Mālama ʻĀina and Ea in Shark Dialogues and The Watcher of Waipuna
Kiana Davenport and Gary Pak are contemporary literary voices of Hawaiʻi, diverse in background and style. Davenport’s novel Shark Dialogues offers a sweeping, dramatized account of Hawaiʻi’s pre-contact history from the perspective of four female, ethnically diverse cousins, while Pak’s short story "The Watcher of Waipuna" immerses the reader/viewer in the dialogues and conflicts of people confronting the modern form of the historic problem of native and local land dispossession, the sprawl of urban, suburban, and resort development. What unites these works is their exploration of the intimate relationship between many native and local people and the land, and the role that this relationship plays, not only on the well-being of people and the environment, but also its centrality in identity formation for Hawaiians, and often for other non- native locals as well. Ultimately, Davenport and Pak tell stories of Hawaiian resistance; resistance that is rooted in the Hawaiian principles of mālama ʻāina (care of the land), aloha ʻāina (love of the land), and ea (life, breath, sovereignty).
Shark Dialogues begins with an introduction to a Hawaiian kahuna, Pono, and her four granddaughters, “hybrids of the new world” (182). Davenport uses the lineage of the four women to sweep through a century of Hawaiʻi’s history and to introduce the reader to the many diverse cultural influences that have impacted Hawaiʻi over the past century and shaped the social structure in the literary present. Davenport explores a diversity of themes having to do with Hawaiian history, and her characters represent a wide range of beliefs and experience.
A unifying undercurrent to the diversity portrayed in Shark Dialogues is the importance of the relationships between each character and the non-human environment. Davenport affords lavish detail to the descriptions of setting in the novel, particularly to the scenes where her characters are interacting intimately, or having a spiritual experience involving the land and sea surrounding them.
Davenport prefaces Shark Dialogues with an excerpt from the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian Creation Chant, re-interpreted by Rubellite Kawena Johnson. The chant begins with the creation of life on earth from energy in space, and continues to list in great detail the life forms that follow, extensively covering those creatures found in the ocean, then moving on to the land. This shows a concept of creation that closely relates to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as other, more recently commonly accepted theories of how the earth and life on earth came into creation. Johnson notes however that “their intent (Hawaiian priests) was simply to relate a newborn chief of high social rank to his ultimate origins in earth’s very beginnings, at a point where all prehuman forms of nature and human life are but common kindred.”
The inclusion of this chant shows how different the Hawaiian worldview was from the European (and American) expansionist ideology of dominion. They viewed the other members of the biotic community as genealogical extensions of themselves, as family not just in a vague philosophical sense, but as literal, distant relatives. “Gods, plants, animals, even stars appear in the Kumulipo.” states Noenoe Silva, quoted in Cari Kapur’s Rights, Roots, and Resistance, “The presence of all these within the genealogy of human beings expresses belief in the familial relationship of Kanaka Maoli to all other life forms in the environment. This genealogical world view gives rise to the particular form that love of nation takes in Hawaiʻi, which is aloha ‘āina (love of land)” (2004:102 - Noenoe Silva)
The themes of aloha ʻāina (love of land) and mālama ʻāina (care of the land) extend throughout the novel and are exemplified in Pono, whose name translates loosely to “goodness, morality, well being, righteousness, duty, and true condition of nature” (wehewehe.org). Pono is depicted as being a kahuna, and exemplifies the genealogical ties to nature that the Kumulipo describes, in that she is literally part shark and has shape-shifting abilities. “Huge sharks suddenly bladed along beside her, playful, amorously nudging her…in the eyes of one of them she saw her reflection: a white tipped reef shark, powerful in size, moving like a bullet” (Davenport 102).
Pono’s strong ties to the historic role that land has played in the Hawaiian struggle for sovereignty are further evidenced in the fact that her name is reminiscent of the phrase “ua mau ke ea o ka ‘āina i ka pono.” This phrase is currently the motto of the Hawaiian state government, and is commonly translated as “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” The phrase was made famous by King Kamehameha III on February 10, when sovereignty was re-established in the islands after an attempted overthrow by English captain Lord Paulet. Because of the circumstances, many believe what the King meant by "ea" (a word that has remained heavily influential in modern sovereignty activism), was not referring just to land, but more specifically to sovereignty. February 10th is still recognized as Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea, or Sovereignty Restoration Day (Kapur, Lee, examiner.com).
