Potent Mana: Lessons in Power and Healing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS/GENEALOGY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS/GENEALOGY An author’s opportunity to acknowledge the support that made book writing possible is not simply about public recognition and gratitude. Acknowledging is also an enactment of genealogy, a statement of origins, and a record of familial, political, and academic kinship. I hoped to write a book that honored my kinship ties, as well as the lessons I learned from my Kānaka Maoli teachers. It helped to imagine that I was writing a love poem that, although filtered through the particulars of my training and experience, would be worthy of my Hawaiian guides and expressive of my profound solidarity with the project of decolonization in Hawai‘i. In the community of Wai`anae, I was blessed by many wise teachers, in particular Ho`oipo DeCambra, Puanani Burgess, and Pōkā Laenui. They invited me into their offices, classrooms, and homes and trusted me to interpret the work of their lives and their love for Hawai‘i. Their tremendous faith in the project of decolonization has remained a great source of my inspiration as a scholar and as a community organizer. I am grateful for the guidance of Kaimi Chung, Kamanàopono Crabbe, Palama Lee, Randall Like, Vicky Milles, Mari Ono, Dixie Padello, Jim Winters, and others who I cannot name because of concerns with confidentiality . I hope that Potent Mana contributes in some small way to the struggle for decolonization and the powerful resurgence of Kānaka Maoli. I wanted to explain decolonization and the struggle of Native Hawaiians in a way that made sense for people who were not aware that such a struggle existed in the fiftieth state, so, I conjured up various mothers of my many students and explained Hawaiian decolonization to them. For trusting me to teach their children and to summon their spirits as collective muse, I thank Lynnette F. Hammond , Barbara Ann Miller, Caroline Sahni, Karen Shaw, Marti Snell, Ruth Stewart, Kiljai Taylor, Doris Thomas, Mayra Y. Vargas, and Mariel York. I am grateful for the community of graduate and undergraduate students, as they are my primary interlocutors. I thank current and former graduate students Helen Chapple, Holly Donohue-Singh, Ann Githinji, Abby Holeman, Anjana ix Mebane-Cruz, Matthew and Marlo Meyer, Yadira Perez, Mieka Brand Polanco, Will Schroeder, Claire Snell-Rood, Anne Stachura, Lisa Stewart, David Strohl, Todne Thomas, and LuAnn Williams. I also thank current and former undergraduates Naseem and Shereen Alavian, Omid Akhavan, Mark Brewster, Mary Elizabeth Bruce, Seth Croft, Jeremy Davis, Liam Del Rios, Stephanie Dewolfe, May Gallanosa, Katie Gillespie, Vicky Jones, Camilo Kohn, Caroline Kuo, Timothy Ly, Kimiknu Mentore, J. T. Roane, Stephanie Shaw, Kevin Simowitz, Preyasha Tuladhar, Jalan Washington, and Ruthie Yow. Last, for sharing their wisdom and ceaselessly urging me on, I especially thank Ayla Fahire Ayvadas and Christin Taylor. I am the product of good mentoring. For engaging with me and my work through thick and thin in a multitude of productive ways, I thank my formal mentors Ellen Contini-Morava, Adria LaViolette, and Susan McKinnon at the University of Virginia, and Dede Yow, now retired from Kennesaw State University . I also thank Lawrie Balfour, Eve Danzinger, Wendi El-Amin, Karen Hall, Julie Lassetter, George Mentore, Norm Oliver, Geeta Patel, and Kath Weston, all at the University of Virginia, for believing in me and my work. In my life before Virginia, I also received committed mentoring and training . In 1986 I graduated from the Center for Third World Organizing’s (CTWO) Minority Activist Apprenticeship Program. I was trained at CTWO by Gary Delgado, Alfredo DeAvila, Francis Calpatura, and Rachel Sierra, who shaped my views on the world in profound and unalterable ways, and who grounded me in an epistemology of community organizing. For her firm guidance and inspiration, I thank my ancestor, the Reverend Marilyn Adams Moore. I learned theology from James Cone and Delores Williams at Union Theological Seminary and anthropology from Vincanne Adams, Rena Lederman, Emily Martin, and Kay Warren at Princeton. Kim Blankenship at Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS taught me how to apply insights from public health literature to my humanities work on HIV. Hector Carrillo, Barbara Marin, Olga Grinsted, and other faculty of the Collaborative HIV in Minority Communities Program, at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), patiently mentored the social scientist in me, as did Sheldon Fields, David Malebranche, Lois Takahashi, Mark Padillo, and Nelson Dias-Vargas, my colleagues in the program. In Charlottesville I was fortunate to...