By the last third of the 20^th century, there were significant strides taken politically and economically to begin a process of change in the culture of shame in Hawai‘i. There was growing recognition of the injustices of the system suffered by the Hawaiian community and a real movement to try to find a sustainable path of transformation in the face of the significant challenges that community continued to face.

The State of Hawai‘i assumed the management of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, a federal agency overseeing the 200,000 acres of lands set aside by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 for Hawaiian agriculture and home ownership.

The 1978 Hawai‘i State Constitutional Convention created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), a semi-autonomous agency to manage the ceded lands the federal government had received from the government of Hawai‘i for the benefit of the Hawaiian community. The trustees of the organization were to be elected by ethnically Hawaiian voters. In the area of education, health, and social services, the Hawaiian delegation in Washington led by Senator Daniel K. Inouye and Senator Daniel K. Akaka pressed for significant resources for the Hawaiian community. Leaders such as Myron Thompson also helped to funnel tens of millions of dollars into educational, health, and social projects aimed at improving the state of Hawaiians.

Innovations such as Hawaiian language immersion schools emerged to revitalize interest and use of the Hawaiian language. Hula, Hawaiian music, and traditional crafts found growing interest in the community while a renaissance of traditional celestial navigation and long distant voyaging focused on the iconic vessel Hōkūle‘a.

All these activities brought Hawaiian issues into day to day discussions and pride to the community. Significant federal funds were used by the Bishop Estate/Kamehameha Schools system (a creation of the last Princess of Hawai‘i, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, using the significant land resources she bequeathed) to develop innovative extension programs to address the significant educational deficit Hawaiian children had in their schooling. Myron Thompson also joined with other Hawaiian leaders to create the Hawaiian Health System, a series of clinics that focused on the needs of struggling Hawaiian families. All of this was brought to a crescendo by the amazing Congressional Apology Resolution U.S. Public Law 103-150 of the 103^rd Congress enacted on November 23, 1993 admitting to the injustice of the seizure of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i on January 17, 1893 and the collusion of the United States government in that illegal act.

It seemed that the culture of shame was on life support. Unfortunately, life has a tendency to be much more complex than we are usually expecting.

Despite all of the above positive changes and investment in social issues, the plight of the poor Hawaiian family remained in place. The waves of alcohol and various drug addictions brought devastation to many. The traditional family structure of the Hawaiian people continued to fragment under the unrelenting pressure to conform to “western values and western perspectives” on life and community. For many families, the roles of kūpuna and the moral authority of the church were slowly abandoned and the commitment to ‘ohana (extended family) became strained. Hawaiian ethnicity was less and less tied to a clear set of Hawaiian cultural and values.   Young Hawaiians were increasingly able to go away for higher education, but they were also less liable to return with their skills to build the lāhui, and their skills were often lost to benefit communities on the mainland. A friend and student of the Hawaiian language and people, Dwayne Steele, once noted that “as Hawaiians experienced prosperity, they became less Hawaiian.” They escaped the culture of shame by leaving their culture.

The stats for the past several decades attest to the persistence of dysfunction in Hawaiian communities despite hundreds of millions of dollars of social investment. Not a pretty sight.

Data source: State of Hawai‘i Department of Human Services, “A Statistical Report on Child Abuse and Neglect in Hawaii” 2000-2015 reports

 

Source: Prison Policy Initiative, http://www.prisonpolicy.org

These questions emerge, “What have we not recognized in this struggle to defeat the culture of shame? How do we move forward towards true transformation and the creation of a healthy and resilient lāhui as we seek to sever the tap root of this plague on the Hawaiian community?”

I don’t pretend to have anything other than some suggestions for areas we can focus on to bring transformation to the community and weaken the culture of shame in our midst:

…We can define what we believe is our “nation,” our lāhui. This means producing and refining documents that capture the heart of who we are. The ‘Aha convened by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs passed the Native Hawaiian Constitution on February 26, 2016, which provides a foundational document for the Hawaiian nation. It provides a legal step in the building of the community into a nation. The implementation of its provisions remains to be done.