In Nation Rising, Noelani Goodyear- Kaʻopua cites ea as the defining principle of the otherwise diverse contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty movement. “Ea can be seen both as a concept and a diverse set of practices that make land primary over government...ea is based on the experiences of people on the land, relationships forged through the process of remembering and caring for wahi pana, storied places” (4). It is appropriate then that this principle be most extensively embodied by Pono, who connects all of the novel’s most vital characters, and allows Davenport to provide her readers with a sweeping account of Hawaiian history and resistance to repeated dispossession of land and culture. The novel serves as a useful introduction for a non-local with little background on Hawaiian history to be able to access contemporary literary voices such as Gary Pak and Alani Apio, whose work is also characterized by the importance to local people of aloha ʻāina, mālama ʻāina, and ea.
The early history of the novel is told through the eyes of Kelonikoa, a Tahitian runaway princess and the grandmother of Pono, who establishes Davenport’s themes of aloha ʻāina and mālama ʻāina as means of resistance and identity. “She was a woman of the sea, and in the sea was solace. She cast off shoes, petticoats and stays…she lost the language of humans, hearing only wildlife, the sea’s rhythms…she resembled a creature half human half fish” (Davenport, 37). Through Kelonikoa, Davenport asserts the commonly held understanding that the beginning of the modern situation of Native displacement from land has its roots in the Great Māhele of 1848, by which missionaries insisted that the ʻahupuaʻa method of land stewardship be replaced with a capitalist approach to land ownership. “Kelonikoa understood the Great Māhele, or land division of 1848, officially separating Hawaiians from their land, had been the true death knell of the people.” Kelonikoa then goes on to be among those who gather in protest of the illegal overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani, singing “Mele Aloha ʻĀina, Song of the Land We Love.” Davenport includes this chapter for its historical importance, and also as evidence to combat the falsity long propagated by the U.S. that Hawaiʻi was willingly annexed.
This intensity of resistance appears again generations later in cousin Vanya, who near the end of the novel, becomes involved in a disorganized act of revolutionary violence in the literary present. Of the four cousins, Vanya identifies most strongly as a Native Hawaiian. She has comparatively little outside cultural influence in her formative years, and is described as looking more Hawaiian than the other three cousins. Through the practice of law, Vanya dedicates her life to fighting against the onslaught of corporate development that is the major modern cause of indigenous displacement.
Due to her activism, profession, and involvement in international conferences on the rights of indigenous peoples, it is possible that Vanya is meant to represent Haunani-Kay Trask, a radical leader of the contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty movement and author of the book From A Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Native Hawaii. In this book Trask states that “Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual and material relationships with the lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources which they have traditionally occupied or used, and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard” (Trask 35). Race plays a vital role in the political discourse of Trask and in the thoughts and dialogue between Vanya and other characters in the story. In videos of Trask’s speeches she make reference to “the Americans” as the “enemies” of Hawaiian people, thus implicating that American or white individuals are as much the enemy of Hawaiian people as the structural inequalities and ideology of dominion inherent in the capitalist system of government. Vanya displays an abhorrence of white people, initially hating herself for her relationship with haole Simon, and often experiencing tension with her predominantly haole cousin Jess over her whiteness.
Jess provides a stark contrast to Vanya. She feels enormous anxiety over her identity, and is somewhat frightened by Vanya’s militancy, despite supporting and sharing in her most fundamental goal, which is to protect and recover the relationship between Hawaiians and the land. When Toru, who interestingly is not Hawaiian by blood, convinces Vanya to join him in revolution, Jess entreats them both to remain with her on the farm, where she expresses mālama ʻāina by tending to the land and supporting neighboring farmers. When Toru is questioned by Simon as to his belonging to the land and to the sovereignty movement, Toru responds with a genuinely felt if controversial statement “I was born here, that makes me Hawaiian…My broken bones, my blood, are in this soil…I don’t even own the shack I live in. You see, I deserve ten acres, because I killed for it. I slaved for it, in a system that wants to keep us slaves (Davenport, 410).
