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One of the primary reasons for the existence of this club is the preservation and promotion of the Hawaiian culture: its arts, language and history being key components of this mission. As noted in the club bylaws:
Nä Hawaiʻi seeks to bring together people of Hawaiian ancestry with others who share a deep interest in Hawaiian history and culture for the purpose of presenting educational opportunities for ourselves, our children and others. We believe in promoting the Spirit of Aloha by teaching our Hawaiian arts, language and history; sustaining a network of mutual support for each other; and providing a model for our communities through our unique multi-ethnic heritage.
What, though, does it mean to teach, preserve and promote the Hawaiian culture?
To answer that question, we must first define "Hawaiian culture"--and seeking this definition we come to our first nearly inscrutable issue, for when we say "Hawaiian culture", we are talking about Hawaiian culture as though it has remained inviolate and unchanged through the centuries.
If the year was 1777, before Captain Cook rediscovered the Hawaiian island archipelago that had been found and colonized thousands of years before by Polynesian wanderers, we might be able to get away with making a statement like "timeless Hawaiʻi". The Hawaiian culture, despite consolidations in power among the ruling class, was not then terribly different from any human culture that had come before it on the islands. It was rooted in respect for the ʻaina and the moana, upon which the people knew they depended, just as generation after generation before had been.
Every Hawaiian generation that has followed, though, has seen countless cultural changes, from the coming of the white man's diseases, dress, and religions in the 1820s to the changes in land ownership of the Great Mahele of the 1840s, to the gradual shift to a more English style monarchy, including many of its trappings during the entire 19th century, to the large-scale non-native cultivation of the islands from the mid-1800s to the late 1900s, with its attendant influx of workers from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Portugal, and other countries, to the relentless intermarriage between the ethnic groups, which has resulted in the likelihood of the last pure Hawaiian blood by the mid-21st century.
Terry and I just returned from a trip to Oʻahu and Kauaʻi. On Kauaʻi, we saw a recent documentary by Edgy Lee titled "The Hawaiians – Reflecting Spirit". This work, a stirring, professional piece about the link between Hawaiʻi and its indigenous people, focussed on Hawaiians' interconnectedness to the land and seas of the islands, and then told a shortened version of the loss of the monarchy and the multitude of changes in Hawaiʻi nei since first contact with haoles. While I was moved by the film, it made me wonder about what truly constitutes "Hawaiian". Do you have to go back to the days before Kamehameha the Great to touch a truly Hawaiian culture? After all, everything that we call "Hawaiian" after the time of Captain Cook is diluted by a constant stream of other social, cultural, religious, and technological changes--Christianity rather than native gods, Western dress rather than mostly bare skin, constitutional monarchy rather than all-powerful monarchy (or several island-based monarchies), guns, planes and cars rather than laʻau palau and outrigger canoes.
The question then arose in my mind: What Hawaiʻi are we presenting, preserving, and promoting?
Every era in Hawaiian history has both its lyrical and its profane aspects. We celebrate Kamehameha's unification of the islands, but we must also acknowledge that Kamehameha and prior aliʻi were ruthless, part of a culture that made a system of kapu that now seems capricious and cruel, a system which forbade the sharing of meals by males and females and which called for the instant death of anyone whose shadow crossed that of a high chief. In this culture, dance and music (chanting) were the province of men alone, and war was a constant.
Later Hawaiian cultures, increasingly influenced by haole ways, tried to meld ancient Hawaiian culture with those of the newcomers, with some successes and many failures. Many of these efforts, though, come to mind to most Hawaiians when they try to define what constitutes "Hawaiian"--for example, music using Western instruments (notably the ukulele, a combination of the Madeiran braguinha and rajão, and the guitar), male and female voices, many church song themes, and Western harmonies and melodies, dance by both males and females, and a multitude of food items from every ethnic group swept up in the race to plant that made Hawaiʻi agriculturally prominent worldwide.
It seems that when we say "Hawaiian", we are referring to an amalgam of influences, styles, and cultures, not merely an ancient way of life. Like Edgy Lee's focus on the beautiful, interdependent nature of ancient Hawaiians with their environment, we, too, tend to gloss over the rougher aspects of certain Hawaiian epochs and latch onto those elements in each era our current society still considers valuable, both post- and pre-Kamehameha: The grace of women's hula, the power of men's, the beauty of Hawaiian melodies and harmonies backed by ukuleles and guitars, the emotional impact of ancient male chants, the sweet of the crack seed and the salt of the kalua pig.
Consequently, what we are trying to preserve and promote is more than a native culture; it is a culture that has been salted and sweetened by centuries of influences from many others, an intermingled, blended, many-flavored culture. In many ways, it is pidgin, not Hawaiian; calabash, not kanaka.
A good example of this is something that is both familiar to all Hawaiians and yet not originally from Hawaiʻi, something whose source is much closer than many here in Oregon realize. This delicacy is beloved by many Hawaiians, and would be proudly claimed as being local by almost every Hawaiian of the last few generations. However, without help from the Pacific Northwest, it wouldn't exist. What is it? Lomi lomi salmon, of course, which the best research indicates came from a crossing of the Hawaiian culture in the form of Hawaiian workers in Kanaka Village with salmon from the ships moving goods from Fort Vancouver.
Just as the ancient Hawaiian culture was transformed by these outside influences, what we knew growing up as Hawaiʻi was and is changing today on a daily basis. We can't stop this change any more than the kanaka could prevent the overthrow of the Hawaiian Republic. Traffic and construction on most of the islands continue to explode, full-blooded Hawaiians continue to dwindle in number, and land once the province of the aliʻi continues to fall into the hands of non-natives. Not that most of us want or agree with all of these changes--but they are happening, and will continue to happen.
In a time when travel and communications are homogenizing peoples around the globe, it may be folly to think that we can go back to the ancient ways--and we'd have a difficult time coping if we went all the way back to the days of kapu, anyway. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted over two thousand years ago, "Change is the only constant."
It is not folly, though, to hang on to the many wonderful and unique aspects of Hawaiian life through the centuries--the spirit of aloha, the life-celebrating aspects of ʻohana, the wondrous birds and flora found only in Hawaiʻi, the music, dance and food from both ancient and modern Hawaiʻi, the mingled and intermarried peoples and ethnicities, the most harmonious blend of cultures in any state in the United States, and the melodic and often profound language, now written but once an indispensable method of transporting a culture's ideas and ideals orally through the centuries.
As the old Hawaiian proverb puts it, "'Aʻohe pau ka ʻike i ka halau hoʻokani." (All knowledge is not taught in the same school.) In other words, one can learn from many sources, the ancient and the modern alike. Losing any of these sources, through neglect or forgetfulness, forever loses us valuable knowledge and cultural memories we can ill afford to lose, especially in a time when a people who know a lot about aloha and harmony among ethnic groups can provide a good example for people around the world to follow.
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