In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

homelessness trisha kehaulani watson If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships —the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace. —Franklin D. Roosevelt restoring our home: hope, homelessness, and humanity Our land was our home. In pre-contact times, Hawaiians enjoyed community living, where individuals shared sleeping spaces and living spaces as families. With a lack of motorized transportation, most travel required people to sleep out beneath the sky. We made do in nature’s many elements. Our intimate relationship with our Earth Mother, Papahänaumoku, and Sky Father, Wäkea, granted us exemplary knowledge about navigating the land and utilizing it to survive. To sleep out on the land was to sleep in the bosom of our Mother, and since the dawn of time, humans have known no greater or more comforting rest than when lying against their Mother’s heart. The land was not only our home, it was our refuge, inscribed in one of the greatest and best known laws of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Mämalahoe Känäwai (Law of the Splintered Paddle): E nä känaka, O my people, E mälama ‘oukou i ke akua Honor thy god; A e mälama ho‘i ke kanaka nui a me kanaka iki; Respect the rights of all men great and humble; E hele ka ‘elemakule, ka luahine, a me ke kama See to it that our elderly, our women, and our children A moe i ke ala Lie down to sleep by the roadside ‘A‘ohe mea näna e ho‘opilikia. Without fear of harm. Hewa nö, make. Disobey, and die. —Kamehameha I1 126 The Value of Hawai‘i The need for people to seek such refuge has not changed. Our society has changed. Our relationship to the land has changed. Our relationships with each other have changed. If we are to heal our world, we must learn to restore the ways we related to each other as members of a community, as members of a larger social family who share this home. We should be ashamed of how we allow our brothers and sisters to live. We should be utterly ashamed of how we are allowing küpuna to live. Homelessness in Hawai‘i is a community ’s failing, not the failing of individuals. I refuse to believe that any individual ever needs to be, or should be, homeless. The answers are to be found in people, not policies. We must be better. We must renew our commitment to stewardship of one another. We must restore Hawai‘i as a home for all people—a place where we are inclusive, not exclusive. a hawaiian sense of community Like many non-Western peoples, Känaka Maoli viewed community differently . Their entire society depended upon the function of the community. As civil rights activist Howard Thurman explains, The working definition of community is the experience of wholeness, of completeness, of inner togetherness, of integration, and wherever this is experienced , at whatever level of life, at that particular level there is community . . . . [T]he individual human being experiences in his organism this definition of community. As if the organism, all the parts, had committed to the memory a sense of the whole, a social sense which is the overtone of the biological inner-continuity. Now this is the heritage.2 Over the last 250 years, foreigners systemically dismantled this sense of wholeness within the Hawaiian Islands. The result is the fragmented community we find ourselves amongst today. Keeping families together was of the utmost importance to Hawaiians— and not only the immediate family in Western terms, but an extended family more consistent with the kauhale living system of pre-contact Hawai‘i. Handy and Pukui have written about this system: “Kinship in Hawai‘i extends far beyond the immediate biological family. The terminology of kinship must be thought of against the background of the whole community of kith and kin, including in-law, and adoptive categories.”3 This system allowed for greater social and community support for all individuals, as the family parcelled out responsibilities in ways that allowed everyone to use their time and resources well. The kauhale system received a devastating blow when foreign diseases began to ravage the islands as early as the late eighteenth century. The kauhale system depended on a healthy population that could reproduce itself. When [3.145.178.240] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16...

Share