Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 25, Number 12, 1 Kekemapa 2008 — Books for all seasons [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Books for all seasons

By Liza Simūn Public Affairs Specialist Time was when the Hawaiiana seetion of bookstores was filled with eookbooks and kid books mostly penned and published somewhere on the U.S. eontinent. A look baek at this year's Ka Wai Ola book reviews - beginning with the provoeative and timely release of University of Hawai'i law sehool

professor lon 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 heeome wide enough to merit dropping the quasi-corny

Hawaiiana lahel in favor of something that reflects a probing native intelligence eom-

mitted to pepa.

Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai'i By Ty P. Kōwika 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 eultural 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, whieh he contextualizes as programmed self-destruction taking plaee 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 conununity.

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 mn story ean be

likened to Shakespeare's Romeo and Iuliet, except the starcrossed lovers in the Hawaiian legend are fated to be memorial-

ized 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 Wiehman Bishop Museum Press $49.95 In Sublime Beauty: Hawai'i's Trees, photo images of trees

speak volumes about human presenee (or the laek thereof) in the Hawaiian Islands. lim 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 oeean currents. Then eome portraits of trees of spiritual and physical sustenance - notably breadfruit and hanana, 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 eall for more conservation by including 'ōlelo no 'eau and a forward written by Chipper Wiehmann, director of the Nahonal 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 eaeh root and leaf, perhaps intended to get us to elimh 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 heahh to poliheal 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 eooperative rights in the district all the way until the 1950s. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and lndigeneity 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 lahel at odds with her embrace of Hawaiian identity. As with the personal so goes the poliīieal, 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 Conunission 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 elue about indigenous identity. Between the Deep Blue Sea and Me By Lurline Wailana McGregor Kamehameha Publishing $15 This is the tale of a high-pow-ered 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, whieh says if you really want to know the facts, read a good pieee of fiction. E3

NĀ PUKE ■ B00KS

Photo: Jupiter lmages