{"id":8951,"date":"2016-07-31T07:45:43","date_gmt":"2016-07-31T07:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=8951"},"modified":"2025-05-13T12:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T12:45:09","slug":"the-life-of-a-native-hawaiian-a-perspective-on-hawaii-us-relations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/the-life-of-a-native-hawaiian-a-perspective-on-hawaii-us-relations","title":{"rendered":"The Life of a Native Hawaiian: A Perspective on Hawaii\u2013US Relations"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Schachter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The following is an\u00a0excerpt from\u00a0The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation<\/a><\/em>. Author Judith Schachter remembers a friendship that began at a May 1989 meeting of the Waim<\/span>\u0101<\/span>nalo Senior Citizens As<\/span>sociation. The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation<\/a><\/em> by Judith Schachter is now available in paperback.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

John Simeona stood at the front of the room, leading the pledge of allegiance. A rendition of \u201cAloha `Oe\u201d followed, the seniors joining in song as assiduously as they had recited the pledge. John ran the meeting, and introduced me at the end taking on the responsibility of communicating my message in their words. She is interested in Hawaiian custom, he said, and the \u201cways of old.\u201d Then, after the meeting ended, he spent forty-five minutes talking story into my tape recorder.<\/p>\n

Several years after we met, he added a typed document to the stories he had already provided in hours of talk, tape recordings, and letters. The \u201cbook,\u201d as he described it, was called Life Story of a Native Hawaiian, and the subtitle read \u201c100 percent Hawaiian.\u201d John\u2019s reference to a percentage recalls and rejects the US government\u2019s categorization of Native Hawaiians as a racial group, with blood quantum taken as the measure. By referring to the percentage notion, John acknowledged the power of an imposed racial definition in his life. By claiming \u201c100 percent,\u201d he asserted that being Hawaiian, acting Hawaiian, and practicing Hawaiian \u201cways\u201d meant something radically different.<\/p>\n

The phrase points forward to his identification as a Native Hawaiian man. The process of identification through an enactment of Hawaiian values persisted even as he engaged in the institutions established by an American colonial regime. From his childhood in the Homestead of Keaukaha, on the Big Island, to the last years of his life in the Waim<\/span>\u0101<\/span>nalo Homestead on O`ahu, John brought the lessons of his ancestors to bear on practices and injustices t<\/span>hat are the outcome of US governance.<\/p>\n

At first John viewed me as the researcher, an anthropologist visiting the senior citizens group. I was a malihini, a stranger who came to the shores of Hawai`i to pursue my project. In time, my work established my genealogy and accorded me a place, without erasing my origins: a haole from the mainland\u2014pale and citified. John did not solidify those identities. He would, he teased, \u201cbrown\u201d me in the sun, fatten me on Hawaiian foods, and socialize me in proper Hawaiian manners. Through acting right, I might achieve understanding. In a letter about my work, he jested: now you are becoming \u201chapa Hawaiian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hapa translates as \u201chalf,\u201d and the common usage in Hawaii is hapa haole: residents of the islands whose background is half Caucasian and half Hawaiian. Over time, the term hapa grew to include other locals, shedding the one-dimensional racial significance of whiteness. The change softened the colonial impact of the designation.<\/p>\n

Critics claim that hapa haole resembles \u201cHawaiian at heart\u201d with its superficial embrace of Hawaiian culture. For John, however, hapa was positive, a sign of flexible identities. When he called me \u201chapa Hawaiian,\u201d he reversed the negative attributions of hapa by assuming I could learn the processes that produce identification as a Native Hawaiian person. For him, hapa represented an apprenticeship to experts in culture teaching. I could learn to act according to Hawaiian cultural norms by listening to the elders. \u201cBe quiet,\u201d he instructed, \u201cand wait for the stories.\u201d In granting me the possibility of moving between identities, from malihini anthropologist to familiar pupil, he mimicked his own life story. For over seventy years, he had worked at juxtaposing the behaviors that represented being Hawaiian with those that demonstrated his acquisition of American teachings; he learned how to practice the right culture at the right time. Hapa was no more a portion or fraction than was 100 percent a fixed totality. As individuals judge and measure Native Hawaiian and American influences in their everyday lives, the components are inevitably in flux, reflecting shifting relationships.<\/p>\n

\"Nearby<\/a>
Nearby John\u2019s Homestead in O\u02bbahu, the Waim\u0101nalo Beach stretches out below the Kalanianaole Highway<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John and I sat at his favorite Waim\u0101<\/span>nalo Beach for hours, talking story. We sat in be<\/span>tween, under casuarina trees that separated dry land from the sea. Eventually we crossed the highway\u2014named after Prince Jonah K\u016b<\/span>hi\u014d<\/span> Kalaniana`ole\u2014that separated the beach park from homestead lots. I met his sister, Auntie Eleanor, the political actor in the family, participant in the cultural renaissance in the 1970s, Department of Hawaiian Home Lands commissioner in the 1980s, and self-defined activist in the 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n

She was \u201cAuntie\u201d but John was never \u201cUncle\u201d for me. He had initially defined our relationship as an equal exchange of information; we were, in his words, first partners, then collaborators, and finally good friends. \u201cAloha Pumehana,\u201d he began his letters, that means \u201cgreetings with affection,\u201d he explained. The first self-reference he offered me persisted throughout the years I knew him. When I met Eleanor, I was already pupil, learner, and familiar; \u201cAuntie\u201d suited our relationship from the start.<\/p>\n

