Special Topics Tuesday: Confessions of a Settler Colonizer

Nov 11

Hawaiʻi is:

Hawaiʻi was never a place for me. It was a vaguely perceptible dot in the ocean of my awareness. It was a place where rich people lived. Where the privileged vacationed. Where pineapples grew.

It was blonde-haired blue-eyed Wendy Watkins from my Sunday school class when I was ten, going every year with her family and coming back all suntanned, hair-bleached, and full of all the reasons why Kauai was the only island worth going to anymore. Too many cheap tourists everywhere else, you know.

Hawaiʻi was never a place for me. It was the 50th state in my great nation. The 50th state who had joined the rest of us alarmingly late, for some reason. It was a place my older sister said she would one day go to college, but she got married at 18 instead. It was a dream. A Neverland. Second star to the right, where soft sands and soothing ocean sounds provided rest and rejuvenation for those who could pay for it. A luxury. A fairytale.

Hawaiʻi was yellow streamers, green paper pineapples and paper palm trees swaying in the mountain breezes of my Colorado backyard. A slip-and-slide Hawaiian party for my daughter’s seventh birthday. Plastic leis, Elvis songs, and a grass skirt for the refreshments table.

Then one January day Hawaiʻi become a reality, the job offer accepted, the moving container scheduled.

Wow, they all said when we told them we’re moving to Hawaiʻi. Will you live in a hut? Will your kids take a boat to school? I’ve heard every home is oceanfront property. Wow, Hawaiʻi. Can you even buy peanut butter there? But maybe you’ll meet Oprah, she has a house there, right? What language will you have to learn? How long will you stay? Not forever, right? You’ll be the only white person. Do they even allow white people to live there? But, wow! Hawaiʻi. Wow. You’ll get so tan. You’ll learn to do the Hula. You’ll live in a house that’s like a resort, all light and air. You’ll surf and swim with Dolphins every day. But, wow! Those Hawaiians, they are like, wow, so nice. Always with a smile and a coconut to share. Always happy to dance for you. They welcome everyone there, everyone gets told Aloha. It means hello and goodbye, oh, and also, I love you, so be careful who you say it to.

Wow, you live in Hawaiʻi? they always say in wonder-filled voice. You’re so lucky, they always say. White sand and palm trees, crystalline shores every day?! Heads shake enviously. You surf though, right? You’ve seen lava flowing though, right? Perfect weather, they say, perfect life. And when they come to visit me on Oahu: where can I get a real Hawaiian pineapple? They say. Where should we go? Where is the nicest beach? Where can we swim with dolphins, see sea turtles, swim with sharks? Where are the best local spots? they say, clawing quotes into the air around the word “local.” We want an authentic Hawaiian experience. We’ll pay top dollar, and we brought our matching Hawaiian shirts so we’re ready. Lay the authenticity on us.

Unsettled

Moving to Hawaiʻi was surreal. The warmth in mid-December when our plane landed, enveloped us. The beach on Christmas day, delighted us. Chickens, geckos, and birds pleased us. Cultural and ethnic diversity enriched us. The novelty of a tropical paradise lingered with us.

*Beach*Aloha*Poke*Roosters*Shells*Shave Ice*Sun*Musubi*Mahalo*EndlessSummer*

So the first time my fifth grader came home from school crying, I stroked her hair and dried her tears and assured her she’d find a way to fit in this new place.

Moving is hard at any age.

The second time my fifth grader came home from school crying, I wiped her eyes, and gave her a cookie and some reminders of why she’s wonderful.

The third time,

the fourth time,

the fifth time…

When the boy causing all the tears started following her home, telling her he loved her and that he wanted her sexy body…

When kids chased her off the playground for rebuffing his attention…

When they threw kukui nuts and wads of paper and sticks at her, yelling “stuck-up Haole!” while she ran…

When teachers did nothing…

When the counselor did nothing…

When the Administration promised to hold an assembly about bullying, that never materialized….

When I’m told,

“You’re daughter will figure out how things go here”

And,

“Slow down, dis ain’t the mainland”

“You can’t help, you haven’t lived here long enough”

“You’d have more friends if you weren’t so haole”

“No need bring food, you never bring enough”

Then.

Then I read that I’m the problem. Then, me coming here is compared to prostituting the islands, the people, the culture. Then voices are calling me colonizer, thief.

But.

But I’m not the one calling names, refusing to walk down ‘haole’ Moana street.

I never stole anyone’s land. I never spread disease. I never lied, cheated, demeaned.

I didn’t outlaw hula, mutilate a culture.

