Despite the fact that his lavish passion in these last years has been cultural -  language, history and spiritual practice - for the first forty-six years of his life focused an equal dose of passion on cars that go very fast.

At the end of almost every Return Voyage gathering in these past years, well-intentioned folks have asked ‘Iokepa:  “What can I do to help?”
He answers:  “When you hear that things are changing on the Hawaiian Islands – and you will – I ask that you offer a prayer for the Hawaiian people.”

The very first American Court House erected on the Island of Kaua’i was built in 1837, with complete awareness and intention on the top of the bulldozed ruins of what was the oldest heiau on this Island. 
Heiau were (and those that remain are) sacred stone enclosures for Native Hawaiian ritual and spiritual practice, prayer and ceremony.  Every heiau was built in alignment with the planets and the stars – with an ancient people’s sophisticated awareness of the night sky.  Each heiau sat within full view of the ocean horizon.

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.

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.

­

It’s been a while; my focus has been elsewhere.

Yes, there has been a two-year global pandemic. Yes, political antipathy has driven a stake into everyday civil discourse. And yes, everything that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I have lived and shared these past 25 years has actually prepared us for these challenges. It has further convinced us that those ancestral Hawaiian Grandmothers knew about which they spoke. “Faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles - even apocalyptic ones - some of us will be crushed; some of us will barely notice.”

Let me be clear. Theirs was not a declaration that the wealthy or healthy will transcend hardship, but the poor and ill will be defeated.

Hawai’i is different. It’s evident to almost every person born, reared or transplanted to these Islands – but not to every. The measure of those difference can be elusive. I’ve spent the past twenty-three years pondering, writing, and attempting (often futilely) to define those differences through the lens of my Native Hawaiian husband and his aboriginal culture.

Perhaps it has never been as easy as it has become in these days of the Corona-19 pandemic.

You can wrap your hands around the neck of another person, choke off her breath or pin her body to the earth for only so long, before all that that resides within her strains and then struggles to reclaim life.  It’s not a moment for compromise.

Oh my, what the Native Hawaiian protectors on their sacred Mauna Kea have woke.

I live on Kaua’i.  For ten years that meant literally sleeping inside a tent snug up against Kaheka - the Salt Pans, where (when the rains stop) the pa’akai – salt – has been harvested by these same indigenous families for thousands of years.  Harvested in a manner, by the mo’opuna – grandchildren - that carry this service to their people in their bloodlines.  And it is a service, a holy practice, not a business.

It isn’t just the largest telescope in the world on top of the earth’s tallest mountain – that false dichotomy between the scientific versus the sacred. “It’s the remnants of our culture,” a young Native Hawaiian was quoted in the news yesterday.  Sobs diluted her rage.

It isn’t just greedy corporate profiteers - and their enabling state governor - feeding the State University’s coffers and pretending it’s for a “higher purpose” than the essential, sustaining sacred.  “It’s the remnants of our culture.”

“The mountain is their victory lap,” said elder and cultural practitioner, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani.  This telescope is a brazen icon to their domination - Mauna Kea, the largest mountain in the world.  

'Iokepa and I arrived home from our four-month book and speaking tour at the exact moment that the mountain - Kilau'ea - at the heart of the Island of Hawai'i erupted.  The frantic (and generous) emails descended immediately after our first night's respite at home.

Initially we assured: we were well and at the other end of the archipelago on Kaua'i; the wind blew the poisonous gases away from our Island; our friends and family on the Island of Hawai'i were unharmed.   But the rest of our message struck many as callous.

I was contemplatively hurling my Pellegrino bottles into the Kaua'i community recycling bin, last week, when I heard my name called.  I turned to the open-arm welcome of an acquaintance newly returned from Macchu Picchu.  This is a woman, who, I am aware, treasures the living truths of indigenous culture - not far removed from one herself. 

She wanted me to understand the hopes she'd invested in her dream journey to the relics of the Inca nation. She told me, she'd hiked the old Inca trail to the mountaintop, eagerly anticipating communion with these ancients.  She wanted me to know, too, how horribly she'd been disappointed .

