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ourstars-ourstories-blog · 8 years ago

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HIDDEN BONES

A Day in the Life of a Storyteller, episode #19

Then there were none.

These words flashed across the screen in front of me, as the lights dimmed and the old, moldy theater on the bottom floor of the Ritz Carlton in Kapalua, Maui, went silent.

The narrator’s voice began, “In 1778 over 500,000 pure native Hawaiians lived on the islands…”

The film brought us through time, as foreigners arrived, along with their deadly diseases, effectively wiping out hundreds of thousands of people. As further colonization occurred, and native culture and people were exploited, those numbers continued to reduce drastically. By the end of the film, which was completed in 1996, there was an estimate of 8,000 pure native Hawaiians left living on the islands. Researchers predict that by 2044, there will be 0.

Then there were none.

What happens when you are no longer remembered by the current generation? When your culture and heritage is no longer passed down by the elders of your community, and is instead lost to history? When your story has been erased and replaced by other more palatable tales?

What happens when your story is no longer told?

I’ve been troubled by this for the last month, each week finding myself further immersed in this question, and in the question of hidden stories—the concealed history, the lost memory.

Two weeks before I left for Hawaii, I attended an event at Chico State showcasing Native American women’s stories and accounts of local history.

On the back of the paper program was printed a quote by Gloria Steinem,

“Feminism is memory”, who in her new book quotes Paula Gunn Allen, stating,

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”

If we do not pull forward the stories of the past, the hidden, invisible, or plainly ignored stories, we pave the road with falsehoods and illusions—and these illusions allow those that come after us to believe a broken story—one that does not include all the players, all the characters, all the conflict and resolution already played out in history;

And rather than start from scratch, we can in fact build upon these stories, if only we can remember they existed in the first place.

For women, for minorities, for all those ever oppressed to be free of this oppression, for our society to recognize the contributions of those not written into official history records, we must remember their stories, their names, and what they’ve done.

Because the stories we tell become our historical reality.

So yes, “Feminism is memory”, 100%.

The week after this storytelling event, I went to see two films, one after the other.

The first was the new Hollywood film “Hidden Figures”, the true story (though dramatized) of three African American women who were the brains behind much of NASA’s work in the 1950’s and 60’s, but whose names until now were widely unknown.

Unknown, forgotten, warped in false narrative, or deliberately ignored…

The second film, “I Am Not Your Negro”, a powerful documentary, followed the life of James Baldwin, and displayed historical footage of the United States through African American eyes.

Baldwin once said,

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”

(James Baldwin. 1968. Credit: Allan Warren)

So much of history is invisible to future generations, because so many of the stories become hidden as we march forward—marching over the men and women whose stories in fact helped to build and hold up our current realities.

Why are we so afraid to really look at the truth of our past?

Baldwin wrote that it is because we are afraid of our true selves, that by acknowledging the truth of history we must admit to our own hand in the way things turned out—admitting to our flaws, our impurity, and actually having to take responsibility for who we are as humans in this world.

This surely does not excuse, but does make it understandable why the true story of Hawaii’s history is so hidden to the majority of those living in the United States. And why millions of Americans visit the idyllic islands, enjoying luxurious hotels and spas by the ocean, soaking up the sun and allowing its glare to blind us to the everyday plight and poverty of many Hawaiian residents.

We enjoy the story that Hawaii is an exotic getaway, a magical place where we can fly off to, where they still speak “our language”, and we don’t need a passport because we already have a citizen’s “right” to be there.

When I was 9 years old, my mom took my brother and I to spend a few weeks on Maui. It was meant to be a vacation, a getaway from the recent death of my dad, and the reality of how much our life had changed in a matter of a few months. It worked--we spent days running on the golden sand, jumping in the warm waves and building sandcastles, retreating to the house where we ate juicy, ripe mangoes and laughed at the geckos scampering along the walls.

One day we visited the grounds of the famous hotel “The Grand Wailea”. Walking through the immaculate gardens, following the winding stairs down and around to the water park and pools overlooking the ocean, I felt as if I had found Heaven. I vowed to someday return to this “Heaven”, and perhaps, one day even stay there, so that I could actually get into the pools and go down the water slides.

19 years later, and I found myself back on Maui, still with this image of the Grand Wailea as a magical place, but with a few questions, and quite a bit of curiosity for what the story was behind this beachside hotel--serving millions of wealthy, luxury seeking tourists and upholding the white washed and watered down story of Hawaii’s past.

And that is how I found myself, at 10am on a Friday morning (St. Patrick’s Day no less), sitting in the basement theater of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Kapalua, watching the film Then there were none.

After the film was finished, Ananke San, the spunky, passionate “auntie” of the Ritz Carlton in Kapalua returned to the stage in front of us, ready to continue our education in the true story of Hawaii’s dark history.

I learned that the Ritz Carlton was in fact the first and only hotel to listen to protests of its construction on beachfront property--for much of the beach in Hawaii is home to the bones of Hawaiian ancestors, buried anonymously under the sands.

Because of the Ritz Carlton’s acquiescence to activists’ pleas, a new law was made and an official department created for overseeing all future burial site disputes going forward.

But this was not before the Grand Wailea had already set up its castle of pools and slides and gardens.

Was my childhood Heaven in fact a Hell? Rooms, gardens and pristine pools haunted by the spirits of wronged ancestors...

A week later, I visited the Grand Wailea, wishing to see with adult eyes the place I had revered as a child. I asked one of the workers at the front desk about the burial site underneath their property.

They told me that there was a plaque now off in the bushes and behind some buildings where most of the bones had been relocated, but that they don’t like to talk about it too much or too publicly--they prefer not to “scare the guests”.

I thought again of Baldwin’s words, we are afraid of the truth, afraid of our own hand in the way things have gotten warped and twisted, how we’d prefer to ignore the past; but our present and our future are made from our past and without it we are nothing.

So what do we do moving forward into that future?

I appreciated Ananke San’s parting words to all of us as we left the Ritz Carlton that morning,

“All of you in this room are not responsible for the wrongs you saw in this video. But now, each of you in this room is responsible for what you do, what we do moving forward. We are in the canoe together, and we’ve got to learn to paddle together.”

Now that we know the stories, we cannot forget them. We cannot let them disappear from our memory, for memory is an act of resistance, is it feminism, it is the right thing to do. There is a Hawaiian term, “Pono”, which basically means to “do the right thing, even if it does not best serve you”.

In the end though, really, doing the right thing does best serve us all. Because like Ananke San said, we’re all in the same canoe, and we’ve all got to paddle for us to reach a desirable place in our future.

So, let’s keep it pono, and keep those memories flowing, passing the stories on, and on and on--so that someday, our official history might actually reflect ALL of our stories.

(For reference, and more info, here is a short clip from the documentary Then there were none https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAmK2LQ0sWc )

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