Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 21, Number 12, 1 Kekemapa 2004 — Hawaiian-style H [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Hawaiian-style H

| With the arrival of the Holidavs comes a tide

a selective sampling of recent Haw

o£ t&e Sto*m Three decades of Hawaiian poliūeal struggle are documented with haunting power in photojournalist Ed Greevy's Kū'ē

By Sterling Kini Wong In 1967, photojournalist Ed Greevy arrived to a somewhat politically docile Hawai'i. Four years later, a druggle lead by locals to stop a pig farm

from being turned into a residential development in Kalama Valley touched off what would heeome known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Through his camera's lens, Greevy watched as this movement unfolded and eventually intertwined with the burgeoning antieviction and anti-militarization struggles. Together these movements would ultimately help to shape the political environment in Hawai'i over the next 30 years. Greevy's book Kū'ē: Thirty Years of Lanā Struggles in Hawai'i is a collection of some of his most poignant pictures taken from the era. Activist and Hawaiian studies professor Haunani-Kay Trask provides the text for the book, whose name means "to protest." "These are the images that historians 100 years from now will want, not those thousands of pictures of beautiful volcanoes that romanticize and mythologize Hawai'i," Trask told KWO at a Greevy photo exhibit in June 2003. "These are people in extreme conditions. They're going to be evicted; their houses are going to be smashed. But Ed was always respectful, very unobtrusive in photographing them as human beings in their resistance and, in many cases, their defeat." Some of Greevy's most memorable images document the impact the state's eeonomie transition from agriculture to tourism had on loeal people. As resorts and wealthy developments began to spring up, longtime island residents, many of whom were Native Hawaiian, faced the prospect of eviction. Greevy's portraits of these people gave them a face and an identity to be viewed by outsiders who too often saw the less fortunate as just statistics. "The dignity of the

homeless is always denied," Trask writes in Kū 'ē. "In fact, the homeless are like all the rest of us: people with hopes and dreams, struggling to survive in a capitalist society." Greevy also documented the pivotal moments that defined the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, from the struggle to stop the military's bombing of Kaho'olawe and Mākua Valley to demonstrations against the construction of the H-3 freeway, whieh would eventually destroy numerous native historic and sacred sites. But for all the impact Greevy's images have had on the movement, his motive for starting them was surprisingly simple. "I went out of curiosity," Greevy told KWO, "and my polilieal understanding began to awaken." ■