The Heart of Being Hawaiian

Introduction

Huaka‘i. It means journey. When I started on the journey that has become this book, I had yet to learn the word huaka’i.

When I was nearing the end of the quest for my Hawaiian roots I met Kapono Souza, a young Hawaiian man who had decided in 2001 to model his own huaka‘i on an ancient practice during the four-month Hawaiian winter. During those Makahiki months of peace and rest, an entourage of chiefs and priests circled their island on foot, stopping at villages for games, entertainments and feasts, and to collect annual tribute from the people. Wanting to understand the ancient rite, Kapono began what became his annual walk around O‘ahu. Lacking a retinue, he did his huaka‘i alone.

At night, he said, "everything smells different, the maile lau li‘i, the sea, the rain. I hear the ocean, the wind, the mongoose in the bush. These are the sounds the ancestors heard. They smelled the maile, the pili grass in Nānākuli. Night is the time when you can pick up on hō ‘ailona, signs, interpreting them in ways that make sense. It’s a time of insight. What I learned from Kapono I wrote in The Long Walk Home" on page 192.

The pieces of my own solo journey appear here as a collection of articles and essays about parts of modern Hawaiian culture. For me, and I hope for you, the group of writings offers insights as a cohesive whole. Only years after the last of them had appeared, in nine magazines and three anthologies, was I able to see that they should be arranged not in order of when I wrote them, but in themes that revealed layers of the Hawaiian heart.

The figurative and indeliberate route of my huaka‘i twisted and turned as it went along, like the Old Pali Road I traversed many times as a Kailua kid on the grand, infrequent adventure of going to town. At first, all I knew for sure was my desire to write about a culture I felt I didn’t know well enough, even though I was a quarter Hawaiian and a graduate of Kamehameha Schools.

In the beginning, not only did I not know the meaning of huaka‘i, I did not even set off on a quest. My intention was to become a full-time freelance magazine writer. But I unconsciously put myself on this particular path in 1984 when I finished a Journalism Master’s Degree at the University of Oregon with a lengthy final writing project called On the Winds of Kanaloa: Rebirth of the Hawaiian People.

At that time I had already lived on the mainland U.S. for 26 years, first at the University of Minnesota following my 1958 graduation from Kamehameha Schools, and then in Oregon. I did come back to Hawai‘i every summer during college to work as a cub reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and then every couple of years to visit my parents for a week or two. It wasn’t enough, but I didn’t know that then.

When I did the Winds of Kanaloa field research in Hawai‘i, my first interview was with Adelaide Frenchy DeSoto, who had recently badgered the state legislature into creating the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. She had much to say on the subject of the so-called Hawaiian Renaissance, but what affected me most was her huge hug. Had the honi been relearned then, she might have stunned me with the nose-to-nose greeting, which, at that time, I had never experienced. Her hug had a similar effect. Having lived away so long, I felt like a foreigner, and I didn’t expect such warmth from a woman I had never met. Her aloha filled the air. I felt so accepted and loved that my eyes filled with tears.

I’d been a journalist since high school days, always in the employ of some corporate or educational entity. When I finished my long master’s tome, my goal was full-time freelance writing. For several years, I fit freelancing around working at a regular job, hustling assignments from local and regional magazines in Oregon, going out on the full-time freelance limb in 1991. When I was home in Hawai‘i for a visit in late 1988, I attended a concert by the Makaha Sons, a benefit for some preschool. The school turned out to be Pūnana Leo, the then-new Hawaiian-language immersion preschool. In 1988 I’d never heard of Pūnana Leo—but I recognized it as a story idea, which I suggested to Aloha magazine. I got the assignment, my first on a Hawaiian topic. The article about Pūnana Leo appears on page 134.

The whole time I’d been away from Hawai‘i, aboriginal twinges called to me. I had grown up in Kailua, O‘ahu, very near the beach. When I went away, I often dreamed of being in the ocean.

