Potent Mana: Lessons in Power and Healing

6. DREAMING CHANGE

6 DREAMING CHANGE When I was born my mother gave me three names. Christabelle, Yoshie, and Puanani Christabelle was my “english” name. My social security name, My school name, the name I gave when teachers asked me for my “real” name, a safe name. Yoshie was my home name, My everyday name, the name that reminded my father’s family that I was Japanese, even though my nose, hips, and feet were wide, the name that made me acceptable to them who called my Hawaiian mother kuroi (black), a saving name. Puanani is my chosen name, My piko name connecting me to the ‘aina and the kai and the po‘e kahiko my blessing; my burden, my amulet, my spear. (Punanai Burgess n.d.1) When Hawai‘i was under martial law, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, a baby girl was born whose Hawaiian name was concealed between a Christian first and last name. Concealing Hawaiian names was a widespread form of quiet resistance to the colonial law requiring the use of 133 “Christian names,”2 and to the imposition of English as the official language of the Islands. In the 1970s, when this girl was a woman, she helped organize a women’s support group with a Maryknoll nun in her home community of Wai‘anae, and significant transformations occurred. Her Hawaiian name— Meipala—emerged, and she began to understand herself as a Hawaiian woman. This was when she committed her life to the struggles of suffering Hawaiian people, and her priorities immediately changed. Meipala said that before the women’s group she would “wake up in the morning, make breakfast, then go outside to warm up the car for [her] husband. But after [the support group began meeting she] wanted to work outside of the home. . . . [So she] told [her husband], ‘get your own beer.’” Meipala was raised in Papakōlea, on lands set aside for Hawaiians under the Hawaiian Homestead Act. In this Honolulu neighborhood, she learned to be Christian and American. She attended Catholic schools and worked stringing and selling leis to tourists at Aloha Tower Market Place. She remembers that her mother resisted teaching her Hawaiian things, and that adopting American ways was considered positive and progressive. Her own children were born at a time when the Hawaiian sovereignty movement was becoming impossible to ignore, and she wondered what to teach them. Working with the women’s group invested her with a sense of her own power to change things for the better, and when her children encountered difficulties in school, she realized that the school system was systematically discriminating against poor Hawaiian children. Meipala became a public school parent activist. She felt shame when she heard people say that Hawaiians could not write, that she could not write (see Ho‘omanawanui 2004, 87), so the women’s group asked a local poet to teach them. It was in the writing groups, where she practiced with short poems, that Meipala’s “Hawaiian thinking” emerged. “Writing poems,” she said, “helped to connect me with my mother and helped me to develop a sense of hope for my children.” The collective process of Hawaiian women writing was also a collective process of uncovering submerged Hawaiian consciousness, a process that helped Meipala understand the powerful links between Hawaiian women in the present and their mothers and grandmothers. She saw that they were connected to their children and through them to the future. She achieved clarity about generational and ancestral connection. “We were only taught about the present, so we were not allowed to know ourselves” she said. “We were not taught that being Hawaiian meant that we did things differently, lived differently, had different concepts about the world.” The poetry writing work helped Meipala see that “all of this wonderful knowledge is deep inside of us.” In the late 1970s, Meipala went to her first sovereignty movement protest. She held a sign that said “Stop the Bombing of Kaho‘olawe.” But her fears that she would be recognized, that her mother-in-law might be angry with her, led 134 POTENT MANA her to hide her face behind her sign. But more and more, Meipala got involved, and when I first met her in 1994, she was a veteran protestor. SERENDIPITY At my desk in Philadelphia, I tried to learn through books about Hawaiian history , culture, and the politics of the sovereignty...