 

…A corollary to the constitution is the clear articulation of the values that will drive our community and the development of the means to help people understand how these values impact their lives and perspectives on contemporary issues. How does “being a part of the Hawaiian nation” set us apart from our non-Hawaiian colleagues and friends? How do the values of our lāhui change our political, social, economic, and community behaviors?

…Let us inventory the resources Hawaiians have and then select foundational areas for cooperative, calculated, and measured investment in transformational change. Areas that rest on the top of my list are early education programs integrated with family education to prepare our young for success and our families for the successful stewardship of our keiki (children). I can think of no other areas of social investment that would result in such transformational building blocks for our community. Achieved measured outcomes in such an investment in our children and families really put in place a sustainable foundation for lāhui.

…Cultural investment is another area of initial importance to our community and to the eradication of the culture of shame. Language and the understanding of our heritage have provided us with windows to self-esteem and positive identification. Understanding the chemistry of the culture of shame will help us as a people to avoid the stereotypes and attitudes that have kept us crippled by this shame in the past, as we step into the future.

It is obvious that these steps are only part of the road to burying the culture of shame. Each of us individually needs to catalogue what bits and pieces remain in our lives and intentionally work on changing or eliminating them. Our children should be challenged to be servant leaders as they move into adulthood and become clear and positive Hawaiian responses to the challenges of contemporary life. We all need to ask ourselves how we are modeling the Hawaiian culture of success to our families, friends and work colleagues. A worthy thought as we enter a new year!

Blessings and aloha to all for this holiday season and for the New Year!

“Mai maka‘u ‘oukou, e ka ‘ohana ‘u‘uku: no ka mea, ‘o ka makemake o ko ‘oukou Makua e ha‘awi i ke aupuni iā ‘oukou!” Luke 12:32

 

I have reflected repeatedly about elements impacting the Hawaiian community throughout my lifetime and during the times of our elders. It is clear that we have struggled to find traction as an ethnic/cultural group in the midst of the tremendous changes beginning in the early 19^th century. Other ethnicities have prospered in the inclusive embrace of the host culture, but Hawaiians to this day continue to suffer from generational poverty and all of the social and physical consequences associated with it. It seems that the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, even other Pacific Islanders such as the Samoan, Tongan, and other immigrant groups, have moved forward while Hawaiians continue to dominate the lower realms of the socio-economic-educational statistics. What drives this reality? How does true transformation take place if we can’t identify the factors that litter its path for the Hawaiian community?

It is very hard, if not impossible, to simply state the factors that lead to socio-economic structures that endure over time. Cultural/ language/ economic/ social/ religious/ military and global power alignments all play roles in the rolling definition of social structures in a cultural clash of this proportion. Despite this complexity, I will venture into a path of trying to block out what the consequences of this clash were during the past two hundred years of interaction between western and Hawaiian societies.

The introduction of western culture to the traditional Hawaiian nation in the latter eighteenth century resulted in huge economic and political changes that transformed the traditional Hawaiian reality. Western imperial interests in the Pacific drew Hawai‘i into the global political and commercial world. The traditional Hawaiian leadership was quickly overwhelmed by ideas and perspectives antithetical to the values and mores of life under the chiefs, kings, and kāhuna. Economic factors overwhelmed cultural values and Hawaiian families were faced with a perplexing decision: how do we ensure the success of our children in a world on wheels going to places we don’t understand? The use of the spoken Hawaiian language was being eroded even as it became a widely used written language. The traditional family, political, and leadership roles were being put into written documents the common people did not understand. Hawaiian agriculture was being replaced by a commercial plantation model and the traditional bond of the Hawaiian people between the land and their rulers was substituted with western land tenure codes and “representational government.”