I was a kid in the ’40s and ’50s, a time when it still was not cool to be Hawaiian. My half-Hawaiian father and his siblings were born in the first decade of the 20th century, the first generation not born in the Kingdom or its predecessors, the several island chiefdoms. They were Americans of the Territory of Hawai‘i, created in 1900. Under what must have been an uncertain and unsettling political and social climate, at least to adults, their family and lots of others left the Hawaiian language behind, along with many customs and much knowledge.

Kamehameha, my school from seventh through twelfth grade, even though instituted for Hawaiian children, sought to make us thoroughly American. Which I was. Except for those twinges and a gaping hole in my heart.

After the Pūnana Leo story, I consciously—and self-consciously, because I wasn’t sure about how I would be received, despite Frenchy DeSoto—pursued article assignments to learn about being Hawaiian as well as to write about specific topics. I learned about hūla, heiau, the Hawaiian diet. I spent three days on Kaho‘olawe during January Makahiki ceremonies, addressed a personal health problem through lomilomi, sailed for an afternoon on the voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a. Eventually I came to know dozens of people in the Hawaiian community. They all welcomed me, especially after I learned to approach any Hawaiian by placing myself in my family, school and community. I think it is today’s version of what some have told me was the ancient recitation of genealogy between strangers until they came to a point of commonality. Never mind the journalism degrees and writing achievements. I am the younger Pierre Bowman’s older sister, Uncle Wright’s niece, Scotty’s cousin. I am KS ’58. I am Kailua, O‘ahu. Now we can talk.

In a few years, with dozens more Hawaiian articles in print, a significant vestige of the heart puka nevertheless remained. Then, in Hilo in late 1997, I met Aunty Abbie Napeahi and Uncle Howard Pe‘a. For yet another article, I wanted to learn about the Hawaiian conflict resolution process called ho‘oponopono. They were practitioners through the Hawaiian social services agency Alu Like. They answered my questions. But they also saw right into the pūka in my heart. How they gave me their down-to-earth blessing is detailed in the opening essay, Aloha, Anuhea, starting on page 2. The ho‘oponopono piece, Setting Things Right, starts on page 149.

For years before I decided to freelance, my professional training in journalism had me keeping my views and orientation out of reporting. But the magazine world is somewhat different, and the Hawaiian world is the opposite. The more projects I took on, the sharper my personal Hawaiian senses became. One of my best editors told me he never wanted to see a piece that didn’t have me in it. Someone else told me I was always in my articles even if I never used the word I. Eventually I wrote occasional essays that weren’t based on research but instead were totally about my own experience. Several of these various pieces won Pa‘i awards from the Hawai‘i Publishers’ Association. But my most treasured praise was five words from Noa Emmett Aluli, the Moloka‘i doctor who is perhaps the best known Hawaiian activist and with whom I worked on some major assignments. I bumped into Emmett some months after the publication of Kaho‘olawe in Limbo (see page 153). He hugged me—there it was again! Aloha hug! And he said, "The Kaho‘olawe piece was great. Your writing is so Hawaiian."

His compliment meant more to me than money, awards or any other accolades. So Hawaiian. Those words signaled the beginning of a confidence and gratitude that I was at last finding the Hawaiian: both Hawaiian culture, history and values and myself as a Hawaiian.

That was in 1993. Soon, I hit a stride. In 2002 I wrote Inescapably Hawaiian, the last piece in this collection. In retrospect, it represents huliau—another word I learned along the way, which means turning point or time of change. I wrote only two more Hawaiian culture articles after that. The last was the profile of Kapono Souza, The Long Walk Home.

In the months following its publication in 2004, I felt in my na‘au—my heart and guts—that I was done writing Hawaiian articles, even though I certainly had not written on every possible topic. But it wasn’t until I was arranging the best of my magazine pieces to make the most sense as a book that I saw that I had been working piecemeal on a quilt, and had come to a point where I could see the whole thing.