I don’t own hotels and vacation property. I can barely make my rent.

A Double Scoop of Hawaiian

There’s this little Hawaiian strip mall right on the side of the road. This kind of mish-moshed storefront all colorful and nestled in among the trees and a dilapidated ice cream counter. I’ve been meaning to stop there since we moved in. Support small business and all that.

So today I do. ‘Cause I’ve been thinking. Thinking about trying harder to fit in here, to make this place home so I don’t always feel on the outside. I realize that I could do more. How can I learn how things work here, if I don’t learn how things work here? If I don’t get out there and do the work to understand? So I park my car in front of the yellow and teal storefront, its wraparound orange deck peeling.

The tiny shops all have their doors swung open, wares spilling out onto the wooden deck. Painted shells and preserved blowfishes all shiny in their lacquer. Jewelry, flower hairclips, magnets, and a coconut shell purse like the one that my five-year-old daughter begs me to buy every time we’re at the grocery store.

I brush past the Chinese couple wearing matching aloha print who seem to be considering which seashell windchime to buy, past the wooden signs boasting ‘Aloha Zone’ and ‘Sand, Slippas, Sun.’

I don’t want any of these baubles. Souvenirs for tourists.

I want to know Hawaiʻi better.

I want to learn. To…to understand what makes this place tick.

To feel like I have a place here. To really belong.

So I buy a t-shirt in extra-large and slip it over my top, break down and buy that coconut purse, my daughter will be happy. Before long, I’ve made it to the ice cream place.

“Here,” I say, waving my money in one hand and extending the other, palm up to the Polynesian woman on the other side of the Ice cream counter. “I’ll take, one scoop of your culture, a scoop of history, aaannd, add a drizzle of Hawaiian language too.”

My money is accepted the object attained.

I turn my back to the stand to face the Hawaiian sunshine and bite by bite ingest this delicious coconut culture. I eat fast before it can melt and drip in rivulets down the back of my hand.

But when I get to the scoop of history, oh man is it sour! Not at all what I expected. I’ve had this flavor before. At home, in the mainland, it’s always been sweet, but this? Geez. They didn’t make it right. One bite of this sends me to powerful puckering, shoots jolts through my jaw.

Carefully, I lick off what’s left of that drizzle of sweet language and drop all the sour history on the ground for the chickens who swarm and peck. I call “mahalo” to the woman over the shoulder of my new Hawaiian shirt as I duck into the next shop to buy one of those cute tiki statues that come from a Hawaiian fairytale, or something.

Living Sociometry

Ignorance is a funny thing. You never know what you have until it’s gone.

I’m not sure when mine started to fade. Not even sure that it’s all gone, but the point is, I’m not sure when I started to change. When this place started to change me.

Was it while watching hundreds of colorfully clad elementary school children sing and dance their love of the islands at May Day? Or the months and weeks of planning that led up to that day? Weeks of working with the other moms who were fun and mostly kind, and also not above giving stink eye now and then. Moms who were a lot like me and also nothing like me, as we designed costumes, sewed bodysuits, glued together headdresses. I may have started to change, just a little bit, the day of the performance when I saw those other parents also cheering for our kids and I wondered if even a tiny bit of their cheering was like mine, a celebration of glue that sticks so no one’s costume broke mid-dance.

Maybe I started to change when I toured Iolani palace and read the words of a queen who was betrayed? Or the fieldtrip to help repair the ancient Hawaiian fishpond built by an intelligent earth loving industrious people? Was it in learning about ancient Hawaiians and their posterity – kānaka maoli, about the Ahupuaʻa system, wayfinding, King Kamehameha the Great?

Or did I start to change when Kumu gave me my Hawaiian name? Sitting in her office after Hawaiian language class that day, she extended to me a tiny piece of her ancestral knowledge.

“Malu,” she said, “is, sort of a peaceful strength and protection.” She made two fists; her arms suspended above and parallel to the surface of her desk.

This was not a nickname or admission to a club.

Malukūkialani.

Peaceful, steady, strength of heaven.

Each name chosen specially for me after three semesters under her keen discernment. This gift of my observed traits, seen through the lens of her culture, her language, she offered wrapped in aloha.

Or did I start to change when I learned about Captain Cook, Christian missionaries, and opportunistic businesspeople? Was it when I read the shameful words of Kipling and even more shameful still, began to see that burden he preached in my own national history?