For those of our friends and supporters who have followed 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and my journey- our Return Voyage to cultural and personal authenticity - there is really no need for background here.  But I always anticipate new readers, and so for those folks and others who may have missed last year's post, I insert a link. http://returnvoyage.com/wordpress/na-kaa-mea-change-in-the-winds/

As a matter of fact, as a matter of principle, as a matter of Native Hawaiian cultural authenticity - 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani does not point fingers. Better to assume responsibility than to blame As a matter of fact, as a matter of taste - he does not plaster our cars with bumper stickers.  He believes that actions, not advertised opinions, speak louder than words.  And yet, he is about to make an exception.

 The ancestral grandmothers have spoken.   ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I are on the edge of our seats with excitement. Huliau–the Return Voyage is about to shift into an entirely new direction. The goal remains the same.  Within the authentic Native Hawaiian experience lies the answer for a contemporary world tormented by rage, greed, and war.  It is ours to seize the ancients’ gifts – to return to that which all of us are born knowing.  We carry it in our very bones, this memory of another way.

So, Hawai'i - as in, 'I've always dreamed of...' or 'I will go before I die...' or'I once went and it was incredible...' (versions of which'Iokepa and I hear daily) - becomes the metaphor.And that metaphor is not just the fantasy of a tropical Island paradise - beaches, coconuts, and aloha.  It is the fantasy of the way life can be lived, should be lived, once was lived - without greed, competition, judgement,  fear, racism, war - and strangers regarded as the other.

When 'Iokepa and I completed our ten year preparation--what the Grandmothers called, our grooming, what I call our immersion into the authentic, aboriginal Hawaiian culture -  That language, history, and the reality of experience of 'Iokepa's brethren - we were asked to take what we had learned on those tropical beaches to the people of the world, and to begin in the continental United States. That was two years ago.  We landed in Seattle; our next stop was Portland.   Portland was also the city where I had, for some years, reared two teenage sons, written professionally, and taught writing workshops. 

‘Iokepa and I lived on Hawaiian public beaches for years.  We slept on the reclining seats of a seriously aging 1991 Camry when there wasn’t gas enough to get us to the tent.  Picnic tables were our dining room furniture; outside showers were our bathtubs; filthy public toilets were our dressing rooms and more.

'Iokepa and I know, quite well, that it is a very fine line that straddles messages that are purely "Spiritual" from those that are somehow tinged with the "Political." Theancestral Grandmothers have been adamant over these years.  The movement that 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani represents is not a political one.  It is simply a return to the cultural values of the ancients, the wisdom of his kanaka maoli ancestors.

We - every last one of of us - build walls that we hope, pray, and assume, will protect us from life's vicissitudes - from the winds of change. We call them:  career,  family, home, reputation, insurance policies (health, house, automobile... more). We'veheard about folks who were terminated from jobs they'd held for a lifetime. We know that divorce happens, and that children disappoint. We've read that people's houses are foreclosed, that they declared bankruptcy.  We have seen respectable people exposed for shameful behavior.  We realize that human bodies get sick and (Don't speak of it!) die.

I am feeling - on this mid-summer early morning - the refreshingly cool, crisp air in what a bit later will feel like a wall of heat and humidity. I'm loving that breeze on my skin. It evokes, in a cellular way, childhood memory - summer mornings on the urban sidewalks of Baltimore. From that deep reservoir these thoughts emerge. We - materially-privileged Americans - have very recently reached the extreme limits of confidence in our ability to control both the political world and the natural one.

This heading is more than a lovely Hawaiian word that rolls off the tongue like music.         It is an even lovelier – or rather, a more potent – life-changing cultural mindset, by which the kanaka maoli, the aboriginal Hawaiians, will potentially instruct the world.  It is the means by which these people refused the possibility of war for more than 12,000 years. Ours is a world sorely in need of some guidance. By its smallest measure, ho‘oponopono has been labeled an ancient Hawaiian mediation technique.

