Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 27, Number 2, 1 Pepeluali 2010 — Memories of a bygone Hawaiʻi offer lessons for the present [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Memories of a bygone Hawaiʻi offer lessons for the present

By Liza Simon Public Affairs Specialist t is commonly known that kūpuna are wise. Now comes a new book that reveals their wisdom — in their own words. Talking Hawai'i's Story: Oral Histories ofan Island People presents us with interviews of 29 people who eame of age in Hawai'i before World War II. Though they hail from diverse ethnicities, they all depict the hardscrabble nature of Island life back

then. But don't expect their voices to be bitter or full of hlame. On the contrary, they speak of the past with unselfconscious ardor for the fellowship of family and neighbors and the bounty of food they worked hard every day to harvest from Hawai'i's land and oeean. Sample, for instance, these lines from the book spoken by Henry K. Duvauchelle about Moloka'i in the 1930s: "The younger children, well, maybe we took care of the garden. . . . If you wanted vegetables, you had to raise your own. And if you had a friend who had vegetables that you didn't have, and you had something he didn't have, then you made exchanges." This type of eommonsense comment about the routines of daily life recur in the book, suggesting that the interviewees played the hand they were dealt in life with gratitude and grace. At the same time, these kūpuna avoid casting Hawai'i's past as the good old days. From Japanese and non-Japanese eome painful accounts of struggling to eope with the U.S. govemment's intemment of

Japanese Americans at the dawn of World War II. From Native Hawaiians eome the wrenching stories of the territorial government's repression of Hawaiian culture, language and land rights. Still, they did more than survive all these challenges; they got through with their dignity intact, as exemplified by this account by Emma Kaawakauo about growing up in Waikīkl. To begin with there is her charming description of a favorite childhood pastime: playing for hours with makeshift stilts assembled from large coconut cans smeared with the tamarind fruit's sticky sap that glued bare feet to tin-can surfaces. As a teen, Kaawakauo worked at the Lalani Hawaiian Village on Kalākaua Avenue, where she performed hula and Hawaiian music, pursuits she says were frowned upon by Kamehameha Schools, where she was a student. By the late 1950s, she found herself alienated by the rapid urban growth of Honolulu. She recounts how her father - like many in Waikīkl, had been duped by an unscrupulous developer into giving up the family's land without receiving proper compensation. On a recent bus ride into Waikīkī, she confesses to feeling resentment at seeing the high rise-armored beachfront. "Generally, I don't feel this way. ... I don't mind change all that mueh really. In a sense, it's just like, 'Oh, I remember Waikīkī when, and it's part of me. It's too bad that's not part of you.' " Frugality, adaptation, generosity of spirit - these are just some of the traits that Kaawakauo and other members of Hawai'i's Great Depression Generation honed by necessity. Yes, they made mistakes and handed down a world, at times, fraught with limitations and loss - such as the loss of land as described by Kaawakauo. If they only knew then what we know now. But isn't it time we listen to their compelling 20/20 hindsight? Here, it has been preserved and just in time to offer hard-to-ignore wisdom to all of us in the Great Recession Generation. Credit for this important and timely act of historical preservation goes to Hawai'i's Center for Oral History. The book is based on the center's archives of transcripts of interviews with dozens of Hawai'i residents born in the first three decades of the 20th century. This is but one of the center's many projects that may help us avoid the all too eommon mistake of embracing outsiders' versions of Hawai'i's unique history. For the true history buff who wants to really know the past's inHuenee on the present, the book's original voices may be more powerful - and certainly less deniable - than a tome of historical fact. ■

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Talking Hawai'i's Story: Oral Histories of an lsland People Editors: Miehi KodamaNishimoto, Warren S. Nishimoto, Cynthia A. Oshiro University of Hawai'i Press 328 pages, $19