Haunani-Kay Trask : THEORY QUESTION 2 : How important is it to develop in your students an understanding of “voice”?

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Transcript

Yeah, you can't have political power without voice. Absolutely. That's a good way to say it because that's what political power is. It's giving your voice a platform from which to make political, historical change.

See, and that's the thing about writing. Writing is a form of voice, which is a form of power.

So I think that historical record's already been created. And the question is going to be how long I'm going to stick around to fatten it up. But I'll be damned if I want Hawaiians to go through what I went through when I was researching the overthrow(1) and read non-Hawaiians on this period of our history. No. No, you will read Haunani-Kay Trask on this period in history. You will. And you will read her students and you will read other Hawaiians and we will record this period of our history. I don't want to read somebody's report on this period of our history. I don't want to. And we're lucky because we have video and we have newspapers.

But that is the biggest problem for Native people and all oppressed people, is the lack of their own historical voice. When you have a voice, you are making history. And if you do not have a historical voice - in however way you want to identify that voice - you are missing at least a part of your history. You have to record that voice. You have to. You can't just record it in actual struggles of the people because how are we going to know they struggled?

And that's where I think Gramsci(2) and Marx(3) and all of the people who wrote theory, they wrote theory not just because they were thinking of their own moment, but because revolutionaries are always thinking of the future. The revolution is the great golden dream, the dream of the future, that the revolution will become reality and freedom will set us free. 

So all of us are in this great river of resistance. All of us - Che(4) and Castro(5) and Rosa(6) and Lenin(7) and all of us - we're all in it.

So we all have to do something to leave behind that record, even if it's a small one. Even if it's a small record, we have to do it.

Why would I, a Hawaiian woman, sit there and read Subcomandante Marcos - "from the Lacandon Jungle…?”(8) I just love that. You know, why do I read it? So that I can take strength from their struggle, from the struggle of the peasants. That's the value of writing, not just for your own people, but for that great unknown river of resistance out there. And I definitely think of myself that way. I am part of that great stream of resistance.

The Palestinians.(9) Every time I give a speech, I mention the Palestinians or try to. And of course, I get attacked all the time. All the Jews in the audience stand up and attack me. So what? I try to mention the Palestinians, I don't always because it's not, you know, because the moment isn't quite right, but you have to sort of connect yourself to other people's contributions. And that's one of them.

Because I went to school at a great time. It's a terrible time for students to be going to school. It's so reactionary. God, when we went to school, it was Mao(10) and Che and Castro and Hồ Chí Minh!(11) My God, everybody was just… it seemed like the world was full of revolution!

Notes

(1) The overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: The U.S. military in support of a small group of white businessmen overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893. In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaiʻi, without a popular vote and against the expressed wishes of the Hawaiian people. Today, Hawaiians are wards of the federal and state governments.

(2) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): Italian revolutionary, Marxist theorist, and general secretary of the Communist Party in Italy (from 1924 until 1928, the date of his arrest and life-imprisonment). While in prison Gramsci wrote extensively on history, education, philosophy, politics, the state and civil society, Marxism, and Americanism. These writings have been published as Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s original contributions include the concept of “organic intellectuals” and their role in revolutionizing society, and the concept of hegemony, both political and cultural, as reflected in cultural and political domination.

(3) Karl Marx (1818-1883): German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary, his most widely known works were written with Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894) - in which history is analyzed as a result of contradictory economic forces and the resulting war between the ruling classes and the subordinated classes.

(4) Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967): Marxist Latin American revolutionary leader and author of the influential book Guerrilla Warfare. Originally offering his services as a medical doctor during the Cuban invasion, Che soon became widely known for his effectiveness as a military strategist and leader. He served in the new Cuban government with Castro as head of the National Bank of Cuba, the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), and the Department of Industries, until leaving to fight in the Congo and later Bolivia, where he was captured and executed by the U.S.-backed Bolivian Army in 1967. Che’s image has become a symbol of oppressed peoples' fight against imperialism.

(5) Fidel Castro (b. 1926): Cuban lawyer, social activist, and revolutionary who led an armed popular uprising that overthrew the corrupt U.S.-backed regime of the dictator Fulgenicio Batista in 1959. He has served as head of socialist Cuba for over 40 years, during which time he nationalized industry, developed collectivized agriculture, and enacted policies to benefit laborers and peasants, while actively providing economic, technical, and military support to many countries throughout the Third World.

(6) Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919): A German socialist and revolutionary, Luxembourg fled Poland for Switzerland in 1889 to avoid imprisonment for her political views. In 1898, she moved to Germany and soon became an influential member within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). She participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and later cofounded the Spartacists, the organization which would later become the German Communist Party. She took part in an uprising against the German government in 1919, for which she was arrested and later murdered by German troops. Her written works include The Accumulation of Capital (1913) and The War and the Workers (The Junius Pamphlet) (1916).

(7) Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924): Founder of the Bolsheviks, leader of the Russian Revolution (1917), and first head of the Soviet Union (1917-1924). Two of his most important works are What Is To Be Done? (1902) and State and Revolution (1918).

(8) Subcomandante Marcos (b. 1957): Spokesperson of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), an indigenous uprising formed in response to over 500 years of colonization and genocide of the Mayan Indians in the Chiapas region in Southeastern Mexico. The Zapatista declaration of independence was delivered on January 1, 1994 - the same day NAFTA (North American Free-Trade Agreement) went into effect. The Lacandon Jungle has continued to be a focal point of the conflict between the EZLN and the Mexican government. 

(9) Palestinians: The indigenous people of Palestine. Since the creation of the settler state of Israel, the Israeli government has waged a war of extermination against Palestinians. As a consequence, millions of Palestinians live in exile. Israel continues to deny Palestinians-in-exile their “right to return”. The most important American client state in the Middle East, Israel is the largest beneficiary of American foreign aid, receiving nearly $39 billion in the period of 1990-2001 alone.

(10) Mao Zedong (1893-1976): Also Mao Tse-tung. Chinese theorist, revolutionary, and founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, serving as the country’s first head of state (1949-1959). He was also instrumental in leading the Long March (1934-1935), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), the founding of communes, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969).

(11) Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969): Vietnamese revolutionary, nationalist, and first president of North Vietnam (1954-1969). His army defeated France in the French Indochina War (1946-1954), and later the United States and the U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1954-1975).

Excerpt from What Do You Mean "We," White Man?

To bewildered non-Natives, it may not be clear why we Natives are so upset about [fabrications of history written by Western anthropologists and archaeologists] or even what infanticide, feudalism, and tuberculosis have in common as descriptions of pre-haole Hawaiian society. Suffice it to say that these fabrications, when taken together, form a tidy racist profile of a people who, in Western thinking, are primitive (because they practice baby killing), backwards (because they have feudal land tenure), and diseased. The value of this description, although false, is simply that Western impact is then seen to be beneficial for Hawaiians, since it meant an end to infanticide, the liberation of private property, and the excusing of diseased Westerners, like the celebrated Captain Cook, and the resulting massive depopulation of Hawaiians. I could go on with this list, which also includes other myths and other inventors from fields like history, demography, and politics. But the point has been made: when it comes to Natives, negative statements are eagerly believed with but the thinnest of evidence or none at all because of the general racist belief in Native cultural and physical inferiority.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. page 130.)