{"id":190470,"date":"2021-08-02T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2021-08-02T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=190470"},"modified":"2021-07-30T04:10:26","modified_gmt":"2021-07-30T03:10:26","slug":"how-haunani-kay-trask-shaped-her-hawaiian-peoples-struggle-for-independence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/how-haunani-kay-trask-shaped-her-hawaiian-peoples-struggle-for-independence\/","title":{"rendered":"How Haunani-Kay Trask Shaped Her Hawai’ian People\u2019s Struggle for Independence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Hawaiian movement for self-determination was forever changed by the fierce and unapologetic leadership of the late Haunani-Kay Trask. This loving obituary written by one of Trask\u2019s mentees explores her powerful\u00a0legacy.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Haunani-Kay Trask, photographed in 1990, was a fierce leader of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and director of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii. Photo by Kapulani Landgraf<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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27 Jul 2021 – <\/em>On July 3, 2021, the Hawaiian people lost one of our most important leaders in our movement for sovereignty. Haunani-Kay Trask passed away at age 71 in Honolulu. A writer, speaker, scholar, and poet, she was an uncompromising leader and the Director of the Department of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai\u02bbi at M\u0101noa, now known as the Kamakak\u016bokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies<\/a>.In her life and work, she was fierce and articulate about the evils of American Empire and the need for Hawaiians to fight against its presence here. Now that she is gone, it is hard to imagine Hawai\u2018i without her. Back in the day, when Hawaiians were still living as Hawaiians, and someone died, part of our mourning ritual included the\u00a0uwe<\/em>, or\u00a0kanikau<\/em>. It is a wailing cry, and in old times it included a recitation of people and events in that person\u2019s life. But that is not what this is. My words are too small.<\/p>\n

To me, she will always be Haunani-Kay, a person I admired and came to know well, someone\u00a0whose kindness and friendship was her way of mentoring me\u2014a diaspora Hawaiian who came home and threw in with the movement. She always gave me interviews and was generous with her time. I was blessed to have laughed and argued politics with her, drinking too much wine when she took me to restaurants I could never afford. Cruising with Haunani-Kay was like riding shotgun with Aretha Franklin. No matter where we went, as we followed the ma\u00eetre d to the table, everyone turned to look at her. If they didn\u2019t know who she was, they wanted to.<\/p>\n

Haunani-Kay modeled for us how to analyze the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, our material reality, and American hegemony in the same frame.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Haunani-Kay remembered all the\u00a0hewa<\/em>\u00a0(wrongs) done to generations of us. She was skilled at explaining the politics of greed, hypocrisy, and moral vacancy that motivated it. She embodied the righteousness of Hawaiian anger and resentment against settlers like a maestro, giving shape to the substance, encouraging insurgency, imploring Hawaiians at every turn to remember of ourselves that which has been dismembered by\u00a0U.S. occupation<\/a>. And the way she did it\u2014with no trace of the polite and submissive Native Hawaiian that\u00a0haole<\/em>\u00a0(White people) had grown to expect\u2014shook the colonial establishment to its core.<\/p>\n

Haunani-Kay\u2019s defense of the word \u201chaole<\/em>\u201d is excellent illustration of her uncompromising defense of Hawaiian rights. When a student at UH\u00a0M\u0101noa\u00a0wrote in the campus paper\u00a0Ka Leo<\/em>\u00a0that the word \u201chaole<\/em>\u201d was equivalent to the \u201cN-word\u201d\u00a0her response<\/a>\u00a0set off a firestorm. Her suggestion that the student could always leave Hawaii led to the university president, the faculty senate, and the philosophy department calling for her removal as director of Hawaiian Studies.<\/p>\n

She elevated Hawaiian Studies precisely because of her willingness to fight with the institution and the state. It went from a niche program working out of a few small offices to the Center for Hawaiian Studies, a beautiful set of buildings, next to a\u00a0lo\u2018i<\/em>\u00a0kalo<\/em>\u00a0on its own part of the campus, and now offers a graduate degree.<\/p>\n

In her book,\u00a0From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai\u2018i<\/a><\/em>, Haunani-Kay took on the\u00a0tourism industry<\/a>\u00a0and the \u201cprostitution\u201d of Hawaiian culture, the desecration, and ecocide committed by the\u00a0U.S. military<\/a>\u00a0on Hawaiian land, and the\u00a0haole<\/em>-settler-colonial systems of power and economy.<\/p>\n

None of our resistance discourse or protests would ever have taken place had she not done what she did.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She spoke out against a litany of abuses perpetrated against us, such as banning\u00a0\u02bb\u014clelo Hawai\u02bbi<\/a> (Hawaiian language), congressionally determined identity via blood quantum rules, and the transformation of a place that had once sustained millions of Hawaiians over millennia into being\u00a090% dependent<\/a>\u00a0on imported foods. She highlighted the shorter\u00a0lifespans<\/a>\u00a0of Hawaiians, higher\u00a0suicide<\/a>\u00a0rates, and our obscene over-representation in\u00a0prison<\/a>, poverty, and\u00a0homelessness<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More broadly, Haunani-Kay modeled for us how to analyze the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, our material reality, and American hegemony in the same frame. Hers was a political mind formed by the anti-Imperialist movements of the 1960s and \u201970s: the movement to end the Vietnam War, the Black Power Movement and Pan-Africanism, the Polynesian Panthers, and\u00a0the American Indian Movement. Her close friendships with Albert Wendt, Angela Davis, Epeli Hau\u2018ofa,\u00a0Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, and her decadeslong relationship with her life partner, professor David Stannard, also shaped her. She proudly kept a poster of Malcolm X in her office, and loved the Basques, the Irish, and the Palestinians, who she saw as heroic fighters for liberation from their oppressors.<\/p>\n

