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Books for all seasons

By Liza Simon / Ka Wai Ola

Time was when the Hawaiiana section of bookstores was filled with cookbooks and kid books mostly penned and published somewhere on the U.S. continent. A look back at this year's Ka Wai Ola book reviews – beginning with the provocative and timely release of University of Hawai'i law school professor Jon Van Dyke's Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai'i – indicates that a healthy pipeline of insider writing by Hawaiians and Hawaiians-at-heart is flowing straight from contemporary native experiences into every conceivable published genre, including the previously skimpy category of scholarly research with Kanaka Maoli perspective. Below is a quick look at the flurry of year-end releases indicating that even if keiki and cookery remain core categories, the range of Hawai'i writers has become wide enough to merit dropping the quasi-corny Hawaiiana label in favor of something that reflects a probing native intelligence committed to pepa.

Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation
in Contemporary Hawai'i
By Ty P. Kāwika Tengan
Duke University Press, $22.95 (paperback) $79.95 (hardback)

The journey of Native Hawaiian men in a post-colonial world is an important but little-known dimension of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance dating back to the 1970s. This insider report from Ty P. Kāwika Tengan – a Maui-born Native Hawaiian professor of ethnic studies at UH Mānoa, documents the soul-searching efforts to integrate ancestral warrior ethics with contemporary leadership qualities. As part of this, Tengan highlights his eyewitness accounts of milestones in reinvigorating many male-dominated traditions such as 'awa ceremonies and lua. While he veers to academic analysis, he doesn't shy away from sharing compelling mo'olelo about native men's struggles to overcome alcoholism and abuse, which he contextualizes as programmed self-destruction taking place under the yoke of cultural loss and colonialist oppression. The book concludes with neither a sad nor happy ending but the expressed hope that this struggle-in-progress will bring healing to the Hawaiian community.

Naupaka
By Nona Beamer; illustration by Caren Loebel-Fried; Hawaiian translation by Kaliko Beamer-Trapp
Bishop Museum Press, $14.95, Proceeds benefit Bishop Museum

The Naupaka story can be likened to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, except the star-crossed lovers in the Hawaiian legend are fated to be memorialized as perfect halves of island blossoms that flower in the mountains and by the sea. The late Hawaiian cultural leader Nona Beamer has gifted us her version of this poetic tale in both English and 'ōlelo Hawai'i in a beautifully illustrated volume and an accompanying CD featuring music by Keola Beamer. Written for keiki but full of appeal for “children of all ages,” this is a pleasurable sampling of Aunty Nona's beloved Hawaiian artistry.


Sublime Beauty: Hawai'i's Trees
By Jim Wageman, with foreword by Chipper Wichman
Bishop Museum Press, $49.95

In Sublime Beauty: Hawai'i's Trees, photo images of trees speak volumes about human presence (or the lack thereof) in the Hawaiian Islands. Jim Wageman's stunning photographs are arranged chronologically, beginning with descendents of the hardy species that hitchhiked here in a previous geologic era via wind or ocean currents. Then come portraits of trees of spiritual and physical sustenance – notably breadfruit and banana, introduced by the first Polynesian voyagers to make landfall in the Hawaiian archipelago. Next, the book depicts Hawai'i's explosion in botanical diversity – also the cause of the disappearance of some earlier endemic species, resulting from in-migration of Europeans. The book underlines a call for more conservation by including 'ōlelo no'eau and a forward written by Chipper Wichmann, director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, on Kaua'i and Maui. Too heavy a tome to be a field guide, the book nonetheless presents a glorious rendering of each root and leaf, perhaps intended to get us to climb aboard the conservation bandwagon the easy way – via passion for the sublime but fragile beauty that surrounds us.

Hā'ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors
By Carlos Andrade
University of Hawai'i Press, $30

Carlos Andrade, an accomplished slack-key artist and college professor, zooms in the ahupua'a of Hā'ena on his home island of Kaua'i, but his overarching theme – relevant to all Hawai'i, is the powerful sway that the 'āina holds for every element of native life, from kinship to mental and physical health to political activity. While land is the book's focus, Andrade includes plenty of little-known stories about Hā'ena's Kanaka Maoli. An especially resonate chapter chronicles the hopes and struggles of the Hā'ena hui that resisted land privatization and exercised cooperative rights in the district all the way until the 1950s.

Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the
Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity
By J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
Duke University Press, $22.95

The 50-percent Hawaiian blood quantum classification gets a drubbing in this scholarly book by a Kanaka Maoli author who discloses her own pain of getting pigeon-holed as “being less than half” – a label at odds with her embrace of Hawaiian identity. As with the personal so goes the political, as J. Kēhaulani Kauanui sets out to prove that the U.S. legal system's equating of Hawaiian cultural identity with blood (starting with the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act) has subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and perpetuated colonialism's politically painful stranglehold in Hawai'i. A heavy read but a timely and important resource, given ongoing court challenges to native entitlement programs labeled as race-based by opponents who apparently haven't a clue about indigenous identity.

Between the Deep Blue Sea and Me
By Lurline Wailana McGregor
Kamehameha Publishing, $15

This is the tale of a high-powered museum curator drawn back to her Hawaiian roots by the death of her father and ultimately into a journey of self-realization and expanded cultural consciousness. Author McGregor, who has written documentaries that wrestle with the theme of native identity, told an interviewer that she wanted to try her hand at fiction after seeing how the Maori-made film Whale Rider resonated with native peoples around the globe. Fiction it is, but this debut novel covers a lot of real life ground–land, culture and spiritual guardianship, perhaps giving credence to the old adage of literature fans, which says if you really want to know the facts, read a good piece of fiction.