'Iokepa and I have mothers on each coast of the American continent. They were both born in 1912. You do the math. (My mother still lies about her age--and she can easily get away with it.) We've called them the bookends: Tiny women who've held their own in this lifetime--forces to be reckoned with; with full lives and distinct opinions, who've cared for and about other than themselves all of their adult days.

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.

Aging is a funny thing. Clearly, from birth to our first driver’s license and beyond, it doesn’t stop – until of course abruptly it does. Most typically, we’re more than able to ignore the process – save for those exceptional times when our loving compatriots insist on celebrating the accumulating birthdays that end specifically with a zero. So thirty, or forty, or fifty become times of reflection.

My mother lived to be 101; my father to 91.  Both made aging look good.  And maybe my brothers and I inherited their genes; maybe not.  But as a family, we are collectively healthy and if we choose, we can ignore the reality of aging.

So yes, I’ve lived the Baby Boom experience in full.  I danced at iconic outdoor concerts to the Grateful Dead.  I was a war correspondent in Vietnam.  I embraced the re-birth of feminism.  I still mightily resist every single new technology, and depend fully on my adult sons to walk me through.  In sum, I am not unaware that there are multiple named-generations after my own.

But absolute nothing tells me more starkly that I have lived a fairly long life than this.  Tourism.

We’ve all read about the infamous Bernie Madoff who defrauded his near-and-dear of $65 billion - often from the charities he “served.” We are aware of the “Nigerian Prince” scammers who invade our email boxes with promises of great wealth.

That happens to others. Not to ‘Iokepa; not to me. We own almost nothing - and yet we have more reasons for gratitude than we can crowd into a day’s prayer. Our work daily delivers chance meeting with amazing strangers; consistently fills us with purpose greater than ourselves. Life is very very good.

I've already written the backstory in some detail.  What I omitted and plan to address here is the quirkier one - when all material possession had been repeatedly relinquished, what remains?  What on this good earth did we value enough to keep?

We receive each offering with gratitude. However when your life's physical bounty (by necessity and choice) fits in the trunk of a medium-sized sedan, and your life is determined by continual surrender...well.

The Back-Story

A funny thing happened on our way home from the Woman's March on Washington last January.'Iokepa and I were stuck shoulder-to-shoulder, buttock-to-buttock within a (genteel) crowd of exhausted Marchers hermetically-sealed inside a disabled Metro car in a subway tunnel underneath the Nation's Capital - for three hours.  This after more than 12 hours enthusiastically chanting, marching, waving signs, and generally placing our aging bodies in the Women's Rights column amidst 500,000 other bodies.  It was the day after the Presidential Inauguration.

Our audiences are diverse:  ethnically, economically, geographically - and this year in particular, when these differences are so glaring and stark - politically.  Human beings appear to have been reduced to their silk-screened, t-shirt and baseball cap slogans. And so before we began this winter's speaking tour, I worried - a lot.  1. How do we speak words outside of the smothering political rhetoric?  2.  Within the current din of fear and anger, would our audiences care about the Native Hawaiian people and their generous but much-oppressed culture?

A Bit of History

For about twenty years (starting January 30, 1997), 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has been an obedient mo'opuna - grandson.  Daily, he has listened for the voices - the direct guidance - of his ancestral Hawaiian Grandmothers.  "I hear them as I hear you right now," he explains to Westerners.  Native Hawaiians need no explanation.  They know they'd be lost without the direct intervention of loving ancestors.

Never before have I been moved to do this.  In the past, when a comment was too long for this space, I simply shortened it.  But this time, the letter is so profoundly important - such a genuine affirmation of the work that 'Iokepa and I try to do, and the work that is at hand across the planet - that I am turning my Post over to this letter-writer. Sonia Trepetin attended our Return Voyage event in Reisterstown, Maryland a few nights ago.  She wrote this afterwards. 