To speak of Haunani-Kay and her impact on the Hawaiian people without recounting these political-historic markers would be like discussing Mohammad Ali without the words \u2018Heavy Weight Champion of the World.\u2019 And like Ali, Haunani-Kay was a fighter\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0a poet. Her first book of poetry,\u00a0Light in the Crevice Never Seen<\/a><\/em>, was the first such book by a Native Hawaiian to be published in North America. Filled with a vivid Hawaiian cultural and spiritual aesthetic, and fearless criticism of\u00a0haole<\/em>\u00a0Americans in particular, the average non-Native reader might actually feel like they\u2019re in the ring with Ali\u2014which is why so many people reviled her. But for every one of them, a hundred Hawaiians revered her.<\/p>\n

When I first learned of Haunani-Kay\u2019s death, I was stunned, and that struck me as an odd reaction. Where was the relief I expected to feel? She had been in a care home for quite some time, and years before that she had withdrawn from public life. Though she did not discuss it openly, those near her knew during the decade before her retirement that something beyond her control was stealing her from us\u2014and from herself\u2014one memory at a time.<\/p>\n

What are we, her people, to make of this space where our beloved leader once stood?<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During the past 10 years, whether the subject was the fight over Mauna Kea or how to pressure the United Nations to intervene with regard to U.S. violations of our rights, I often wondered, \u201cWhat would Haunani-Kay say?\u201d And I asked other activists the same thing. None of our resistance discourse or protests would ever have taken place had she not done what she did. Even in her captive state, she was our true north, her illness mirroring the Hawaiian people\u2019s experience: a devastatingly relentless process of being disappeared by a force we haven\u2019t managed to stop.<\/p>\n

When Haunani-Kay spoke in public, she floated up to the microphone like a beautiful butterfly, unleashing words that stung settlers like a million bees. Hers was the voice that once heard, no one could forget. In her most enduring speech given at \u2018Iolani Palace on Jan. 17, 1993, on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. overthrow of Hawaii,\u00a0she proclaimed<\/a>, \u201cWe are not American! We are not American! We are not American! Say it in your hearts. Say it when you sleep! We are not American! We will die as Hawaiians. We will never be American!\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking of her life as a whole, it is impossible to distinguish the extremes of how she lived and died from the metaphors in her poetry, the anti-colonial defiance of her politics, and her solidarity with her people.\u00a0K\u0101naka Maoli<\/em> (Native Hawaiians) and\u00a0pae\u00a0\u2018\u0101ina\u00a0<\/em>(Hawai\u2018i), the people and the land, were inseparable in her mind, heart and soul. We meant everything to her. Indigenous nationalism, she said, in\u00a0\u2018Native Daughter<\/em>, \u201cis born not of a predatory consumption nor of murderous intolerance, but of a genealogical connection to our place, Hawai\u2018i.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haunani-Kay\u2019s younger sister Mililani Trask<\/a>, who was her co-engineer in many of the most important aspects of the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, posted one of her late sister\u2019s poems from her book\u00a0Night is a Sharkskin Drum<\/a><\/em>, on Facebook after her death. It begins with the words, \u201cInto the light I will go forever,\u201d and ends with: \u201cInto the\u00a0wa\u2018a<\/em>\u00a0of Kanaloa, voyaging\u00a0moana nui<\/em>. Into our sovereign suns, drunk on the\u00a0mana<\/em>\u00a0of Hawai\u2018i.\u201d I want that vision of Haunani-Kay, sailing Oceania filled with the divine strength of her homeland, to become my new memory of her.<\/p>\n

What are we, her people, to make of this space where our beloved leader once stood? I wonder what Haunani-Kay would say.<\/p>\n

Together, for her, all we can say is,\u00a0uwe<\/em>.\u00a0Uwe<\/em>.\u00a0Uwe. Uwe.<\/em><\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/em>Anne Keala Kelly (K\u0101naka Maoli) is a filmmaker and journalist living on Hawai\u2019i Island. Her works depict the critical links between cultural, film, and spiritual survival in the movement for Hawaiian self-determination and indigenous peoples\u2019 struggles for territorial and environmental survival. She is an outspoken advocate for indigenous self-representation in mass media. Keala is a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow and has an MFA from UCLA\u2019s School of Theater, Film and Television. Her reporting and commentary have appeared in many publications, including<\/em> Indian Country Today, The Nation, the<\/em> Honolulu Civil Beat, and the<\/em> Honolulu Weekly. For more information go to www.annekealakelly.com<\/a> and www.nohohewa.com <\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Go to Original – yesmagazine.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hawaiian movement for self-determination was forever changed by the fierce and unapologetic leadership of the late Haunani-Kay Trask. She modeled for us how to analyze the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, our material reality, and American hegemony in the same frame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":190472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[229,867,1149,120,393,101,290,276,331,100,401,267,2588,1312,1313,1395,260,487,866,504,950,651,444,1142,86,109,1914,1190,380,99,292,95,70,126],"class_list":["post-190470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-activism","tag-anglo-america","tag-asia-and-the-pacific","tag-conflict","tag-coup","tag-cultural-violence","tag-culture","tag-democracy","tag-development","tag-direct-violence","tag-environment","tag-geopolitics","tag-haunani-kay-trask","tag-hawaiian-culture","tag-hawaiian-religion","tag-hawaiian-sovereignty","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-international-relations","tag-invasion","tag-justice","tag-nonviolence","tag-obituary","tag-occupation","tag-politics","tag-polynesian-culture","tag-regime-change","tag-solutions","tag-structural-violence","tag-un","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}