A Living, Breathing History

We have been like sharks lately, in constant movement. We are consumed by showing up, standing up, filling in, and speaking out.

A couple weeks ago, Jonah expressed that as much as he wants his new program to succeed, as important as his actual paying job is, he wants to ACT. He wants to find the next rally, he wants to go to the mauna, he wants to bring people together and engage in discourse. All of us echoed these same sentiments. All of said weʻd been less engaged in other activities so that we could focus on this one.

I woke up this morning with Kumu Hinaʻs words on my mind. "No can, but can. Hard, but not hard. Tired, but not tired." She, too, is pulled between at least these two inclinations: to stand for the mauna and her people and to go to work. For anyone who has a family, a job (or two or three), and other daily responsibilities, it can be super difficult to carve out time and energy for these other activities. For those of us in education, I know many of you, including my own family (my joke is that education is the family business), are preparing for the upcoming school year. Weʻll have meetings to organize and attend, lesson plans to put together, classrooms to arrange, and materials to prep. And because we do these things with utmost care because we accept the great responsibility of raising intelligent, free-thinking, compassionate children, we feel conflicted: I should be doing school work, but I really want to write this blog/attend this rally/listen to this speaker/watch this YouTube video/read this article/go to the mauna.

Because of my own fervor, Iʻve lost out on sleep. Tired, but not tired. Iʻve spent time away from my family. Hard, but not hard. Iʻve felt unequal to the task of telling my own stories, and felt close to useless in this movement. No can, but can. Even now, three hours after I woke up, Iʻm hungry and thirsty, and yet taking the time to make breakfast and coffee seems like too much time away from this. I woke up with "No can, but can. Hard, but not hard. Tired, but not tired," running through my head and I flew to my desk. I had to jot down my thoughts. I donʻt speak Hawaiian, I donʻt work the land, and I donʻt fish. But I can tell stories, and telling stories is how I serve.

What has been a particular source of irritation for me is this false dichotomy being disseminated over social media and has not been contradicted (although I have found allies in some unusual places) by traditional news media: if youʻre against TMT, youʻre anti-science. It is a slogan that resounds over the inter webs, being spouted by every lay person who thinks itʻs clever. Youʻve seen this play out in a number of ways, most recently in todayʻs paper in which the pro-TMT organizers claim that their rally was to show that Hawaii "appreciates astronomy" and that "Hawaiian culture and science can coexist" on the mountain. If thatʻs all they were doing, weʻd all be standing on the same side of the road. What in my protest demonstrates that I donʻt appreciate astronomy or that I donʻt believe culture and science can coexist? And, perhaps more importantly in my mind, what about your pro-TMT stance suggests that you appreciate astronomy or value Hawaiian culture?

I know that many people living in Hawaii can look at our past and sympathize. You can see the injustices that took place and feel disgust and sadness-- you can see the loss. You can identify who our champions and allies were by name at various points in our history and feel pride and amazement for what they accomplished. You look at this historic struggle with sympathy and might even wish things had been different, but you think itʻs all in the past and that nothing more can be done. You might even wish you could have been there during that time so you could help change the tide, but you canʻt because itʻs history.

What you might not recognize is that we are living history RIGHT NOW. I know it looks different from the 19th century or the 20th century, and you donʻt think of yourself as a George Helm, say, or Loretta Ritte, but here we are. You might not be able to see the importance of your own actions or of those around you, or you might think your efforts to be so small as to be insignificant. You might not see that the tools that were used against Hawaii (tools that were long used by imperialists throughout time and geography) so many years ago are the same tools being deployed today. They might look a little different-- there was no Instagram back then-- but look, and youʻll find the ideological apparatus in play.

Those who stand to benefit most from the construction and operation of the Thirty Meter Telescope are not scientists. I hope you understand this. People who support the construction of TMT-- the people commenting on Facebook posts-- are not the universities and countries backing the TMT. Those who will benefit from TMT have invested tons of money because they stand to make a ton of money. Do you really think their primary motivation is scientific discovery and exploration? They have a lot at stake and will dedicate large quantities of their resources to see it done. They can influence politicians and control the flow of information. They can hire outside agencies to sow discord and lies. This is not paranoia or a conspiracy theory. They use whatever tools are at their disposal-- including the everyday people who support TMT-- to get what they want. What scientist would want their TMT under these circumstances?

My struggle is not against the telescope, science, or technology. I struggle against Business As Usual practices that utilize racism, propaganda, and the repressive state apparatus. I fight against those who would use those tools of oppression to marginalize my voice and all minority voices whether they be indigenous or female or something else entirely. I struggle against profit at the expense of the environment and the well being of the people.