Is it possible that indigenous peoples - Native Americans from the tip of Chile to the North Pole - and yes, the Native Hawaiian people out in the middle of the Pacific as well - still pose a threat to the rest of us immigrants, settlers and colonizers?  Is it possible that these indigenous peoples, who have, by this point in time, been dispossessed of every conceivable cultural, economic, and political strength, still manage to pose a threat to our non-indigenous lives and livelihood?  Whew, I wouldn't have thought it. I have lived on Hawai'i among the Kanaka Maoli (aboriginal people) for eighteen years.  

We are frightened of all the wrong things. We are terrified that we will die; we are afraid of how we will die.   Let me count the ways:  by cancer, by Ebola, by terrorists, by warring gangs on city streets.  We expend so much of our life-juices fearing the obvious, the inevitable.  In fact: we will die. We are nothing, if we are not mortal. There is a far greater danger than that inevitability.  It is the horror of a severely circumscribed life - to live, but to have never really lived at all.

This is not going to be an easy story to tell.  Not easy because I might seem to be targeting our dearest friends, our most heart-felt supporters: the uniformly educated, caring progressive, environmentalists on our Island. These are Americans; many who moved here years ago.  They love these Hawaiian Islands, and they feel the pain inherent in the glaringly apparent destruction all around us.  These are Americans who care that the reef fish are now toxic and inedible, the rivers are poisoned with the run-off from cattle feces, the fields and hence the ocean around us are full of pesticides.   These are not Native Hawaiians, but they are the very best of the malihini (guests) who've arrived and settled these sacred Islands of my husband's people.

Thanks to Doctor Seuss, when the calendar announces the annual cap and gown ceremonies, his classic book (named in the title of this essay) speaks to the day.  I think of this now becauseit's June and there is another generation heading into those places. Some of those places will be comforting; some, threatening - that's the Seuss-an map. 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and I have a couple weeks left before our flight home to Hawai'i from this pastoral spot in Virginia. I'm reminded that there's a story that remains to be told before we leave.  It could be called, "Oh The Places We've Been..."  Perhaps, it is these words rather than Dr. Seuss's(we're not, after all, twenty-two year old grads) that should head this post.

Racism: it’s in no way subtle.  But neither is it consistent. There are ironies that would be laughable if they weren’t so painful.  Like a bad joke, it only hurts when I laugh. So our president, Mr. Barack Obama – whose mother hails from Kansas and whose father was the son of an African tribal chief (making our president by any mathematical calculation half white and half black, and royalty to boot) – had his fate sealed in American eyes, word, and deed.  He is simply “Black;” no subtleties are permitted.

Tell me why it’s so much easier for modern men and women to delineate – to draw big black lines around our thoughts and our hearts, to categorize, to isolate, toseparate – than not. Oddly, this ability has come to pass for intelligent, educated discourse, for a level of sophistication.  I suggest that it is none of the above. Now tell me why aboriginal men and women (the ones whom we tend to dismiss as primitive) saw only unity, only the connections, the relationships, the whole.  They could not, in fact, see other than that.

It looked something like this. 'Iokepa and I had just had an enormously successful Grandmothers Whisper book reading and discussion at the Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota the night before.  We had a free day before the next book event on the Ojibwa Reservation in Grand Portage.  We decided to do that rare thing for us:  be tourists for a single day.

It is impossible to travel as ‘Iokepa and I do – from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Washington State to Washington, D.C. – and not notice the differences. I am not speaking about mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, prairies, and deserts.  It’s the human differences – the face of a place.  I’m speaking of the angles and planes of the human face – and I am speaking of the human temperament of a place.  They aredifferent. We are at this moment among the cool, reserved New England faces.  They are lovely and angular and they are comforting to me.

Exactly two years before the Camry met its fate, we crossed the width of the continent in that black Toyota with the gold wheels in four weeks.  On that particular crossing:  we had dinner with a saintly, eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest in Portland, Oregon; we had high tea with a Japanese Buddhist.  We stayed in the home of the eldest of eight siblings in a Mormon family that traces its roots to the earliest church founders.  In Missouri, we broke bread and bared souls with a Unity minister – a woman whose heart is as open as the roads we traversed across Nebraska.