I am the keeper of a frail antique Hawaiian quilt. My Hawaiian grandmother, Mele ‘Elemakule Pa Bowman, made it around the turn of the 20th century, when the Hawaiian Kingdom had been overthrown and Hawai‘i was being annexed by the United States. Her fragile, hand-stitched quilt lies folded in a suitably antique trunk, where I see only a small part of it. The red cotton design portraying leaves of the ‘ulu—breadfruit—has faded, and its white background has yellowed with a century of age. The old cotton batting shows through small puka where the fabric has simply disintegrated.

The quilt is too delicate to keep out. And yet, one day, a year or so after I wrote about Kapono Souza and his huaka‘i, I laid that quilt upon my bed where I could see the whole thing. That night I slept under it.

Just recently I have seen that I had been stitching a figurative quilt folded over my lap, words substituting for bits of fabric, my pen working as the needle. With that last story, I metaphorically laid the quilt of words upon my bed and saw my work as a whole. In some places this quilt remains unfinished, but it is complete enough.

The magazine articles and essays are pau because I am at that huliau, a time of change. But with every end comes a new beginning. The pieces here are the gift of the huaka‘i, for me, and for you. They are roots, and with the care of a calm and grateful heart, flowers and fruit are sure to follow.

Sally-Jo Bowman

Keala-o-Ānuenue, The Path of the Rainbow

2008

1

Heart of the Matter

Grief, healing, blood ties and discovering what’s important

ALOHA, ANUHEAs

1997

Her name was Anuhea. The last time I saw her, she had given me something as important as life itself. But it took me 40 years to accept it as my own.

In Hilo in May of 1995, I met Hawaiian kūpuna Aunty Abbie Napeahi and Uncle Howard Pe‘a when I was researching an article on the spiritually based Hawaiian family counseling process ho‘oponopono. Aunty Abbie carefully explained the steps of ho‘oponopono, from finding the core problem to forgiving all parties involved and cutting loose from the pain. And then, partway through the interview, she gently shifted the focus from ho‘oponopono to me.

Aunty Abbie asked me to lay before them the problem deepest in my heart, the one giving me the most pain in my life. In my mind I quickly reeled through classic candidates: Money. Marriage. Family. None of them seemed to warrant ho‘oponopono.

Then I did the bravest thing I’ve ever done. For the first time, I named out loud the gaping, lifelong hole in my heart: Although I am Hawaiian by blood, I’m not sure I am a worthy Hawaiian.

I told them my Hawaiian school’s mission had been to turn us into haole. My haole mother and Hawaiian father both had done the same.

My mind reeled off more reasons: I knew no more than a couple hundred isolated words of my language. I didn’t even look very Hawaiian. My Hawaiian grandmother had died when my father was a baby, and no one ever passed down to us the knowledge of our guardian spirits, the ‘aumākūa. Pain flooded me as if I had ripped a bandage from an open wound.

I did not voice my last, dark secret: I didn’t have a proper Hawaiian name, one my family gave me. Without a Hawaiian name, I thought I had no lineage, no place with my ancestors, no heritage: I was nobody. The fact had burst forever into my consciousness when I first enrolled at Kamehameha Schools in the seventh grade. Unlike public school, where my class had only three Hawaiians, all 400 girls at Kamehameha were Hawaiian. Almost all my classmates had both English and Hawaiian given names.

In 10th grade, in the fall of 1955, Anuhea Nahale-a brought my problem to the surface. She and I, and about 40 other sophomores, boarded in Dorm K at the top of the Kapālama Heights campus.

About four o’clock one rare afternoon when we were free from the dorm’s scheduled after-school tasks like washing and ironing, Anuhea asked me to cut her hair. She’d asked me to do this several times before, though we weren’t in the same academic section and didn’t know each other very well.

That day she sat in my room with a towel clipped around her neck with a wooden spring clothespin. As I snipped at her unruly waves, she said, Eh, what’s your Hawaiian name?

I could barely admit I didn’t have one.

