-
Alternative Economies for Alternative Futures
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIES FOR ALTERNATIVE FUTURES DEAN ITSUjI SARANILLIO As a child growing up on the island of Maui, I remember my mother, Eloise Saranillio, singing a funny song to the tune of the McGuire Sisters’ 1958 hit “Sugar Time.” Changing the word “sugar” to “cabbage,” she sang, “cabbage in the morning, cabbage in the evening, cabbage at suppertime.” She told us that when she was growing up at the McGerrow plantation camp on Maui, her mother, my grandmother Masako Inouye, went on strike at the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. (HC&S) sugar plantation and served as a strike captain. In 1958, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) laborers went on strike to seek a living wage, and cabbage farmers from Kula helped to feed the workers and sustain their strikes. I suppose the song made us laugh because as opposed to a romantic white American life of eating sugar all day, we were more accustomed to thinking of sugar as something that caused bitterness, like forcing a family to eat cabbage for three months. My father, Dick Saranillio, told us about how his oldest brother, my uncle Fred “Junior” Saranillio, worked in the school garden while they attended Lanai Elementary School. When my Uncle Junior could not scramble enough lunch money for himself and his siblings, he would forgo lunch at the cafeteria and eat the vegetables he helped grow. My father only found out when he caught his older brother eating carrots by himself. When my brother and I were in elementary school, my father took us every weekend to Olowalu to dive for fish and tako (octopus) with three-prong spears. He taught us what was “good eat” and to catch only what we needed. Before we were born, upon his return to Hawai‘i after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he would go diving to feed himself and stretch what money he had. He also did this when he went out on strike as an ironworker. By teaching us to dive, and to clean and prepare fish, he said that no matter what happened, we would always have the ability to feed ourselves in healthy ways. 198 SETTLER COLONIALISM These family stories regarding food and poverty arose from the deliberate strategy of Paul Isenberg, a prominent leader of Hawai‘i’s sugar industry in the nineteenth century. Isenberg argued that arranging workers’ wages so that the “Chinese and Japanese had to work or be hungry” made them easier to control.1 Like many have argued before, capitalism benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. Throughout history, to stave off getting deeper in debt, many have had to rely on alternatives to a capitalist economy—such as fishing, diving, hunting, planting, gathering, and sharing. Sometimes illegal economies are used to supplement otherwise meager incomes. In this way, capitalism cannot function without the existence of alternative economies.2 These alternative economies, especially land-based Indigenous economies, also offer the “material conditions of resistance”—the ability to sustain resistance via autonomy that makes a community less vulnerable and controllable by employers, creditors, developers, and potential thieves. Like my three older siblings and many other working-class students, I worked after school and on the weekends at a series of part-time jobs, often pulling twelve-hour days. By seventeen, I had worked at three jobs, including Taco Bell, Kay-Bee Toy Store, and Pizza People Paukukalo, delivering (and eating) pizzas. As a student at Maui High School I was thought of, and saw myself as, a “bad student.” I viewed school as something that I was forced to do. Diving for fish still remained a passion, and I often cut school to go diving with my friends. But there was one class I never missed, with a teacher who broadened my world by teaching history as a guide to endless possibilities. Walking into Mr. Andrew G. Klukowski’s classroom portable, you would have noticed the Bob Marley banner overhead: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!” You would have seen hung on the wall a series of black-and-white photos from the Vietnam War, of US soldiers dragging Vietnamese soldiers and civilians behind US tanks. His classroom was a place where seemingly taboo topics were openly discussed . Indeed, it was where I learned of the 1893 US military-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The topic had been “taught” to me before, but this was the first time I learned this...