We’d been invited to a Friday evening Shabbat dinner at the home of a Portland Jewish family.   It had all the trappings of the ritually kosher home I grew up in. We lit the candles and said the familiar, traditional Sabbath blessings in Hebrew.   Our host, an accomplished professional woman and the mother of three, held her hands over the heads of her teenage sons and prayed that they would grow to be men in the likeness of their forefathers:  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

We have been driving down the road of civil disobedience. The place names flash up at me with the increasing vagueness of an aging memory:   Birmingham, Alabama; Meridian and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  For 'Iokepa and me, these are fleeting interstate highway signs--a quick stop for gas or food on our way to Baton Rouge.  But they tickle memory, and memory is nothing if not the instructor of this present moment.

President Elect Barack Obama, 'Iokepa, and I shared a couple vacation nights together on the Island of O'ahu, on our way back to Washington state for the start of the second Return Voyage outreach; on his way back to an Inauguration. To be exact, we shared the 'aina (land) and nalu (ocean waves) on the same small Island in the middle of the Pacific.  Our paths did not cross.

We are nestled, this week, under the brilliantly watermelon-colored Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Nearby, we discovered the weathered lava fields resplendent with American Indian petroglyphs – remarkable symbolic stories that indigenous peoples etched in stone thousands of years ago. The symbols took us by surprise.  Many are identical to those at the mouth of the Wailua River on Kaua’i. These indigenous narratives have certain things in common, but I won’t overstate their similarities.  This is the desert; our Islands are surrounded by ocean. The stories share common threads, but they are not the same.

It appears that, as a culture, we rear our children to fit in.  And it breaks our parental hearts at the first sign that they do not. We attempt to protect them from being the last chosen for team kickball; from a lunchbox full of food that no other child would trade up for; from visible orthopedic shoes instead of Adidas; from finding their Valentine box empty. We live in a culture that has very narrow parameters for difference. Most of us grow up feeling marginal in some way – by virtue of the narrow boundaries of conventional acceptance and the harsh social judgment around those differences.

Our road atlas has two full-page maps of Minnesota: one south and one north. But the top of that northern map stops short of a chunk of Minnesota that wraps still further north and east around the largest lake on Earth, Lake Superior.  Tucked elsewhere on the atlas page, we located an insert that continued the job up to Canada. That is where we’ve spent this past week – about a quarter of a map inch from the Canadian border, in the winter wonderland of Hovland. Imagine a Native Hawaiian experiencing nightly saunas followed by dips in the icy January waters of Lake Superior, and you begin to picture how powerfully different – yet remarkably the same – this week has been.

Say the word spiritual, and a deathlike solemnity settles over a crowd. Watch a gathering of good folks work overtime to know, feel, or say the right thing. I have watched triathlon competitors swim, bike, and run, and look no less intense or competitive than when I watch spiritual seekers attack their goal.

When ‘Iokepa wrote the original words on the homepage for our website, he wrote: “If you have a single drop of Native Hawaiian blood, we invite you to join the conversation.” The aboriginal Hawaiians never judged their relationship between one another by the amount of indigenous blood that had – or had not – been diluted by intermarriage. You were Hawaiian even if you were born red-headed, blue-eyed, and aboriginal – if you claimed it, accepted responsibility for it, and lived it.

We have been in New York City for the past week, and we are loving the concentration and intensity of creative energy on this other Island. A new friend, in casual conversation, brought up the historic and current plight of the South African people. Her intention was to gently mitigate the seriousness of the aboriginal Hawaiian losses.

Perhaps, nine years ago now, we were camping (actually, living in a tent) at Kaheka--the Salt Pans Park-- on Kaua'i, when we met Lou. Over these past ten years, we have met hundreds of visitors to the Island, at that particular park. Some were there for a quick swim by day, others were camping for a week. They were vacationing from Germany, Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, and every part of the United States.

We first met John Talley at an Eastside Portland coffee shop.  He was sitting one table away and couldn’t help overhearing ‘Iokepa speaking with an old friend.   John was intrigued by what he heard, introduced himself, and apologized for eavesdropping. ‘Iokepa, for his part, was drawn immediately to the seventy-six-year-old Iroquois with the powerful face – etched deeply along strong native features – and the gentle voice. They agreed to meet again.

