Archival photos like this one of a nighttime vigil for self-determination highlight cultural turning points in Hawai'i history. - Photos: Courtesy of UH Press and Franco Salmoiraghi

New Mānoa journal charts course of kuleana

By Liza Simon / Ka Wai Ola Staff

Thinking about the future is not so much fun these days. Not with history's hangover of injustice, poverty, genocide and war still staring us in the face and signaling a perpetual imbalance in power that has even bent the axis of the natural world with global warming. But there is a route to a brighter horizon: help one another to give up the burden of grief and move on. This is the premise for a new edition of Mānoa journal, entitled Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination, a collection of essays, poems and plays by elders, tribal leaders, dissidents, veterans, poets and others. The diverse contributors have been through the fires of injustice but speak out in voices unscathed by recrimination or political rhetoric.

The volume is intended to raise the profound question of “how people who have been on opposite sides of historical animosities can find a way to get along together,” said Mānoa co-editor Frank Stewart. The idea that literature can be part of a solution came from Stewart's collaboration with acclaimed essayist poet-philosopher Barry Lopez. The two had met at a conference where South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu discussed his nation's efforts to heal from apartheid by creating a venue where victims and oppressors came face to face and told their stories. “We believe that the stories of literature allow people to listen to each other across all kinds of boundaries, and enter each others' minds and lives with a new understanding,” said Stewart, a University of Hawai'i English professor. He and Lopez took nearly a year to sift through literary works to come up with diverse perspectives on reconciliation. “This is a very complex matter and we wanted to avoid giving the idea that there could ever be a single, simple answer,” said Stewart, who is already compiling a second volume of Maps of Reconciliation.

To bring the theme of reconciliation home to Hawai'i, the Mānoa journal editors invited some noted Native Hawaiian writers and community leaders to contribute their personal accounts of selected cultural turning points – visually recorded in the archival portfolio of Franco Salmoiraghi – a Honolulu photographer who has documented many momentous events in island history – often at the invitation of cultural specialists. Combining Salmoiraghi's images and the Native Hawaiian narratives, the journal editors created three photo essays that provide a soulful lens into the following: the 1993 centennial commemoration of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy that culminated at 'Iolani Palace with a dramatic vigil in support of Native Hawaiian self-determination; a consecration of the heiau at Pu'ukohalā on Hawai'i Island that symbolized resolution of a deadly ali'i rivalry dating back seven generations to the time of King Kamehameha I; the reaffirmation of burial rites that grew out of a challenge to what had become the common practice of resort developers' desecration of kūpuna iwi in the midst of construction projects.

The photo essay on the Honokahua burial site during the late 1980s cuts particularly deep in delivering the profound truth of Maps of Reconciliation. Several Native Hawaiians, who have since become familiar faces in many local activist causes, have contributed to the essay their recollections of turning anguish into action and finding unexpectedly positive outcomes. “People whose culture it is were able to begin to make the decisions about what happened to these important sacred places,” Dana Naone Hall writes in spare but heartfelt prose that has its monumental counterpart in Salmoiraghi's black and white portraits. Other activists, including Charles Kauluwehi Maxwell Sr., add their narratives of stopping the developers, forcing changes in state land policy and forming burial councils for repatriation of remains. This helped to revive of the protocols necessary for reburial of iwi, as recounted in a portion of the essay contributed by local writer Jocelyn Fujii, who describes the making of funerary kapa cloth, a practice that had been eclipsed in the past century of Western dominance. These events made news stories 20 years ago and made it apparent that change was sweeping through the Native Hawaiian community.

But the news was really about invisible changes. This is the point of the Honokahua essay – and of the entire volume – a reflection on the courage and compassion required to go forward without destructive detours into continual cycles of blame and rage. A passage by Edward and Pualani Kanahele depicts the events of Honokahua unfolding in this way: “In one sense, Honokahua represents balance, for from this tragedy came enlightenment: the realization by living Native Hawaiians that we were ultimately responsible for the care and protection of our ancestors…” It is a passage that echoes the Hawaiian sense of kuleana – perhaps one of many helpful roads to travel in Maps of Reconciliation.