It’s Thanksgiving Day; ‘Iokepa is threatened with jail. The challenge of Return Voyage, always and only moved by ancestral guidance, intensifies. In the long, deep, ubiquitous story of freedom denied, of national identity obliterated, of oppression institutionalized – there have been wars waged, anger and violence righteously uncorked against oppressors.
This is the insistent (seldom kindly spoken) challenge that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani hears whenever he dares to speak of the future of the Native Hawaiian people – or of their nation. The implied conclusion is: these people would not know what to do with their sovereignty. The implied assertion: deny them that choice. ‘Iokepa answers the question in a larger way.
We live in a noisy world. We have coming at us in any given moment: telephones that no longer sit quietly next to our bed or on our office desks (they now follow our every step into movie theaters, churches, and romantic dinners with our lover); mail that no longer comes once a day on the eagerly awaited footsteps of our postman (now it beeps its electronic announcement night, day, and every moment between); news that no longer slaps at our doorstep at dawn or arrives from Walter Cronkite’s lips at dusk (it comes at us 24/7 from so many contrary and irritating voices that it’s hard to know whom to trust).
I've been a writer my entire life, a professional writer since I left college at twenty-two, and an author since I was forty. In that time, I have naturally watched my writing evolve: from eighteen years of salaried newspaper and magazine journalism to the less financially predictable, but ultimately more emotionally satisfying occupation of writing books. Sometimes those books have been well-published, turned into feature films, sold around the globe in translation; sometimes not. Writing for myself on occasion meant writing only for myself. But that was the nature of the beast.
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.
‘Iokepa and I return to our Islands. But before we step off the airplane, we take ourselves to task. We remind ourselves that ends never justify means, and that our only hope of influence is by living example – our observable behavior. For many months and even more car miles, we drove the American continental freeways. But we spoke out, always, on behalf of this place and these people.
‘Iokepa and I read a New York Times editorial page column, and sucked in our collective breath. We were aghast that the editorial writer could have so completely missed the mark. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood, the Times writer began: “The 50th state turns 50 on Friday, and the strange thing is how wildly and jubilantly the islands aren’t celebrating.” The writer explained the lack of celebration: “The reasons are sad but obvious… Tourism is in the tank.”
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.
Our dear friends, Diane and Bill, were married thirty-some years ago by a Presbyterian minister in Indianapolis. It was in all ways a family-sanctioned, conventional, and presumably very lovely wedding. Over these many years the couple's spiritual practices unavoidably evolved. From a stalwart adherent of the traditional Episcopal church in Virginia, Diane studied, searched, and found her way to ordination as a Universal Worship minister herself.
I live in a place that is rich in tropical flora, volcanic mountains, lavish waterfalls, and beaches. It sits--this most isolated archipelago on the planet--in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Paradoxically, I live also, ina place where the detritus of the continental United States floats to shore--literally and figuratively. Our beaches are strewn with the enormous, floating timber cut from the old-growth forests of the American Northwest. Our campgrounds are brimming with the continent's social misfits: Castoffs from several states' welfare systems--after the obligation to serve them has expired.
There is an other Islandreality than the one that 'Iokepa lives to speak. Anyone who has sat in a Return Voyage gathering, or has casually perused this website, or has shared a conversation with 'Iokepa over the past years, knows this: He cherishes the authentic wisdom within his kanaka maoli culture. He lives to convey that aboriginal wisdom to the world--and to awaken all peoples to the strength and possibilities within their own indigenous cultures.
‘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 Hanalei 'Imaikalani has often instructed me. "European and American sugar cane barons laid claim, almost two hundred years ago now, to the land that my people stewarded for thirteen thousand years. They claimed ownership of a land that, we knew, only the Creator could own.
'Iokepa and I have spent the last week in the Florida home of a bright, sweet, and talented young man. ("Young," now defined, as somewhere between the ages of our four children.) He was a stranger, and he opened his home to us.
There are whole categories of assumptions Americans make. One of them – especially post 9/11 – is this. All air travelers must carry government-issued identification. For so many years now ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani has traveled the length and breadth of the United States, by air and by car, without one. It has not been an oversight on his part; he didn’t leave his state or federally-issued ID card at home in a drawer.
‘Iokepa’s mother died yesterday. The only way we know to honor that momentous passage is a reprieve from doing – a seizing of “still.” The Return Voyage has slowed to a crawl. In our lives on Earth, it is absolutely required that we honor the pauses. That we stop in our tracks – permit, at times, what feels like a loss of momentum. Within our industrial world, there is an addiction to motion – and a consequent avoidance of still.
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.
'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.
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 - 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.