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.

The release of Girls Don’t! A Woman’s War in Vietnam coincided with year-two of the pandemic. As a result, I did not get to visit my audiences - hugs to hugs - on our usual winter tour of the continent or the Island as I had with my earlier books.

Instead, like a lot of folks in these locked-down years, I was imprisoned within my book-lined office walls speaking at each and every book event in front of my laptop screen. I am a self-proclaimed tech-moron, but I was forced to consider lighting, angles, and backgrounds on Zoom gatherings of hundreds of faceless listeners. I did my best, and they did theirs, but I was starved for a glimpse of that man sound asleep in the front row or the woman in the crowded-middle visibly itching to ask her important question. I wanted to feel my audiences.

Just a few days ago, the image of my new memoir - Girls Don’t! A Woman’s War in Vietnam - was visibly splashed across our Return Voyage website. Seemingly, it’s an unusual fit on a website devoted to the rebirth and wisdom of the Native Hawaiian people and their culture.

But neither ‘Iokepa nor I were able to imagine: this twenty-five year labor, now reaching-fruition, not finding a home on our very personal website. Many thousands of good folks who’ve heard us speak across the continent in these past 13 years will attest: the work we do, the words we speak, the lives we share – are nothing other than personal. There is very little distance between our lives, and yours.

You know us; we know you. We’ve made a point of it. And so have you.

Dear President Trump,

I am a proud daughter of Baltimore – born, reared, and educated.  Each of my immigrant grandparents arrived by ship and settled.  My parents built a business, a home and a family there.  I trace their roots to East Baltimore; my own to West.  Always, the city – never the suburbs.  Congressman Elijah Cummings would have been my representative.

“Ross Perot, eccentric billionaire who made two independent runs for president, dies at 89” appeared across a Washington Post digital headline – and I am forced into memory.  I happen, at the moment, to be thick in that remembering - picking away at a memoir of my fourteen months in Vietnam and Cambodia – so many years ago.  I was a war correspondent for Time.

I was very young – just a year past my baccalaureate from Cal Berkeley – when my path fleetingly crossed the cranky, arrogant, difficult Mr. Ross Perot.

Americans have long-savored the notion that within our nation there is a unbridgeable division between church and state. It is a distinction that allowed me, as a child in a public elementary school, to sit silently while my Christian classmates recited the Lord’s Prayer.

In later years the very fact, that Jewish children faced that obvious social pressure to conform, was challenged. No longer were small children forced to disobey their school authority in order to obey a higher power. Our federal courts reminded: school prayer was against the law.

The television sitcom, Murphy Brown, starring the smart and outspoken Candice Bergen, returns 20 years later - and I can’t help but reminisce - and laugh in anticipation. Generations of younger folk have no recollection of that first television sitcom - ever - to evoke a knee-jerk (and at that time shockingly, politically incorrect) reaction from the Vice President of the United States of America! Let me remind you - before President Trump, that just did not happen.

In those simpler times, when Presidents or Vice Presidents didn’t demean their office with gratuitous critique of television actors, Vice President Dan Quayle stepped into the seeming triviality of a television show, and found out that it was a quagmire.

We are killing reporters in the very newsroom where I too was once a young reporter. I was twenty-two years old, just months out of college and over-filled with ambition, work ethic, and a genuine sense that I could change the world for the better.  I suspect that these - now dead - five journalists inside the newsroom that we once shared at the Capital Gazette, embodied the same.  Few end their careers at small town newspapers - many begin them there.  Those that remain have a passion for the challenges of local news - in other words, for community.

My blog-writing fingers feel rusty.  My intense focus in one direction has meant the utter neglect of this other.  I don't multi-task at all - not with writing.  So stealing energy from this public forum - I've invested it wholehearted in a private (for now) endeavor:  a new take on a very old subject - my next book..  Writing projects, like babes in utero, have their moment; they can neither be rushed nor ignored. 

