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 Covid19 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: “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.
I am not Native Hawaiian and I do not speak for them. I am intimately aware of the forbidden fruits of “cultural appropriation.” I am also aware of how heartening the white faces are at this moment among the Black Lives Matter protesters.
When I met and fell in love with the man who has been my husband for the last 23 years, it was apparent (if not felicitous) that to make a life with this Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner, I would have to abandon a quite satisfying life in Portland, Oregon.
Moving to Hawai’i would never, otherwise, have been my choice. I was an inveterate traveler who’d lived for years in Europe and Asia, but the prospect of living anywhere near a tourist mecca repelled me. I knew nothing about Hawaii other than Honolulu, and I avoided that city as assiduously as I avoided other tourist hot spots. If there was a Native culture on these Islands, I knew neither what nor where, it was.
Half a lifetime later, I’ve come to love some of the things that others, who idealize these Islands, love. Of course, the beaches, the ocean, the night sky, the mountain hiking. But that has never been enough – not for me. Delaware has beaches. New Mexico has stars. I’ve hiked the Appalachians. Instead, what keeps me lodged in the heart of Hawai’i (other than my Native husband) are the remnants of a culture that we’ve done our very best to obliterate, and an ‘aina we’ve replaced with suburban St. Louis.
What I’ve grown to value are the exact things targeted for distortion and sale: a people as product; a culture as fantasy - and the unending effort to package each, to the threatened extinction of both.
So, Mr. Omidyar, the only sustainable future for these Islands (and Covid 19 presents an opening) is to turn our collective backs on the ubiquitous influence of the conquering nation, and to embrace truly and fully the Native Hawaiian people and their ancient wisdom,
What does that mean?
It means, first of all, that it is in our collective interest to recognize the sovereignty of the host culture. Exactly, as the U.S. needs to embrace its former slaves. Not for them – but because of us.
Within the culture is the seed of each contemporary challenge: sustainability, education, health. But with the enforced imposition of another, less caring, more malevolent way of life, it has been obscured from view.
There must be a sustained statewide effort to register every Native Hawaiian voter – and facilitate the return of their mail-in ballots as well. Natives will need, in this intermediate juncture, to awaken their potential within the existing system (with support for the process from within the system) in order to powerfully affect outcomes. This is a first step toward reparations and sovereignty.
Next, we will require state support to educate the non-Native population (born on Island or not) to the graphic and tragic history leading up to of the sugar cane and pineapple barons with gun to the Queen’s head.
Educating that wider population, too to the truth of the metaphoric Native language we inadequately abuse. Ohana: Everything we lay our eyes on is our collective responsibility to care for. Aloha: In the presence of the Creator with every breath. If we do not know the language, we cannot know the people.
With:
1. Meaningful state-wide recognition and nurture of the Native culture
2. Serious state-funded education of the non-indigenous population.
3. A Native people living their genuine heritage.
Then, and only then:
We could actually welcome travelers - not tourists - to these shores as part of an authentic cultural experience, not an “I paid for aloha’” demand.
That means we cut the kitsch.
“Blessings” at the opening of American businesses are a distortion of purpose. Hula to modern jazz is devoid of its sacred meaning. Do not continue to move Hawaiian culture to Western locale (hotels) for ease of access. These are excuses for refusing to educate ourselves, roadblocks to real understanding.
Within a thriving indigenous culture, travelers simply observe Native life. They will no longer have to search for it, pay for commercial lu’au, or look to hotels for their imported “cultural experience.”
Within a living Hawaiian culture, genuine visitors – again, not tourists – would wander the Island, as I’ve done in Russian cities or Greek Islands, in Peruvian villages or on Cambodian trails – and naturally encounter the differences in life experience.
My husband, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani, and I lived on our Island beaches for many years – and repeatedly, young, bright visitors arrived looking for the culture - and found it invisible. At the knee of his Grandmothers, ‘Iokepa inhaled: “Our culture is not for sale.”
Mr. Omidyar, the future of Hawai’i depends on our listening, deeply, to these ageless women.
Ho’omaika’i - blessings,
Inette Miller