It is important to remember that racism and reactionary race hate, while both undesirable, are very different. One is the systematic oppression of people deemed inferior or fundamentally different from the dominant group based on biologically fraudulent theory. The other is the lashing out at members of the dominant group by members of the oppressed group as a means of resistance to exploitation, despite the fact that it is very likely that in most cases individuals in the dominant group will have more in common with individuals in the oppressed group than they do with a minority of major power holders who continue to perpetuate racism as a tool to maintain staggeringly unequal power structures.
Alani Apio explains this difference in the case of Hawaiʻi in his essays Kanaka Lament and A Thousand Little Cuts to Genocide. “Using racism as a tool of power and control, America classified Kanaka (Hawaiians) as a race of people instead of citizens of an overthrown nation. This divided the Kanaka community within itself, and Kanaka from the larger Hawaiʻi community” (Apio). This is an important response to accusations of the contemporary sovereignty movement being racist for its nearly exclusive focus on native Hawaiians as opposed to locals in general. These essays are a platform for Apio to criticize legislation aimed at dismantling the few official attempts made to preserve the ability of native Hawaiians to maintain ea and right to the land. “The issue of a stolen nation and oppressed culture has been turned into an issue of race – not by Hawaiians, but by America. And in doing so, it effectively uses its own laws, ideology and mythology to confuse the issue and make it appear that even the half-hearted attempts at reparations, like OHA [Office of Hawaiian Affairs] and Hawaiian Homelands, are wrong and racist” (Apio).
In her 2005 dissertation Rights Roots and Resistance: Land and Indigenous (Trans)Nationalism in Contemporary Hawaii, Cari Costanzo Kapur discusses this same theme from a research based approach, citing the Great Māhele of 1848 as a foundational event in the privatization of land in Hawaiʻi and ensuing displacement of Hawaiians. She then discusses the importance of kalo cultivation, and by extension traditional methods of farming and interacting with the land, “in the revival of Hawaiian cultural practices, the fight for indigenous rights, and, interestingly, the “rootedness” of not only native Hawaiian identity, but also the “rooting” of non-native local identity in the islands” (Kapur 84).
Kapur’s observations about Hawaiian land based identity, and Apio’s analysis of the criticism against Hawaiian Homes, seem to suggest that it is necessary to find a legal method of Hawaiian identification by which people can be ensured access to land and water besides the blood quota, which is based on racist imperialist ideology. In Native Daughter Trask states that “Indigenous people have the right to belong to an indigenous community or nation, in accordance with the traditions and customs of the community or nation concerned.” This could mean a revision of land laws and distribution based on Hawaiian principles in regards to community and land use, rather than the present model. That being said, while Apio does not contest or directly address Kapur’s claim that many non-native locals strongly identify with, and make a positive contribution to the land and the community, it is implied in his writing that it is necessary in the contemporary sovereignty movement to distinguish between Hawaiians and non-native locals. This is because the politics and socio-economic situation of the present are so influenced by the highly racialized past in which native Hawaiians as a group have been systematically oppressed and dispossessed of their homeland, and because the strong sense of spiritual identification with the land that so many locals feel stems from a specifically native Hawaiian worldview which is of vital cultural importance to Hawaiians in particular.
By elevating nature to such an important role alongside other major themes in Shark Dialogues, such as the evolution of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, Davenport highlights not only the importance of land rights in the struggle for indigenous peoples’ survival and cultural preservation, but also drives home how deeply the Hawaiian people’s connection to the islands is felt, and how the wisdom of nature surpasses politics, class, and race.
The principle of ea also provides a unifying thread between Davenport’s Shark Dialogues and Gary Pak’s The Watcher of Waipuna, a tale that chronicles one local family’s struggle against the pressures of corporate development and local displacement. Pak delves into the themes of family dynamics, connection to place, and loyalty to the land, including its people. In building character identities, he seldom makes direct references or explanations as to ethnicity except in the case of the haole and Japanese businessmen who are set on coercively seizing and developing protagonist Gilbert Sanchez’s land. Gilbert is a fisherman who has served in the U.S. armed forces, spent much of his life taking care of his aging parents, and has a deep and innocent sense of trust in, and commitment to his family, his community, and the place where he grew up. He is perceived by the community, and by his sisters in particular, as being crazy, particularly because of his habit of talking to himself, and his difficulty with understanding the world outside of his own, personal reality.