She said matter-of-factly, I give you one. She didn’t speak again until just before the haircut was over. Keala-o-Ānuenue, she said. The Path of the Rainbow."

The name was beautiful, in sound and in concept. I didn’t dare ask why she chose it for me. I loved it. But in the back of my mind I thought I mustn’t use it because my parents hadn’t given it to me. "Keala-o-Ānuenue felt kapu to me. I would be a thief to call myself The Path of the Rainbow. So I didn’t use the name. But I couldn’t forget it.

After we graduated, I went away to college in Minnesota, where people thought Hawai‘i was a foreign country. Occasionally, one of the more worldly people asked me about my Hawaiian name. Keala-o-Ānuenue. The Path of the Rainbow. And I explained that Anuhea had given it to me, aching in my heart because it wasn’t a real name. The ache became bigger—an elusive, ghostly void. By the time I was 30, sometimes I wept from the chronic pain, but still I did not know its source. I had moved to Oregon and was visiting Hawai‘i more often—a mixed blessing, for in Hawai‘i I was far more likely to meet someone who would ask the dreaded question that had become the symbol of my grieving heart. I could lie and say I didn’t have a Hawaiian name. But I wanted my name. Yet, each time I spoke it, I always added the disclaimer: I got the name at school.

I mentioned none of the name agony to Aunty Abbie and Uncle Howard. My doubtful worth as a Hawaiian was enough.

Now the room filled with Aunty Abbie’s mana, her life force, her spiritual power. I felt like I was swimming safely in a deep ocean of no-nonsense love.

You must stop blaming your parents and your school, she said, touching my arm and looking deep into my puka heart with her wise eyes. Look at what they did give you. They gave you the power to write, the power to do your work. Let go of the blame. And never use it for an excuse again.

Instantly I felt myself do exactly as she said. I began to weep in relief. The time had come for the puka to heal.

Uncle Howard asked my Hawaiian name. Keala-o-Ānuenue, I said, barely able to speak. Oh, yes, The Path of the Rainbow, he replied, calmly accepting something I hadn’t been able to accept for myself. Tears poured down my face. And then Uncle Howard and Aunty Abbie folded me up in their arms and their hearts and told me the name was a special gift—a gift of honor, a name I had grown into, for I had become a writer with the power to touch people’s hearts, a writer who writes about Hawaiians, who are the heart of the rainbow.

And then they said, Welcome home, Keala-o-Ānuenue.

In the weeks that followed, I came to understand that 40 years earlier, on the day of the haircut, Anuhea had given me the answer to the question I had spent my life asking myself: Who am I? All I had to do was grow into the answer, bare my heart, accept the truth of the gift. Now I can speak the simple answer. I am Keala-o-Ānuenue.

I know now in my heart that our Hawaiian names are metaphors bundled in multiple meanings that we grow into. However we receive them, our names are a means by which we know we belong to our homeland, our ’āina.

My name is Keala-o-Ānuenue, The Path of the Rainbow. Anuhea died in 1981 at age 41. To this day I still thank her for the name I have become.

OUT FOR BLOOD

1999

Kailua twilight. Beneath mauve clouds in a pale sky, my niece stands in ceremony in the sand, marrying a Boston Irish man. High tide surges just beyond the lau hala mat under their bare feet.

The roar of the surf snatches most of the words, bits of Robert Frost, American Indian wisdom and Hawaiian chant.

I rejoice for my only Hawaiian niece and for her Irish man. But my heart sorrows, too, here on the sand where both she and I grew up, for she is our fourth generation to out-marry.

Ninety-five years ago—1902 in Haili Church in Hilo—her great-grandmother, Mele ‘Elemakule Pā, married the first Bowman, an adventurer from Ohio. And on that day in April, our family stepped onto the long, muddy ti leaf slide to ethnic oblivion. I am in no position to chide my niece. I am not merely the pot calling the kettle black. I am a double-boiler pot, for I married haole men twice. Some in our family have married part-Chinese, part-Korean, part-Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese. In 95 years, only one besides my grandfather married a full-blood Hawaiian, only a few married other part-Hawaiians. If my niece has a child, the keiki will be only 1/16 Hawaiian.

