Posted by Pinky.
Bunny just posted a new homepage picture and I wanted to share some background information about it.
The landscape photograph was taken at the Pali lookout on the island of Oahu, a site very popular with tourists. When you stand at the lookout and face north you have an expansive view of the windward side of the island, and it's just breathtaking. The site itself is all concrete and railings, with a large parking lot and hundreds of tourists coming and going constantly.
It gets pretty crowded. We took this photo by standing on a wall. Most of the tourists were from Japan and the United States but we also met people from all over Europe, China, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
We thought it was interesting that a lot of the people took photographs of the sign that had a picture & explanation of the landscape spread out in front of them, but hardly anyone actually stopped to read it. Average time looking at the sign must have been something like 10 seconds or maybe even shorter.
Here's a close-up of the sign (below, click on it for a much larger version).
In the distance (right side of photo) is Mokapu peninsula. This was, and continues to be, a sacred place for Native Hawaiians - with ancient fish ponds, springs, archaeological sites, burial sites, temples... However in 1918 the peninsula was seized by executive order of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and given to the U.S. military. Now Mokapu is occupied by a very large U.S. Marine Corps Base, which of course sits directly on top of the aforementioned everything.
In Hawaii there are 10,000 other stories that follow this kind of logic. Our upcoming Hawaii-episodes will try to explain how Hawaii became a colonial holding of the United States of America, and at the same time we'll try to talk a little bit about some of the consequences and future implications that arise when one nation tries to erase another. I'll post updates on our progress here in my diary (a.k.a. "blog") for those of you who are interested in stuff like that.
~pinky
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Posted by Bunny: If you want to see something crazy, go check out the Marine Corps Base Hawaii's website (example screen capture here below). They actually have the nerve to talk about protecting and respecting sacred Native Hawaiian sites even as they bomb, build on, dump on, dig up, burn, or otherwise destroy hundreds of sacred sites throughout Hawaii. The photo of the burial mounds at Mokapu now transformed into a military golf course just blows my mind. They have no shame. ]