Pak’s work can, in a sense be considered activist literature. It captures the frightening slickness of wealthy developers who aim to profit at the expense of people and the non-human environment. His writing also depicts the natural world as a mysterious and living force, conveying a sense that the land and those who belong to it are extensions of one another, and allies in resistance to exploitation.
Pak’s choice of appointing his protagonist as the “Watcher of Waipuna,” a title handed down to him from Nakakura-San, an elder fisherman and veteran who had taken the title onto himself to protect the community from the constant threat of the mysterious and amorphous “frogmen” (likely a reference to the history of the strong and often damaging U.S. military presence in Hawaiʻi), makes reference to the Hawaiian word makaʻāinana, or “eyes of the land.” Used to describe farmers, fishermen, and artisans in Hawaiian society, “makaʻāinana” is among at least five different words in the Hawaiian language used to describe a person’s relationship to the land, and is further evidence of the important role that this dynamic plays in the spiritual and genealogical identity of Hawaiians (125). The parallel between the protagonist’s newfound title and the phrase “eyes of the land” solidifies Gilbert’s role in the traditional Hawaiian perspective of humans and the land being mutually supportive and protective partners in life.
This mutually supportive and protective relationship is emphasized in the plot by events that portray nature as an active party stepping in on behalf of Gilbert and the community in preventing the land from being developed. Lucy, who in the beginning of story supports her sister Lola in attempting to legally usurp Gilbert’s land rights in order to get the property sold, experiences a call to consciousness when a mynah bird shits on her shoulder, and then she gets caught in a baptismal torrential downpour on her way to Gilbert’s house to warn him about the legal proceedings (69). Lucy’s protests come too late, and the land is zoned for commercial development. Even so, a series of ensuing natural occurrences prevent this development from being carried out. “Strange things starting happening in Waipuna. For one it poured for three days straight. It rained so hard that people could not get out of their homes” (83). This deluge is followed by an onslaught of tadpoles, and eventually the company that bought the land forecloses and leaves.
The Biblical reference to the flooding, and pestilence in the form of an onslaught of frogs, is not the only reference Pak makes to a melded spiritual connection between people and the environment. When Nakakura-San first passes on the responsibility to Gilbert of being “dah Watcher of Waipuna” he reminds the younger man: “Remembah dis - Gilbert - dat we only dah – dah small kine Watcher - dah Big Watcher – das dah one – who really run dah show – Respect him” (68). Pak uses Biblical language to describe the characters’ relationship with place not only to convey a sense of the spiritual importance of the land, but also as evidence about how different religions have come to shape spiritual identity in Hawaiʻi.
While the authors discussed are wildly different in style, genre, and background, they all convey a similar message: a sense of struggle against the physical, economic, and spiritual outcomes of what University of the West Indies professor Horace Campbell calls the “ideology of dominion” that characterizes international politics and regards the land, and often people as disposable non-entities to be possessed and used for profit rather than to be respected and worked with. This is a struggle encountered by indigenous, as well as local people the world over, and as is the case with many resistance movements, the specific political aims of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement are presented in these literary works as being splintered and somewhat amorphous. It is difficult in any case to have a strong adherence to and analysis of a political situation that does not yet exist. What is unique about the case of Hawaiian resistance is evidenced in the unifying themes of these pieces of resistance literature, and is the strength of the foundational principles of mālama ʻāina, aloha ʻāina, and ea. As Hawaiʻi moves forward in resistance efforts that have such a strong base in ancient wisdom, the results could serve as an inspiration for many island communities facing the struggles that come with a severed relationship to the land caused by a colonial history and corporatized present.
Works Cited:
Apio, Alani. "Kanaka Lament." Honolulu Advertiser. Sunday March 25, 2001. Web.
Campbell, Horace. "Reflections on the Post Colonial Caribbean State in the 21st Century." Social and Economic Studies 54. March 2005.
Davenport, Kiana. Shark Dialogues. 1994. Print
Goodyear-Kaʻopua, Noelani, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright. Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements For Life, Land, and Sovereignty. Duke University Press. 2014. Print
Kapur, Cari Castanzo. Rights, Roots and Resistance: Land and Indigenous (Trans)Nationalism in Contemporary Hawaiʻi. 2005. Print.
Pak, Gary. The Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories. 1992. Print
Trask, Haunani–Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press. 1999. Print.