Alright, I concede that a great deal of what I'm about to contemplate can be seen in the light of having lived most of my life in a time when letter-writing was a life-changing art - emotionally wrought and eagerly awaited; telephones were attached to a wall - and refused to accompany us away from home or office; and an overheated car radiator required standing by the side of the highway in the rain waving down help. And so our banks, bookstores, daily necessities were more than an interaction with keyboard or a mouse.  These were unavoidable reminders that we are not alone on this planet - and that other humans (disappointing, aggravating, and occasionally comforting human beings) share our world.

Okay, so my husband is very carefully non-political.  He argues that his people were "never politicians" and when they were drawn, against their nature, into that arena, they were sorely used and abused.  That continues still. Instead, 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani's every spoken word is directed at the cultural resurrection of his Native Hawaiian people.  His voice is strong; his passion is unquenchable; his work is unending. He does not identify himself in word, deed, or government issued ID, as American.  He is a sovereign Native Hawaiian working toward the resurrection of his occupied nation.  So obviously he does not vote in American elections.

A version of this post has sat dormant in this computer (actually in its Toshiba predecessor) for seven years.  That may be a single record for this writer's patience. And so this story began eight years ago.  For all of those years, readers of this website and of our books, and audiences at our speaking engagements across the American continent have discovered that my husband, 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has somesurprising gifts. We know him to be an inspiring spokesperson for his culture, a crystal-shattering chanter of the ancient Native Hawaiian words, and a serious wielder of a 20-inch chain saw.  There is very little that he cannot figure out a way to fix.   I assumed that I pretty-much knew the parameters of my husband's talents.

This appears to be, of all things, a story about houses.  But appearances can be deceiving.  And though I am describing a singular life spent sleeping in tents and car-seats for ten years, and another seven years in other people's beds - this is decidedly not a comparative study of canvas walls or bucket seats versus bricks and mortar. Readers of these posts and of my books, Grandmothers Whisper and The Return Voyage, know a fair amount of the personal history here. 

I met 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani at sunrise Christmas morning, 1997.  Count them: that was seventeen years ago.  Perhaps you read about our first ten years together on the Hawaiian Islands in Grandmothers Whisper. Then we took the Native Hawaiian ancestral wisdom on the highways of America for the first time on September 7, 2007.  That was seven years ago.  For approximate half of each of those years, we accumulated 95,000 car miles, speaking in homes and churches, bookstores and clubs.  Perhaps you've read about those seven years in The Return Voyage.

There is a new member of our family, and all words feel patently ridiculously predictable.  "Miraculous" doesn't replicate the adrenaline rush, the heart-thumping anxieties, the feel of that newly exposed-to-our-atmosphere skin. 'Iokepa and I were immutable fixtures just outside the door at the moment ofher birth (and for ten hours before).  We were inside that door with baby in arms immediately after. (At the climatic moments I was literally on my knees with my head glued to the door.)

The last three months on the road with The Return Voyage have been snugly scheduled with just a bit of breathing room.  Our schedule page tells the story.  We've just returned fromour spin through the southeastern states; we're back at our base camp here in the northern Shenandoah Valley. We are now doing something that 'Iokepa and I very seldom do - we are waiting.  We do not wait, because indigenous Hawaiians did not wait.  Like all tribal peoples, they lived every moment - no, every breath - with absolute awareness that it might be their last.  There was only today,  this breath.  Everything else was illusory; everything future was unknowable.  To expect, to wait, was to refuse to live this breath fully.

It is winter on my skin and in my bones.  I am bundled from the top of my head to my wool-encased feet. The plunge from eighty degrees to twenty degrees was abrupt and challenging.  The first question we've been asked during the past couple weeks in Seattle and Portland, in Baltimore and now in northern Virginia is:  "Why are you here in the winter?" We are here in the winter because that is when folks choose to come out of their caves to attend book events, to listen to the itinerant speaker - to invite us to share our story.  In the summer and autumn they are traveling and active in other ways.