But you donʻt have to take my word for it. Iʻm always learning, and I encourage you to keep your heart and mind open to new and different ideas. Weigh them, question them, and be willing to change your opinion. This is how I like to approach knowledge-gathering:

1. Come humbly without expectations. Remember that even though we all come with our own knowledge, you donʻt have to always exert your knowledge. You donʻt have to be the loudest voice in the room. In fact, you donʻt even have to be a voice in the room. You can listen. You can be silent. You can observe. Humility is not weakness, it is strength.
2. Ask questions, especially if you donʻt know or understand, and LISTEN to the answer. Chew on it. Mull it over. You donʻt need to react, especially if what youʻre hearing is new information.
3. Consult a variety of sources, including those that support your opposition. Get the fullest picture you can. Look beyond traditional news sources. Talk to people, watch documentaries and YouTube videos, listen to podcasts. Find as many primary sources as you can. When articles refer to a study or poll, find that study or poll and read it for yourself. 
4. Use your brain. Be skeptical, be curious. Question what you read or hear-- does that sound true? Who stands to benefit? Where is the money coming from and where is it going? Where are the women? Draw your own conclusions based on the evidence you find. Come up with your own unique perspective.
5. Remember, even after you gain more confidence in what you know, revisit your own values and opinions. Be open to changing your mind. I hated lima beans when I was a kid because, clearly, theyʻre disgusting. And then Charlie made them in a different way and I realized okay fine, maybe theyʻre way less disgusting than I remembered.
6. Finally, talk stories! When I was writing a paper and got stuck on a point, Iʻd almost always talk to Charlie. Whether we agreed on something or not didnʻt matter because either way it helped me discover and articulate my point, even if I wasnʻt sure what it was before we started talking. At different stages of writing this blog, I spoke with Shelley, and that served as kind of more brainstorming. This little 6-point checklist might not have happened if it hadnʻt been for her.

I hope you see that my goal isnʻt to get you to think like me. My goal is to encourage you to seek knowledge, continually and circumspectly. I am an educator and I advocate for education. I donʻt expect you to agree with me, but I hope that if you do disagree, especially about TMT, that you come to me with an informed argument. Donʻt tell me you think TMT is good because science or jobs. Donʻt tell me to educate myself, which is generally good advice but irrelevant to this particular discussion. Might as well tell me to breathe or blink. Show me your evidence because I might find it so compelling as to alter my way of thinking.

With informed discourse, we can broaden the conversation and perhaps better understand each other and the issues at hand.

Mauna, ʻOhana, and Finding My Way

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to be Hawaiian. What makes me Hawaiian? What makes anyone Hawaiian? What makes anyone anything? I obsess over this in a way that I don't over being Chinese or Japanese. I even wrote a blog about it recently.

And these are contentious times. Check out your choice of social media, open a newspaper, visit local news websites, and what do you see? Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians are standing up for what they believe, protecting the mauna, and preserving the places that our people have held sacred since the beginning of everything. It is as good a place to start as any.

I spent this past weekend on Maui. We had a family reunion to attend, which provided an excuse to take a vacation. It was Charlie's first neighbor island experience and our first real family getaway. It was a wonderful adventure, and highly instructive. Two significant things happens on this trip, the first being that we went up the mauna, Haleakalā.

If you've ever been to Haleakalā, you know what the drive is like. It's long and winding and takes you through a landscape that is mostly unknown and unseen on Oʻahu. You see vast tracts of land that are untouched by concrete and pavement. You see cows, goats, and horses. You see large swaths of greenery and houses with spaces between them. You see a sky that is limitless and stretches beyond imagination. Once you get to a certain elevation, the clouds are beneath you and instead of more road or land, you only see sky beyond the edge of the road. It is scary and exciting and otherworldly.

And then you reach the top. There's a parking lot and a couple of Visitors Centers with restrooms and trash cans. There's even parking stalls for buses, though who would ride a tour bus up the mauna, I don't know. Like with most tourist destinations, there are signs that tell about that place and what ancient Hawaiians did there. I wish I had thought to tell the guard at the front charging $25 a car to get in that we were there to pray because pray is what we did. In our way.

I thought of those Hawaiians-- my ancestors-- and how they walked up the mauna. They didn't have cars or roads or buses, and they weren't charged an entrance fee and then given access to a toilet that flushed. They walked. Can you imagine that trek? The summit of Haleakala is at over 10, 000 feet above sea level-- that wasn't a vacation, that was a journey. And when you reach the top, the world is different.

