Potent Mana: Lessons in Power and Healing

3. MANA What the Data Hide

3 MANA What the Data Hide . . . [R]esistance to the strangulation of our people and culture is interwoven with a celebration of the magnificence of our nation: the lavish beauty of our delicate islands; the intricate relationship between our emotional ties to each other and our ties to the land; the centuries-old ways of caring for the ‘āina, the kai, and, of course, the mana that is generated by human beings in love with and dependent upon the natural world. (Trask 2000, 52; see also Trask 1993, 117–18) In a world dominated by myths of empiricism, fact, of course, is synonymous with truth. (Obeyesekere 1992, 98) This chapter explores the health status of Native Hawaiians in the late twentieth century, the conditions that produced the diseases affecting them, and the reinterpretations of the facts of Native Hawaiian morbidity and mortality from an epistemology of decolonization. The beliefs and practices of Native Hawaiians were not extinguished by American history, Western science, politics, religion, or capitalist economics. The descendants of ka po‘e kahiko endured. They survived the deadly epidemics that occurred in the midst of American colonization . They persisted through lethal narratives that portrayed their history, culture, language, and society as diseased and degenerate and that belied their strengths and ability to overcome. In the late twentieth century, a burgeoning sovereignty movement and an intense focus on cultural revitalization and decolonization demonstrated the potent mana of a people determined to thrive. 69 THE EXIGENCY OF MANA In 1677, in The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Sir Matthew Hale, a seventeenth -century English legal scholar, illuminated the Christian principle of dominion over nature derived from Genesis 1:28 in the Hebrew Bible.1 In relation to this inferior World of Brutes and Vegetables, the End of Man’s Creation was, that he should be VICE-ROY [sic] of the great God of Heaven and Earth in this inferior World; his Steward . . . of this goodly Farm of the lower World, and reserved to himself the supreme Domination, and the Tribute of Fidelity, Obedience, and Gratitude, as the greatest Recognition of Rent for the same, making his Usufructuary of this inferior World to husband and order it, and enjoy the Fruits thereof with sobriety, moderation, and thankfulness. (cited in Black 2006, 94–95) While theories about the meaning of nature injunctions in the Judeo-ChristianIslamic tradition have been contested (see Kay 1989; Faber 2004), it is clear that in practice the meaning of dominion was well expressed by Hale. The god of the Hebrew Bible’s injunction for dominion resulted in exploitation, plunder, and death of the natural world. David Abulafia’s (2008) The Discovery of Mankind makes clear that Hale’s definition of “this inferior World of Brutes and Vegetables ” included the humans that Europeans discovered beginning in the fifteenth century. According to Abulafia, there were “great scholastic debates” in Christendom about the “right to dominion of non-Christian peoples” (308). The debate was settled by the Spanish, who decreed that “it was right [for Christian Europeans ] to claim dominion in lands inhabited solely by primitive people’s.”2 In the Pacific, the British demoted “the Aborigine’s territorial sense” and claimed it as a “terra nullis, a vast no-man’s-land.” They “treated the Aborigines as wild beasts, extirpating completely the native population of Tasmania” (312). For the most part, Abulafia noted that “greed for material resources . . . pushed aside any sense” that the people inhabiting the land that Europeans desired were “rational, sentient human beings with rights” (312).3 The practice of dominion and its results can also be understood through the lens of biology. Marxist scientists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (2007) described the relationship between dominion, conquest, capitalism and health. “Waves of European conquest,” they argued, spread infectious disease. The destruction of forest lands fueled by the profit motive “exposes us to mosquitoborne , tick-borne, or rodent-carried diseases.” The agro-capitalist imperative for monocultures of grain feed rodent populations, “and if the owls and jaguars and snakes that eat the mice are exterminated, the mouse populations erupt with their own reservoirs of diseases.” Development projects mortgage lives and health 70 POTENT MANA in the Global South. The building of enormous hydroelectric dams and canals for irrigation, for example, “spread snails that carry liver flukes and allow mosquitoes to breed” (Lewontin and Levins 2007, 19). This Western concept of dominion, and its political-economic and biological...