This is a story that I’ve never before told. I hesitate even now – perhaps twelve years after the fact. My hesitation still hinges on Thanksgiving, for goodness sake. Thanksgiving: uncontaminated by commercialism; serving up my favorite foods; and celebrating gratitude. It’s a hard holiday not to love.

On January 13, 2012, my oldest friend on this earth died. She was the model of modesty,  empathy and a hard-work that she consistently made to look easy - in sum, grace.

On May 20, 2012, 'Iokepa and I were crushed in our automobile by ayoung man driving 80 miles an hour in a 40 mile zone - heavily intoxicated and then running on foot away from our destroyed car and my damaged body.  When we met this truly nice young man days afterwards - in a jail cell - he touched us deeply with the goodness of himself and his life.  We found the divine where we least expected it.

For five autumns now, ‘Iokepa and I have found ourselves strangers in unknown distant cities.  Each year we’ve had to unearth a Jewish congregation from the yellow pages, and solicit an invitation to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in their large urban synagogue.  Without exception, we’ve been embraced. But it is here in our tiny Kaua’i Jewish Community that we find home.  Blessedly, we are home again this year for these most sacred Days of Awe. 

It's a very funny thing about being a writer.  I complete a book.  I've said everything that I have to say about the matter. Then the book tour begins, and I am expected to say more - much more.  And when the questions begin, silence is just not an option: not on radio, not on TV, not in print. Writing the book Grandmothers Whisper was completely in my hands.  But my control stopped there.  I cannot - will not - pretend to know how any single human heart and mind will respond to their reading of Grandmothers Whisper.  I do know that each of us brings our own story to bear on the one we read on the page.

…Every last one us is the son or daughter of a couple of them.  So choose your perspective here.  I can tell my story from the only perspective I have: the singular daughter of two very specific people; the mother of two very specific sons. But like all writing, the micro or anecdotal only has meaning if it sheds light on the universal.

'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and I live a life that is at odds with the person that I am - and yet it is not.  This life addresses just one half of me - the half that communicates meaningfully with other humans.  My very destiny is caught up with the skill, the need, the substance of words - speaking them aloud, writing them within the hearing of other ears.  Both fulfill me amply; it is my nature. I grew up in a family that encouraged exactly that. 

I first met Merrell Fort Gregory in 1969 sitting at a desk across a tiny newsroom.  It was my first newspaper job out of college. The Maryland Gazette - calling itself "the oldest continuously published paper in America"  - was a weekly.  We were two of a staff of six. I was twenty-two; Merrell was a year older with twelve months experience.  On the strength of that experience, I thought she was the epitome of a seasoned reporter.

Like all good stories, this one has a beginning, middle, and an end. After thirteen years writing and rewriting, drafting and re-drafting, Grandmothers Whisper found its miraculous way to a bound book that could actually be held in your hands (or alternatively downloaded onto your Kindle) just last Thanksgiving.

I was born on Mothers’ Day, the much valued daughter after two sons.  Mothers’ Day has always had a resonance to my little family. It is a terribly long distance from the Hawaiian Island that ‘Iokepa and I call home to the places where my sons and mother call home – six thousand miles to be exact.   But this year, by happenstance, we landed in Baltimore (between a book signing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and a scheduled speech in New York City).  I was able to share Mothers’ Day across three generations with my ninety-nine-year-old mother and my thirty-year-old, first-born son.

I’ll admit it upfront. Last week, I had no idea whether a 'podcast' was:  animal, vegetable, or mineral? This week, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I were participants (?) subjects (?) occupants (?) of one.

It is just a few days before Christmas 2010.  And it is also exactly thirteen years since this remarkable convoluted journey began for me. The first words of the firstparagraph of thefirst chapter of the newly released book, Grandmothers Whisper read.

For the past two weeks I’ve been blaming the heat.   And yes, it’s been a record-setting 100 degrees in inner-city Baltimore, with an unconscionable level of humidity.  But yesterday I realized, that is not it – not my problem at all. Allow me to explain. My oldest brother is a professional man.  He was the apple of my father’s eye.  My next brother, the self-proclaimed “middle child,” tried harder.  He took over the family business and cared for our aging father every day of his life.