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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
In these nineteen years together, 'Iokepa and I have made a practice of crossing the Pacific Ocean twice annually. It's something we do alone as a couple. We fly to the continent to speak the words of the Native Hawaiian ancestors - and after some months, we fly back home. We visit with our family and friends in both places, but we don't cross the Pacific Ocean with them. Yet, there seems to have been an omnipresent someone who has shadowed our airplane's jet trail over these many years. Madi Kertonegoro is an accomplished visual artist from the Island of Bali.
A dear friend, who graciously hosts us when our work takes us to New York City, posed this semi-sardonic question. She'd read our post announcing that - after eighteen years sleeping in tents, car seats, and rapidly shifting house-sits - we'd been gifted a home of our own. Her question prodded me. Clearlywe owe our readers a bit more of the story. Snug in an actual "home of our own" (and no, we neither own it, nor do we pay the expenses involved in owning); we have been gifted its permanence and its comforts. We chose it, no strings attached.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