I weep with this thought. But I am of the age of weeping, and she is not. Only the older heart seeks the past and worries about the future.

Our Pa lineage has gone the way of most Hawaiian families. Now we have so little blood quantum, we don’t think about land entitlements. But I do think about blood, especially since last year when Office of Hawaiian Affairs kupuna Betty Jenkins told me this story:

Her job-hunting son, perhaps in his mid-30s, had recently asked her to compose his résumé. She did a singular job. He came to look it over. The computer design looked great. The information sang his praises well. But he pointed to the last section: Personal Data.

I don’t like this. It says I’m a quarter Hawaiian, he said.

The ghost of racial shame flashed in his mother’s mind. But before she could lecture him about ethnic pride, he added, I want it to say ‘Hawaiian.’

Our blood is dwindling. But what about our identity? My quest for answers led to Hawaiian sorrow and anger and pride and, most of all, to the open hearts that are at once the greatest strength of Hawaiians and the very reason for our decreasing blood.

We all know the tiresome political and legal facts: The Hawaiian Homelands Act of 1921 established a blood quantum of 50 percent to qualify for homestead awards on 200,000 acres set aside for that purpose. In 1959, the Statehood Admissions Act ceded from federal to state jurisdiction another 1.6 million acres that had been government and crown lands under the monarchy. The ceded lands are mandated for five purposes, one of which is for the benefit of native Hawaiians as defined by the Homelands Act. Office of Hawaiian Affairs programs funded by ceded lands monies are subject to that same blood quantum requirement, although OHA supports doing away with it.

The original rub has remained the biggest: administration of the Department of Hawaiian Homelands. From the get-go, little of the 200,000 acres was awarded to Hawaiians, and The List (as in waiting list) is something Hawaiians speak of as a bureaucratic rendition of purgatory.

Mindful of 77 years of this, Bill Souza, project coordinator for the Native Hawaiian Community-Based Learning Center at Leeward Community College, said to me, "We’re getting pain and suffering and whimpering and whining. But no mana‘O—no meaning. The political issue ties us up in knots and there’s no reality to it."

Reality. Mana‘o. When you eliminate the morass of politics and law, what does blood quantum mean?

When you have a name like Souza, you’re just it, he says. I just accepted being Portuguese. Never confessed to being Hawaiian.

But about 1983 he volunteered for the advisory board of Alu Like, the Hawaiian job training and social service agency. Later he joined in John Waihe‘e’s first campaign for governor. In places like Kohala and Wai‘ōhinu in Ka‘ū, Hawaiians greeted John wailing. They composed chants that said ’In this time and place someone Hawaiian comes.’ For me, it was chicken skin to be walking with him.

Later Souza joined the Royal Order of Kamehameha— founded in 1865 by Kamehameha V, declared seditious in 1893 by the Provisional Government and reinstituted in 1903 by Prince Kūhiō in a torchlight ceremony at midnight.

Another ceremony put Souza over the top as a Hawaiian: Onipa‘a, the 1993 three-day observance of the centennial of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. At least 20,000 Hawaiians jammed the grounds of ‘lolani Palace, a quantum fact that made much of Honolulu uneasy.

There were SWAT teams on rooftops, Souza remembers. "But there was no need. I was in an ocean of people re-baptizing themselves as Hawaiians. It was a passion play in the streets of Honolulu. It was not evil, nasty or militant, but people finding their place on the soil. Nobody in Kāhala got killed, nobody got robbed in Waikīkī, no one was arrested in the name of Hawaiians. Even then I didn’t know my blood quantum. But I learned that Hawaiians embrace you if you’re even one drop. Are we reading the epitaph of a culture? I think not. In our language classes at Leeward, it’s the hapa-haole who want to regain the heritage. Language is giving them an armament, a mantle of