Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 7, Number 4, 1 April 1990 — A mainlander's plea [ARTICLE]

A mainlander's plea

To the Editor: I was iust reading in my L>ecember OHA news paper about the hearings on the mainland, It made me cry. 1 iust want to say that I am one of those mainland Hawaiians who feel& exactly as des cribed — although I have lived on the mainland since 1 left for college in 1958, Hawaii is home both physically and spiritually. The older I have beeome, the more bound and rooted I feel to my homeland and culture. I eome home as often as I ean. I attended Kamehameha in an era when the schools tried to make us haole. Twenty years later 1 felt compelled to search delibera*ely for my roots. With all that I learned, I wrote a thesis for a master's degree in journalism at the University of Oregon (1984). It was called "On fhe Winds of Kanaloa: Rebirth of the Hawaiian Culture." Since then I have been doing considerable freelanee maqazine writing. and I now try to include some Hawaiian fopics eaeh vear. In 1989 I wrote about Punana l.eo preschools for Aloha magazine and the Christian Science Monitor nahonal news- aper. This year I am doing a profile of Unele Bill Sproat for Honolulu magazine. I hope in this wav I ean help the rest of the world hn' w about why our culture, nnd other native eultures that have been battered by colonialism, is important not only to us, but to the world. Mueh of mv family still l<ves in Hawaii. Mv brother was Pierre Bowman, the late Star-Bulletin writer My uncles include Wright, the eanoe builder and woodworker, and Pierre, whose first fame eame playinq football for Oregon State and who later was with Kohala Suger. My dad was Moffett. Being Hawaiian is most important to me. And I believe that having some of us away from the homeland, living in accordance with Hawaiian values, is a benefit to the world Please don't forget us in Hawaii Nei. With deepest aloha, Sally-Jo Bowman Springfield, Oregon