John and Eleanor opened a space in the `ohana for me. In different ways, each member of the family welcomed the visiting anthropologist. I was welcomed \u201chome\u201d and I did, in a fashion, belong to the `ohana, but I also slipped back and forth across boundaries: I went home to Pittsburgh every year. John kept these crossings in our minds when he used the term hapa. To belong, in the Native Hawaiian culture, means acting with concern, generosity, and involvement.<\/p>\n

For some people I remained the inquiring anthropologist, and those individuals provided information on the persistence of custom in a modern state. For others I became pupil, a person who could learn Hawaiian ways of life by listening and watching.<\/p>\n

John welcomed me, a stranger from the nation that had taken over an existing l<\/span>\u0101<\/span>h<\/span>ui (nation), seized acres of land. Our conversations crossed over this intersecting history, and we exchanged interpretations of the role of the US in Hawai`i. John interpreted American presence through the lens of a public school education, his time in the Army, and his job at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. In the mid-1990s, he sent me letters carefully assessing the sovereignty movement in terms of timing, responsibility to the people, and the debt the US owed Native Hawaiians. Eleanor was more critical in her talk, appraising the outcome of the federal government\u2019s Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, recalling her protests against military appropriation of acreage, and arguing for revisions in the American judiciary system in Hawaii. The stories I heard from them deny the simplicity of a historical narrative propelled by colonial intrusion and indigenous opposition.<\/p>\n

In interviews, conversations, and casual kitchen-table chat, the individuals I met told stories, adapting the Native Hawaiian\u2013style discourse. \u201cWhen you come, we can talk stories about everything,\u201d John wrote. Digressive, anecdotal, and meandering, talk-story captures a person\u2019s perspective and stance in the world. \u201cThese stories are all mo`olelo,\u201d the Hawaiian historian Jonathan Osorio explains, \u201cwhether they tell of mythic beings, of \u2018real\u2019 individuals whose power and influence affected the society in which they lived, of personal occurrences and family stories, and whether remembered in the mind or committed to writing.\u201d Such stories are a form of recounting and assessing experience, as well as placing personal reflections into context. Such stories are history. Osorio points to another dimension: mo`olelo, he continues, are a \u201cform of assertive scholarship,\u201d meant to persuade, motivate, and call the reader to action. As Auntie Eleanor put it, a person writes in order to cause change. \u201c\u2018<\/span>\u014c<\/span>lelo\u2019: \u2018word\u2019 or \u2018speech\u2019 was far more than a means of communicating. \u2026 The word was itself a force.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing alters the power of the word, freeing expression from the constraints of oral communication and opening the way to an assertion of individual viewpoint. Eleanor put it clearly one afternoon: \u201call books are a person\u2019s opinion.\u201d She referred to the book she knew I was planning to write\u2014a warning, perhaps, or more likely a lesson. And she presented a challenge: to assert a point of view without making oneself the central subject of the story.<\/p>\n

Guided by John and by Eleanor, my story reflects the knowledge\/learning of the grandparental generation and a<\/span>lso k\u016b<\/span>puna, \u201celderlys\u201d (in John\u2019s word) who possess wisdom. These k\u016b<\/span>puna play a crucial role in the \u201ctransmission of cultural heritage\u201d for Native Hawaiians. At the same time John and Eleanor are part of a social generation, individuals exposed to the same historical events and the same intrusions by the US into their everyday lives. <\/span><\/p>\n

John initially introduced me to members of this generation, siblings and cousins he recommended as \u201cexperts\u201d on Native Hawaiian culture. The elderlys accepted a burden, a kuleana or responsibility to the youth who would inherit new stories and social contexts. Defined by a relationship to predecessors and successors, not by kinship or age, `<\/span>\u014d<\/span>pio (youth) turned to the elders when, in the 1970s, historical circumstances gave bi<\/span>rth to a Hawaiian cultural renaissance.<\/p>\n

John\u2019s Life Story ends: \u201cI love everybody in our surroundings, my family, my friends and our good Lord for giving me this privilege to put all I know about my livelihood, my knowledge, my learning, my good attitude and all the good things I know from my past and from my present experiences. I hope that my family will do the same for their families, when they get as old as I am.\u201d In my book, I try to fulfill the task John gave his `ohana and that his generation gave the next.<\/p>\n

\n

\"schachter-source_cmu\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Judith Schachter<\/strong> is Professor of Anthropology and History at Carnegie Mellon University. Her publications include Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture<\/em> (University of California Press, 1994), A Sealed and Secret Kinship: The Culture of Politics and Practices in American Adoption<\/a><\/em> (Berghahn Books, 2002), and The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation<\/a><\/em> from which this excerpt is taken and now available in paperback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Schachter The following is an\u00a0excerpt from\u00a0The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation. Author Judith Schachter remembers a friendship that began at a May 1989 meeting of the Waim\u0101nalo Senior Citizens Association. The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation by Judith Schachter is now available in paperback.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[299,107,1665,111,166,788,680,110,204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8951"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9771,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8951\/revisions\/9771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}