Cultural Appropriation, Diaspora and Settling In

Ten years in Hawaii-- that's it. That's only a decade. I've got a 5th grader's worth of life experience in Hawaii.
I learned some things. I learned my favorite foods and favorite places. I learned the language. I made friends-- people grown there and flown there-- but always the seeking souls. The people curious about the world and open to conversations that dive and meander and plan and mourn.
I threw a lot of parties. I lived most of a marriage there. It ended there, too, when he died. Hell of a way to end a marriage...

But that's off topic.
I'm thinking about carrying that forward, here, and now. In Utah. On the mainland. On the stolen lands of the Ute, the Shoshone.

One reason I learned Hawaiian, and learned the stories and songs and chants and place names, was because I believe that is your responsibility when you live someplace, to understand the culture and history.

It wasn't mine, by blood, but I did not want to contribute to its erasure with my ignorance.
It is my kids', though, by blood, ancestral and cord. My blood and theirs, mingled in their births in the cool misty highlands of Waimea and Wailua, on mountains ringing with birthstones. Their placentas are planted there-- kanu ia in the earth, e hoomomona ana I ka honua, to fatten it. And their father's blood gives them the blood of generations born across the islands, buried in dusty cemeteries on Kauai, Molokai, Maui and Oahu... Na Iwi, na Oiwi, Na kulaiwi. Starving sickly Japanese picture brides, reckless whalers and sailors, warrior-singers, jewelers, galley cooks, zori-makers, water lunas, missionaries.

I was acutely aware of my belonging or not belonging in Hawaii. But as time went on I realized that everyone's story is complicated. Everyone's claim of authenticity is shaky, or at least nuanced in difficult ways. A traditional tattoo artist is a born again christian, and won't tattoo if the Hawaiian gods are invoked. A most traditional and Hawaiian-proud kahu at the immersion school's mom is a white lady living in Florida. The traditional navigator didn't meet the blood-quantum requirement to receive Hawaiian Homelands. The Hawaiian immersion preschool teacher is 100% Filipino by blood, and has no hesitation in saying, "Us Hawaiians." And the most fluent Hawaiian speaker I knew was a tall blond girl, born and raised in Wailua, who can skin a pig, run a farm, home birth a baby, and catch your fish for dinner on the way home. I mentioned in passing to my late dear wild and wise friend Kumu Ka'e'e that, funnily enough, my great-grandfather was fluent in Hawaiian. He was a Mormon missionary there at the turn of the 20th century, and helped, according to family legend, plant to tall palm trees at the LDS temple on Oahu. She gripped my arm and shook it into me-- "This is in your blood, this is meant to be." She said, "I wondered how you got here, now I know. Your kupunas carried the olelo and now you do too." I was moved and surprised-- I don't know anything about that grandfather-- (his journals are lost to another family line, cousins third and fourth removed, and haole style strangers, not still family as we would be on an island). But maybe language can exert some special pull over blood-- the red Hawaiian dust at the time of the Queen's overthrow permeating DNA and tugging on the strands across the generation. You've got to hope, if trauma can be passed from generation to generation, that the magic and wonder can be too.

So I settled in. I thought, "I'm here, I'm learning, I'm trying my best to honor the culture-- to ho'ola-- to make it a living, healthy thing in my life." And we learned every day-- every day I was a novice, startled by the depth and breadth of a culture and worldview, by the potency of the language.

But now... we live here, in Utah. That daily learning has stopped. And worse, what I did learn has ossified a little. Grown stunted without the sunshine and salt-water of daily maintenance.

How do I keep that connection to Hawaii? To Hawaiian language, culture, land, and bones? Is it even possible? Is it even right? Those complicated shaky connections now seem even more tenuous.

When we first moved here, raw and traumatized, I took the girls to their new public school open house. Maile's classroom was decorated with palm trees and floating plastic lei, and the kids' names were printed onto little slippers. She was agog-- "Did they know I was coming from Hawaii?? Is this for me??" That teacher, Mrs. Langston, became solid ground for Maile, and I will adore her forever for it. And then, we went to Rosie's classroom. I saw the door and had to pause and press my hand over my mouth. Mrs. Kaluhiokalani decorated the door with famous Hawaiian surfers, and the walls with Na lula Olelo Noeau-- the same posters of wise sayings in Hawaiian that hung in our classrooms in Kauai. Each group of tables was labeled a different Hawaiian Island, and images of the waterfall on our road hung behind Rosie's desk.

It was a moment of pure magic-- pure kindness from the universe. Like the time my American Girl Doll obsessed 9 year old, who had been obsessively watching videos on how to restore AG dolls, found an AG doll on the side of the road, in front of our house. It was all scuffed up, and there were spider eggs in its eyes, and Rosie had the incandescent delight of cleaning it up and discovering it was the limited doll of the year. And when we found the owner, she said she didn't like dolls any way, and brought over a garbage bag of doll clothes. Hundreds of dollars worth... I still can't fathom that it really happened.

But back to Hawaii, and Hawaiianness in Utah.

So from the start, we've made Hawaiian connections. At a free bike-repair class at the local bike co-op, I heard a mom calling for her daughter, "Maire! Hele mai!" So I gave her a big hug and pointed out my daughter Maile. We sat together every class and talked magic and healing and spirituality.

