Haunani-Kay Trask : REFLECTION QUESTION 3 : How do you and your students in Hawaiian Studies understand the significance of your studies and activism at this historical moment?

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Transcript

I have become myself a historical figure, which is very strange. On the other hand, you know, it's like anything else - it's strange and then you go on with your life. So I've come to accept - as everybody else has in Hawaiʻi - that that's the way things are. And if they don't like it, that's too bad.

But what that does for the students is give them a sense of what they're doing in my class. They're no longer there because it's just a class or they're required to take it. They're there because this is a great historical moment and they're a part of it. They're a part of this moment. It's fabulous.

For example, all the students walk differently now than they did when we started Hawaiian Studies. They don't walk like this anymore. They walk like, "Watch out, man. We're Hawaiian." Great! That's the way it should be! You are ʻōiwi.(1) You are Native. It's not just pride. It's a sense of place. You know, you can be proud of your cultural accomplishments, but to have a sense of place grounds you in a way that doesn't ground anybody else. And that's great.

So if our students feel that way and if the general public feels that way, that's fabulous. It's a great achievement. Where is it gonna go? I don't know.

Notes

ʻŌiwi: a Native person; Native things.

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Excerpt from "The New World Order."

This indigenous knowledge is not unique to Hawaiians but is shared by most indigenous peoples throughout the world. The voices of Native peoples, much popularized in these frightening times, speak a different language than Old World nationalism. Our claims to uniqueness, to cultural integrity, should not be misidentified as "tribalism." We are stewards of the earth, our mother, and we offer an ancient, umbilical wisdom about how to protect and ensure her life.

This lesson of our cultures has never been more crucial to global survival. To put the case in Western terms: biodiversity is guaranteed through human diversity. No one knows how better to care for Hawaiʻi, our island home, than those of us who have lived here for thousands of years. On the other side of the world from us, no people understand the desert better than those who inhabit her. And so on and so on, throughout the magnificently varied places of the earth. Forest people know the forest; mountain people know the mountains; plains people know the plains. This is an elemental wisdom that has nearly disappeared because of industrialization, greed, and hatred of that which is wild and sensuous.

If this is our heritage, then the counter to the New World Order is not more uniformity, more conformity but more autonomy, more localized control of resources and the cultures they can maintain. Human diversity ensures biodiversity.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. page 59.)