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.
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