Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 10, Number 11, 1 November 1993 — Oral histories: recording the past to educate the future [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Oral histories: recording the past to educate the future

by Patrick Johnston One of the most effective ways of preserving the past is recording stories of people who lived it. With the advent of tape recording technology, researchers and historians have been able to preserve the voices and memories of native Hawaiians who lived in a different time and, in many ways, a different culture. "Elderly native Hawaiian speakers are storehouses of a traditional culture," says Larry Kimura, a language instructor at University of Hawai'i-Hilo who has spent the last two decades recording conversations with kūpuna. "They have the closest ties to the culture and seem to be more knowledgeable about it." Kimura feels recording oral his-

tories is especially important for Hawaiians because it preserves both a record of the past and of the language. He himself used recordings of elderly Hawaiians to study Hawaiian at Kamehameha Schools and, in a radio show he hosted throughout the 1970s and 1980s, invited kūpuna to eome in and speak about the past, all in Hawaiian. "I wouldn't do a project unless it was in Hawaiian," says Kimura. "It's the only way to capture the feel of the culture and the time." Kimura has done a number of oral history projects outside his radio show including one that involved interviewing people who had personal experiences with Queen Lili'uokalani. Explains Kimura, "The purpose

was to catch the personal side of the queen. Eventually we had 30 hours of recorded oral history." Kimura was inspired by the work of Mary Kawena Pūku'i, a pioneer in the field of recording oral histories. In the late 1950s she and Eleanor Williamson began, with the support of the University of Hawai'i and Bishop Museum, lugging around early recording instruments and talking to elderly Hawaiians around the state.

They eventually recorded hundreds of Hawaiians, not only speaking but also performing chants and hula. Says Williamson, "We onee spoke to a man whose father had told stories to folklorist Mary Beckwith 40 years earlier. The retention of the same stories by

the son was amazing. Hawaiians had incredible memories." Since that time hundreds of other individuals have been involved in recording kūpuna. Some of the major players are the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa, Bishop Museum and Brigham Young University. Kenneth Baldridge, past director of the department of oral history at BYU, put together an extensive collection of recorded interviews, many completely transcribed, of old Hawaiian Mormons. Some of the work BYU has done involved talking to the first Moloka'i homesteaders and the distribution of homelands in the early days of the homestead act. The present director, Bill Wallaee, wants to broaden the

scope of the eolleehon to include more of the cultural aspects of the Hawaiian community. "We want to go beyond the Mormon Church and include the cultural side of the people we interview. ... We're trying to preserve the way people talked and lived, in a way validating people's own experience, and having it available for research." The state has gone a step further with the use of oral histories, creating a systematic approach to their use with the hope they ean preserve the cultural integrity of areas where both private and publie organizations undertake projects.

"We use oral histories to supplement our cultural research," says Nathan Napoka, head of the History and Cultural branch at the Department of Land and Natural Resources, "but we approach it very scientifically, very methodically, so we ean bring about development with the least amount of impact on the culture." (See Ali'i dr. story below.) Napoka mentioned a group of archeologists who did a study of Kapu'a in south Kona without talking to any of the loeal people. When they had finished they showed their conclusions to the loeal Hawaiian community only to find out they had misidentified many of the buildings. Napoka explains, "When there is no historical documentation for a certain area, speaking to people ean be very important in minimiz-

Kupuna are storehouses of traditional culture. Photo by Theodore Kelsey courtesy of the Hawaiian Historical Society