Maybe I started to change when these women invited me to learn hula from them. When I went even though I was nervous. When we met in Pi’i’s front yard every Thursday night for weeks, the warm trade winds wafting the scent of someone’s barbeque in the air as we danced. When it was mostly okay that I was the only haole there and even okay that they liked to remind me, through wide white smiles, that I dance like a haole. And they laughed when I replied, ‘Well, yeah. It’s the only way I know how.’ And their laughter meant friendship amid differences. When it meant it was okay that I didn’t always understand because I was trying.

Creation and Colonization

My earth is a fallen one, a rippled reflection of God’s glorious kingdom, a temporary state, that, if endured well, will win me an even better one. My land was given for me to be master of. “Dress it and to keep it,” were his exact words, given by an all-powerful creator whose current holdings are bigger and better than this earth (Genesis 2:15). So maybe it makes sense that for eons I’ve thought I owned the whole place. Thought it was all mine to keep. If, from day one, it was all supposed to be mine anyway…

There is value in my Christian creation story. There are loving heavenly parents who provide and instruct, a wise mother Eve and obedient father Adam. There is a selfless sacrificial savior who allows my inheritance to become fact. There is hope, and love, sin, and redemption, pain and so much beauty.

But what would it feel like to know

I came from this earth? My bones birthed

by parents of ocean and sky? The food springing

from the soil, my siblings? That they rely on me as

I rely on them? What would it feel like to know

from the deepest hollows of my bones that

the forest, the ocean, the mountains, are

hallowed ground?

To raise my voice in plea for permission to

enter, but never to own?

Dear Hawaiʻi

Dear Hawaiʻi,

I need to, want to say, I’m sorry for my ignorance, it’s just that colonization, and the racist and elitist paradigms it breeds, are so woven into the fabric that clothe ‘modern’ life that I throw on that proverbial shirt without a second thought. The individual threads, spun on the wheel of my colonial ancestors, I don’t see

because the shirt is worn in perfectly.

Soft and cradling.

The comforting familiar.

All those colonial fibers?

Invisible.

But I’m not stupid, I know enough to know that colonization, elitism, racism are real. It’s just that they don’t affect me because I don’t make the humans around me into ‘others.’ My heart is not darkened, so I can let all those terrible actions rest in history, I thought.

But I do acknowledge them,

there,

in the past:

the actions of ignorant supremacists who couldn’t see past their own imagined burden of enlightenment.

I’m glad I see more clearly. I understand humanity better.

Or thought I did.

And so, I’m sorry, because I know enough to know it’s important to learn about the colonization of the past because it helps me see how racist people used to be, how colonization breeds division, breeds hate.

How hate harms.

And I do see it. I do.

I see it when it carries a gun.

When it shouts slurs.

When it bruises, cuts, burns, suffocates.

Then.

Then I am quick to make my sign and join in the march against that evil,

but I’m sorry because all the while, I cannot see the threads of

my inherited colonialism woven into the shirt on my own back.

I don’t notice colonizer language in my own voice when I say,

“I’m going to make Hawaiʻi my new home.”

I don’t see the problem with teaching “A is for apple,” in schools across the globe even where apples don’t grow.

I hardly notice the whitewashing of American television and film or only studying the “greats” in literature classes: Bradstreet*Irving*Melville*Dickinson*Twain*Stowe*Hemingway*Faulkner.

Voices of the American narrative.

I don’t notice the voices that are absent from our ‘single story’ of American greatness. How can I hear those voices unless I seek them out and then listen?

How can I allow what I hear to then focus my eyes and allow me to see the threads of colonization that extend to me even now, twining down through the centuries and clothing me still?

Critical Dialogue

Dialogue

a conversation between two or more people

conversation

oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas

exchange

the act of giving or taking one thing in return for another: reciprocal giving and receiving

Typeface: Kānaka ʻŌiwi

{Response to “Nā ʻŌiwi” by Haunani-Kay Trask}

Anguish gushes from each

instroke, outstroke, ascending, descending, a tide of

ink-stained pain

Blackened screams swell from

the hollows of white-hot paper eyes within

each twisted black letter on the page,

Your people of bone and sea, mummied in

Parchment, sticky in ink, ‘cry out in their

infinite dying’ from

every stroke and stem, looped

lobe and leg

in bulbous black and white.

I read, but how will I ever understand?

Shared Humanity

{A response to “How I Learned to Write my Name” by Brandy Nalani McDougal}

Your story floats off the page

A nearly material pearled mist,

the image,

a swirling pulsation my

soul recognizes, déjà vu familiar, like

that hazy almost-remembered dream that

recedes with morning’s first blink, like

an ocean wave slides down the sandy shore, like

the rainbowed mist evaporates in the bursting heat of sun.