From this toxic clash of cultures a number of important responses emerged, changing traditional Hawaiian social, economic, political relationships. The dominant economic interest of the Caucasian businessmen pressed them to mold the political system into one that would protect their investments in Hawai‘i and foster their growing interest in entering the global market through the plantation agricultural model. These goals hinged on changing both the traditional structure of ruler/subject relationships (which was basically a social compact between the chiefs and the governed with clear responsibilities to care for each other), as well as the traditional land tenure model that was predicated on the assumption of a strong personal relationship between the land and its user. In this latter relationship, the farmer assumed a “relationship of kinship” with the land and personal land tenure was superseded by the needs of the larger community, led by the chiefs. In the later part of the 19^th century, both of these traditional models were replaced with a western model that gave economic interests and monetary wealth a large say in public policy and as a result, the Hawaiian community was faced with a foreign constitutional form of government and an increasingly intrusive private land tenure system. Traditionally, the land was essentially a relative to Hawaiians; you cared for it, made it prosper, and did not exploit it. However with the change to a western perspective, the land became just another component and input to the economic health of the community. The Hawaiian community did not function well in a plantation setting, so the importation of workers from China, Japan, and later the Philippines, fueled Hawai‘i’s commercial agriculture boom. With plantations taking over, Hawaiians could no longer produce enough food to sustain themselves and the traditional small farming reality faded but managed barely to survive, just like the language, thanks to isolation and poverty.

The traditional Hawaiian language was a threat to this startling shift in the Hawaiian reality, so it was essentially banned and removed as the teaching language in the public schools in 1896. This trickled down to Hawaiian families concerned about the future success of their children and soon the language began to disappear in the home setting. A major foundation of identity and strength for the Hawaiian community was replaced and given a negative connotation in the lives of the people of Hawai‘i. Relationships and responsibilities that the language presupposed were radically “westernized” into a system that the bulk of the native population did not understand.

On top of everything, the population of the Hawaiian community continued its downward spiral from a high of 500,000 or 600,000 at contact to less than 50,000 at the turn of the 20^th century. Diseases introduced from the west ravaged the host population while radical political, economic, land tenure, and cultural changes caused a similar destruction in the culture, stability, and more importantly self-sustainability of the Hawaiian people. All of these combined left a community in search of an identity. The ruling elite of missionary offspring and imported westerners were happy to strengthen the negative portrait of the Hawaiian. Writers like racist Rev. Sereno Bishop (1827-1909), son of a missionary with ties to Lorrin Thurston (a leader in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893), wrote “definitive” histories of Hawai‘i depicting the Hawaiian as lazy, slow, and incapable of caring for themselves. As editor of the influential Christian newspaper “The Friend” from 1887-1902, he held an effective platform in pushing for the annexation of Hawai‘i to the US and furthering racial issues against Hawaiians. As they say, to the victor belong the spoils, and this was astoundingly true when it came to the public perception regarding Hawaiians and their place in their own land. The culture of shame was planted and it quickly became reality.

 

“He ma‘i nui ka hilahila”

Shame is a great disease.  Shame and Humiliation can make one sick to the heart.

– ‘Ōlelo No‘eau #783

 

Throughout the 20^th century the culture of shame strengthened. The Hawaiian language slowly disappeared from everyday use on the streets and in most homes, Hawaiian cultural practices like healing and Hawaiian martial arts faded into practice outside of the public view, while hula became westernized and a part of the Hollywood picture of Hawai‘i and its tradition. At the school for Hawaiians, the Kamehameha Schools, standing hula was prohibited as being too provocative. Hawaiians had lost a sense of their unique roots and cultural traditions except in those areas where contact with the western economy was limited: rural, isolated communities that had limited contact with the economic/political reality of Hawai‘i between 1890 and 1960 (places like Na‘alehu, Kalapana, Miloli‘i, Moloka‘i in general and particularly the east end, Halawa valley, etc.).  These areas were subsistence economies and generally ignored by the ruling elite and therefore were able to preserve the language and some of the traditional cultural practices. In other words, the Hawaiian culture and language were being saved by those deemed in poverty and isolation. When the Hawaiian language revival began in the late fifties, the sixties, and the seventies of the last century, these rural communities were major resources for the movement.

 

(To be continued…)