She connected me with the Hawaiian Civic club. I've hosted Kani Ka Pila-- music get togethers and potlucks, and gone to amazing workshops on Hawaiian knowledge. The folks here who miss Hawaii work hard to cultivate that connection. They teach their kids hula, how to make lumpia and crock-pot Kalua Pig. They wear Hawaiian t-shirts, they join the hula group, even if there isn't an official kumu, but just an experienced enthusiast.

But now it's been almost three years. We used to speak and sing and read Hawaiian every day, and now we don't. The kids are self-conscious when I invite them to chant to the rising sun, or to the trees when we gather plants, or to the mountains when we ask to come in and hike.  I've worked hard at memorizing new Hawaiian songs and chants, but the girls aren't using it, and they're forgetting it. This hurts my na'au-- my gut.

When I taught high school, I remember the way that the students didn't believe me when I told them things: an essay needs a topic sentence, a simile uses like or as, unprotected sex can lead to STDs. They would eye me skeptically. But when they heard it from another source, what I was telling them was legitimate. (Yes, I taught sex-ed. I had my midwife come in with a bag full of contraceptive options for the kids to poke and prod at. It was memorable!) One voice alone-- it's not enough. But a community-- that makes it real.

And right now, I'm the only voice whispering Hawaiian words into my kids' minds. It feels impossible to keep it alive in them without the critical mass of community.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to talk about the Hawaiian goddess Pele at a women's gathering here in Utah Valley. I was a little torn-- this is classic Cultural Appropriation No-no territory. I'm a well-intentioned white lady. I know a little, I've been exposed to a little, I've been taught a little, and I've been asked to carry a little. I know some stories, some songs, some chants, some protocols. But, as a non-Hawaiian, do I have the right to share those things? Or tell other people those stories? There are things which are kapu-- sacred or forbidden-- and things which are noa-- profane or released from taboo. I wondered if the things that I know would be considered noa and therefore on the okay-er side to share with other people, not with any pretense of expertise, but just as information to broaden their worlds and give a more nuanced and accurate account than, say, wikipedia.

I decided to err on the side of caution, and ask. I reached out to my former co-worker, a Hawaiian language teacher, taro farmer, merrie monarch hula dancer, and Kauai activist. We used to giggle and make long extended Hawaiian puns during staff meetings. I explained my dilemma to him-- how I wanted to keep my kids' connection to Hawaii alive, how I wanted to deepen our understanding of Hawaiian language and culture even if we're not there, how I wanted to do it in a pono way.

I admit, I was hoping he'd say, "intent is what matters, just do what you can, be honest about where you learned things and the limits of your knowledge, and keep what you have alive." In retrospect, if there was only one thing I wanted to hear, I should have just given myself a pep talk rather than reaching out for support and validation.

He answered quickly and with two words: Ha'awi pio. Give up.

This was like a punch to the solar plexus. I felt unmoored. Was he right? Was it pointless to try and keep a culture alive in our family, without a daily connection to the land that birthed it?

I was still reeling when I went a few weeks later to a talk at BYU from a woman named Hokulani Aikau. She is writing a fantastic and challenging decolonizing guidebook for Hawaii. She is doing her research in decolonial work in Hawaii and in Utah, and gave a wonderful talk about the weight of tourism and tourist gaze on Hawaii and Hawaiians.

And then she talked about her role here, and now. She's from here-- Utah. She couldn't ignore that fact-- her presence in Hawaii, as well-intentioned and well-informed as she was-- wasn't harmless. She needed to return home to Utah, to take care of the Hawaiian community here, and to get involved in supporting and uplifting indigenous voices here. So she has gotten involved in supporting the Polynesian community in Salt Lake, and in helping with Indigenous place-names projects that seek to map out original names for the creeks, valleys, and mountains in Salt Lake. This seemed like a beautiful, if bloody hard, way to surf the diaspora wave.

I don't have any answers. How do you survive diaspora? How does language and culture survive outside of the land-cradle that made it? And how do you deepen your understanding without making things shallow or tipping into cultural appropriation?

The way things are passed along matters-- who taught you, where they learned, where they taught you-- all of those things are encoded in the teaching and in the subsequent performing ever after. (Can you tell I wrote my master's thesis about this? Pardon the descent into academeze naval-gazing drivel.) So if I remember there was a sunrise chant that we sang before performing hi'uwai, but I look it up on youtube to remind myself of the words--- is that okay? I land, tentatively, on yes. It's okay. Because the most important thing is that culture lives daily in our lives, not that I sometimes have to read the words of the Aumakua prayer off of my phone in order to get the articles right. Maybe I'm wrong.

But Haawi Pio is hewa. Giving up is definitely wrong. Sinking into cultural nihilism is not the right choice. So I guess we're left with struggle, with unsurety, with change. It's a new world. Technology is here, and exerting tidal pulls on culture, on language, on authenticity and on community in ways that we've never experienced before. I feel that we have to focus on the goals of continuity, of practice, or continuing diversity. If that means USING the double-edged tools that technology washes up on our shores, fine. It's gross that someone can learn a terrible fake "haka" from youtube, but so be it. Because my kids can also watch amazing kumu Kekuhi Kanahele explain and perform "Ai Ka Mumu" and talk about who Pele is and how we should best approach her.

I'll let the Olelo Noeau say it best:
A'ole pau ka 'ike I halau ho'okahi. Not all knowledge is contained within one school.
We all have to keep muddling through, doing what we can, minimizing harm, maximizing thoughtful goodness, and keeping the languages and songs that we've been given alive in our daily lives.