People say it's like being closer to God, being up that high, and when you're there, it's easy to understand. You're so high up that the ocean looks like sky and the sky fills your vision. You might just be literally, physically, geographically closer to God if you believe in God and that God's home is in the sky. You also see the landscape, which is so different than what you see catching the bus to work or riding your bike along the beach. On the way up, there are rolling greens, for sure, and you'll pass through forests of trees, but there's an invisible veil it seems and once you're through, there are rocks and cinder cones and brown. And that's only one part of the mauna. It is vast and humbling. It is haunting and otherworldly. It doesn't taste like chicken.

Not long after we communed with the mauna, we descended into Kula for our Ikua Purdy family reunion, and this is where the second significant thing happened. This biannual tradition began in 1994, the year I graduated from high school. We camped at Ulupalakua that year, the ranch where my great-grandpa Ikua worked and died after returning from his Wyoming trip. The monument in Waimea had not yet been erected and Ikua was not yet in the National Cowboy Museum Rodeo Hall of Fame. It was hard for me to tell if anyone beyond our family knew who he was.

So we returned to Maui this year, and the first thing that happened when we got there was they corralled all the Kukuna (great-great grandkids) for a photograph. Now, if I were really a picture person I would have been all over that opportunity, but I wasn't so I don't have a copy of that yet. But believe me, they are plentiful. Got choke. And they were lined up behind all twelve of the Hua (grandkids) who attended, which is my dad's generation-- the closest living generation to Ikua. And my cousin (fellow Hua ʻŌpiʻo) was on the microphone talking about honoring our ancestors while also raising up the future-- and how did we want to do that? How were we going to do that?

And then in a moment of pure clarity, it made sense to me. What does it mean for me to be Hawaiian? Family. It was as simple as the words my cousin just spoke: how would I honor my ancestors and how would I raise the future? It wouldn't matter what language I spoke, what historical dates I remembered or celebrated, or what I studied in school. How would I use my talents, skills, and gifts to honor the past and build the future?

I don't know what's taken me so long to come to the realization that action alone is not enough to define who I am-- it is, at least in part, informed engagement. It is how I strive to serve, to better my community, using the tools I have. I might not speak Hawaiian or dance hula or work the land, but I can still contribute and I can still learn. After all, I descend from navigators, warriors, and cultivators. My great-grandfather traveled to Wyoming and returned home a champion. I draw strength from that (and yes, I wrote a blog about that, too), so what do I give back?

I cannot say that this is my final answer to the question of what it means to be Hawaiian. It's a topic I keep coming back to. But I know that my Hawaiianness, which can only be defined by me, is fundamentally tied to the people around me and the places we occupy and hold sacred. I might not have a personal stake in either mauna, yet I am a child of both: Ikua made his livelihood on the slopes of Mauna Kea and Haleakalā. Further, my Hawaiianness isn't a badge or reward and it won't necessarily gain me entrance to the more selective Hawaiian circles (they exist, I've seen them), and that's okay. All I really hope to do is understand myself and be as good a person as I can manage.

Remembering Dmitri Mendeleev

One of my ongoing goals has been to read through the entire periodic table, one element a day. If you know me, you're likely scratching your head, wondering why I'd take an interest in chemistry. I don't know. I just realized toward the ending of May that I have a deficiency and wanted to correct it. I can do anything, after all, including read short blurbs about things I should have learned in the 11th grade (and likely did but forgot).

Click here to find the table I've been reading.

You can also download their app for your mobile device, available in the Apple app store or Google Play.

I started this one element a (week)day thing in June beginning with Hydrogen and moving horizontally through the periods, and I'm only doing weekdays because I don't usually journal on the weekends. Come Monday, the next element is Calcium.

And I considered keeping notes on what I read or trying to commit their atomic symbols to memory, but that just seemed like work. Too much work, really, and not a lot of fun. The idea wasn't to become an expert in the elements, just familiar with them. So, I just read. I read about the element's uses and properties and its history, which, as far as I'm concerned, is plenty. For example, at the beginning of the table, near Berylium and Boron, Charlie and I were watching the HBO mini-series, Chernobyl. Imagine my excitement at the overlap! Practical application of knowledge learned!

But knowledge for knowledge's sake is fun, too. Did you know that 5% of the US's production of electricity goes toward the manufacture of aluminum? According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, anyway. I also wowed Charlie (with information he already knows) when we stood under the Hawaii Theatre's marquee and I said, "Only the red lights are actually neon, you know." And so what if he already knew that? So what? I didn't know that before a few days ago, and I feel pretty proud of myself for knowing it now.

Dmitri Mendeleev