I Ulu I Ka Aina: Land

A Hawaiian Geography or A Geography of Hawai‘i?

4 A Hawaiian Geography or A Geography of Hawai‘i? Carlos Andrade Hawaiian geography is characterized by fluidities. (Herman 1999:81) When Captain Cook sailed away from Plymouth Sound on July 12, 1776, aboard the ship Resolution, he was embarking on his third journey into the Pacific. His ostensible mission was to search for a northwest passage to the Atlantic Ocean, and in the process of doing so, he mapped lands from New Zealand to Hawai‘i in greater detail and on a scale not previously achieved. On this third journey, he discovered the islands inhabited by our Hawaiian ancestors, and they in turn eventually ended his life and earthly wanderings. Cook was the harbinger of a new time. He was the first in a chorus of new voices that came from the “Old World” and European America. Because he was also carrier of infectious diseases that began the decimation of the Hawaiian people, some contemporary indigenous scholars have nicknamed him “The Plague.” He was the spearhead of the explorations that would bring other geographies to our island home. There had been many voyagers in the two millennia before him. Their exploits , however, went unrecorded in the written texts of the European world. These Vikings of the Pacific—a name given to them by Sir Peter Buck, a distinguished Maori scholar—had raised the land not by chronometer, compass, or sextant but with a great fishhook, Ka Makau Nui o Maui (Great Fish Hook of Maui), which now hangs in the heavens (the constellation known as Scorpio to people from other lands). These ancestral voyagers felt at home venturing out on the bosom of their earth mother, following stars cast into their sky father by personages born of Pō. Their stories were recorded on rock, reef, mountain, stream, and the minds of their descendants. They conceived of the islands born before them as elder siblings. They recognized the shark as guardian angel (‘aumakua ) and a host of other fellow creatures as relatives to be respected, loved, and feared. As recorded in their orature, some of these ancestors had been here long before the voyagers from islands in the southern archipelagoes arrived. The geography built and informed by their collective experiences still permeates the ‘āina, though more recently overlain by other visions of the world. This narrative is a first journey, a journey to explore an elder geography, a geography that grows from within, that is not imposed by a source elsewhere. Andrade | 5 It explores a geography of islands that began more than four thousand years ago and filled the archipelagoes with more than forty thousand gods and myriad names and stories. Some were carried from far away, and some were specific to islands located under a star that did not move: Hōkūpa‘a (fixed star, Polaris). The land, sea, and sky were filled with stories, songs, and sayings that reflected the way the ancestors saw the world. As in the voyages of those who have come before, not all that exists in this elder geography can be revealed in a single exploration. Not all islands and seas can be explored by a single navigator or even by a single generation of explorers. Carter (1987:25) observes in his account of Cook’s coasting of Australia that while discovery rests on the assumption of a world of facts waiting to be found, collected and classified, a world in which the neutral observer is not implicated, exploration lays stress on the observer’s active engagement with his environment: it recognizes phenomena as offspring of his intention to explore. Despite the tendency of most historians to regard the terms as virtually interchangeable, the pleasures of discovery and exploration rest on utterly opposed theoretical assumptions.…To be an explorer was to inhabit a world of potential objects with which one had an imaginary dialogue. And, in so far as they had already been imagined, there was a sense in which the explorer’s most valuable service lay in progressively clearing them away, in allowing the uncluttered space of the journey to emerge in its own right and speak. [My italics.] Most present-day geographies of Hawai‘i reflect the voices, metaphors, models, and perspectives of those who came in the last two hundred years in the wake of voyagers whose home ports lay on distant continents touched by other oceans. These geographies celebrate lords and commoners from a feudal land. They glorify the imposition of industry, book learning, consumption, and exploitation...