Fukuda's Chalkboard:
Praying for a Dream: Living in the Hawaiian Culture

Lynne K. Fukuda
Instructor, Institute of Biology, Hawaii Pacific University
lfukuda@hawaii.edu

Growing up in Hawaii and attending the public schools, I feel that we were deprived of a culture and an education that should have been our birthright. One did not have to be Hawaiian by blood, but by love, by belonging, and by will. I am puzzled still, by the foreign-sounding names like Kalanianaole or Waianae that are familiar in sound, but eons away in meaning. Waikiki is flooded by Hollywood-Hawaiian culture that caters to tourists that has very little connection with true Hawaiian culture. Our schools, our businesses, our lifestyles are unHawaiian in much of the modern areas of our islands.

The Hawaiian cultural revival did not occur until the late seventies. It was then that a generation of native Hawaiians found pride in their culture and began to relearn what had been forcibly erased or removed by others. Pure Hawaiian individuals who spoke Hawaiian were as rare as endangered species. No one was allowed to speak, read, or write the language in schools. Ancient hula went underground for a century. Young people grew up never knowing the teachings of the kupunas or their teachers.

In school, we briefly visited the Bishop Museum, the only cultural museum in the state. In class, we studied Hawaiiana or Hawaiian history an a smattering of Hawaiian language for one year of grade school and one year in high school. Although I had Hawaiian relatives and my paternal grandparents had lived as almost subsistence farmers on the island of Kauai where they and their Hawaiian neighbors had lived with electricity until the sixties, I was sadly deprived of Hawaiian culture even while growing up in Hawaii because our schools emphasized the mainstream American culture and its teachings. My father's family however practiced Hawaiian values in their love for all children, in their generosity to others, and the high value they placed on family.

I grew up in Honolulu, at once Hawaiian, and yet another city with buildings, bustle, and pollution. I was more familiar with the asphalt roads, the metal street signs, the 50s buildings with its Mom and Pop businesses, and the small, but peaceful valley of Manoa, my only piece of Aina or land that was my Hawaii. My deeper connection to the Aina, did not come until I did field work with conservation for the Volcanoes National Park on the island of Hawaii where new land formed from the volcanos and the green was not the manicured parks of Honolulu with trees of foreign origin and scrubby pigeons, but the lush natural forests of Ohia and fern and native birds. I found the natural world, the significant inspiration for the songs of the hula, the language, and culture of the Hawaiians and felt at once a part of the land and the native culture.

It was not until I accompanied my professors for a project that I became acquainted with the mission of the Kamehameha Schools that was the inspiration for all young Hawaiians. I had known about the school that was situated on a mountainside with the facilities that was the envy of all school, but I did not know how much the school had shaped many fortunate generations of Hawaiian students. The school and the estate itself had been a gift of a royal princess, Pauahi Bishop, who had no biological children, but considered all children of Hawaii to be hear own. Her generous gift was the gift of a dream. It was for all young children to grow up proud and versed in culture and teachings of her people. It was so that a conquered people could arise out of the ashes of the lava to spring anew, with hope and dreams for the future.

The art of the hula was alive again, haunting the halls of the school. The melodious language that spoke of the Ohia trees, the valleys, the streams, and the oceans was alive again in the voices of the children. I saw in the smiles of the Kamehameha students, who were a elite group of individuals, the dream of Princess Pauahi. They were hard-working, intelligent, proud, and healthy in mind and in spirit as if the princess herself had raised them in the fashion of the Ali'I or nobles. The privilege of attending an exclusive prep school for Hawaiian children that incorporated Hawaiian culture and teachings into the curriculum was a way to propagate that hope and to spread the dream across the island kingdom. Instead of slums with drug businesses, instead of families with domestic abuse, instead of neglect and abandonment, instead of unemployment and deprivation, instead of low self-esteem and unhappiness, there was only great joy.

The school became one large Ohana, or family. Trust, love, caring, and protection of the children was a priority. And for the rest of us who were non-Hawaiian, they provided the teachers. They answered our questions about the Hawaiian names and meanings. They related stories of their culture and shared with us their love for beauty in nature.

Looking back over the decades since the Hawaiian revival, I can only say that all of us in the islands have benefited with the dreams that the Hawaiian children brought to us. So that the rest of us not of Hawaiian blood, relearned the Hawaiian values in order to spread aloha to the world. Now there are populations of Hawaii-born people and Hawaiians who live in various parts of the United States, keeping their culture, teaching their hula, and sharing with others. Even as Americans, we see ourselves as a microcosm, where island life reflected the traditional Hawaiian values of aloha. And I am still a true monarchist, dreaming of castles in the sky.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

Page Viewed:   / Created: August 2002 / Updated: 10 August 2002