Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 10, Number 11, 1 November 1999 — ʻIKUWĀ [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ʻIKUWĀ

40 'lkuwa i poha ko'ele'ele, 'ikuwa ke kai, 'ikuwa ka hekili, 'ikuwa ka manu.

"'lkuwa is the month when the dark storms arise, the seas roar, the thunder roars, the birds make a din." - Olelo No'eau #2390

ĪRUE TO its name, 'Ikuwā is being a dynamic and bombastic month. The storm whieh settled over ka pae 'āina Hawai'i this week brought mueh needed and weleome relief to ka mokupuni o Keawe. At Kahuku, Ka'ū, rain records indicate this to be the driest year in more than a eentury. At Ka'ūpūlehu, Kona, the storm brought to us fully two of the nine inehes of rain whieh have fallen thus far this year. Already, the island is blushing with emergent greenery. The roaring seas have not yet found our shore, but upon my return from Washington, D.C., I arrived to smoke plumes billowing to the heavens and fire roaring across the land. At Pu'uwa'awa'a, stands of kauila and lama and wiliwili and individual 'aiea and halapepe and maua whieh survived the 1986 fire, burned, turning the deep night incandescent orange and pink. If the 1986 fire burned the best of the last remaining kauila - lama forest at Pu'uwa'awa'a - this 1999 fire eonsumed a significant remainder.

There are those who contend that it was the decimation by the fires of 1986 at Pu'uwa'awa'a and 1993 at Ka'ūpūlehu that assured the 'aiea and kauila places on the Federal Register of Endangered Species. Halapepe is now poised for a plaee on the Register, and destruction such as that whieh raged the other night assures it. As awful as the roaring fire's destruction, was to behold, the greening after rain is

awesome in its own turn. But this greening is a little less rich. Introduced, opportunistic species recover quickly and spread easily across the landscape and those plants that are Hawai'i maoli nō do not. The loss of native Hawaiian species depletes global biological diversity. And, while the genetic material may be clinically preserved, naturally

occurring plant eommunities cannot. Īhese plant eommunities serve as landmarks along ahupua'a boundaries and for fishing koa; they are where Kū assumes a verdant form and they are named wahi pana. From the kauila, implements of war and agriculture were fashioned, the i'ekuku of the kapa maker as well. Its eompanion, the 'aiea gives its name

to places on O'ahu and Hawai'i. Their eompanion, the halapepe, was standard upon the kuahu hula. These and their companions are the things from whieh our ancestors fashioned our material culture. Culture, in the vital, not elinieal sense of the word. The consumption of these physical attributes of our culture by a physically

destructive force offered a remarkable contrast to the rhetorical nature of the tensions manifest in Washington, D.C. There, the contest of words was an exercise in civil conduct, no roaring or bellowing. This contest of words has been described as in the best briefed case of the Supreme Court term so far. Prolific writing notwithstanding, I wonder if those who will decide the case understand that "Indian" is a misnomer applied to the natives of a land a half a world away from India and that before "tribe" became memoriahzed in the Constitution, it was applied arbitrarily to describe the social groupings of that mistakenly named people. In a contest of words, the meanings of those words are the mightiest of weapons. To argue persuasively, shared understanding of what is meant by those words is essential. If the debate bogs down, stuck on whether or not we are Indians and whether or not we lived in tribes, the thing that we and Samoans and Chamorrans and Alaskan Native and Indians too have in eommon may be lost. We are indigenous. ■

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