Hawaiian Chants

Video Find(s) of the Day

It was the first music I ever heard made. It was more powerful for coming from people than the music that came from machines. That's probably why wherever I go, whatever I do, the background music in my head always comes back to Hawaiian chants.

It's been really hard to find decent Hawaiian chant videos. But it's been getting better. Here are some I have found.

Strong Hawaiian Chant



Spike Jones - Hawaiian War Chant



Uliuli by Halau O Kekuhi



At 1:14 in the next video you can hear a version of the entirety of the Kaulilua song. I ran a translation of it in No Arguing Over Poi. These are the sounds in my head.

Chants and Stories from Hawaii

Hawaiian Weird

Video Find of the Day

The sort of thing my friend Lani despised, this also comes close to depicting my parents' fantasy of Hawaiian Native music and culture. To me it looks and sounds a little creepy, but anyone who knows me knows creepy by itself doesn't repel me.

Hawaiian Hula Song w/Steel Guitar - Ana Lani & Ray Kinney

I Become Racist

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened late July or early August, 1955, after my 6th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

After Bible School there was a period of great summer childhood, with nothing particular to do day after sunny balmy day on an army base surrounded by ten acres of well kept lawn and isolated trees, except to run around barefoot trying to make friends with the other kids that would have it, and meanwhile watching clouds glide over the whole thing.

Oh, yeah, and the Davy Crockett craze was in full swing, so I had to have a coonskin cap. There was a lot of Injun killing involved. Nobody wanted to be the Injun that got killed, so we had to all take turns at it.

Now that's odd, because I was accustomed to thinking of myself as white on the outside but red on the inside. Hawaiian Natives, I don't remember if I already mentioned it but I should have, may look golden skinned to the white folk, but in their own minds they're red. Injuns, on the other hand, were always red, in everyone's book. So why would I mind being an Injun?

Well, it's obvious isn't it? Injuns were a fictitious and/or historic race that were always the bad guys on TV and in movies. They only existed to me as villains.

That's not racism. That's just innocence. I got out of that mindset as soon as I got to know real Native Americans.

But one day I had an experience that made a real racist out of me. I was wandering around by myself and I encountered a Black kid my age. I had seen Blacks before. There were Black girls in my Kindergarten class. But I could not believe how black this kid was.

I'd been taught not to stare at people who look different from me. So I didn't say anything about how black the kid was. We introduced ourselves to each other as kids do (Hi! My name's Wes! What's yours? I think he said Jackson), and then we found some game we both liked to play, and it was cool.

After an hour or so my new Black friend said he wanted me to meet his Mom and Dad and his brothers and sisters.

I should have said, this was a Sunday afternoon. Fort Devens had a strict rule that no one should drop in on anyone's house on Sundays, and no one should invite anyone over. The idea was, people who needed a day of rest from socializing wouldn't get it, by being too nice to not invite people over. The base commanding general himself ordered that people stay out of each others houses on Sundays, for there own good.

It was a very good rule, as was proved in the breaking of it. I went to my new friend's house precisely for the reason that the rule was devised, namely, to not hurt the inviter's feelings. Besides, Jackson already broke the rule by asking me, so I didn't break it first.

So we waded into Jackson's living room. They were all as black as he is! There were tons of them! It was like the Mother Nest!

Nobody said anything about the No Sunday Socializing Rule. I enjoyed talking to Jackson's parents. They were nice fun people. I was really happy to meet such good friends.

Later, when I got home I told my Mother I found a new friend, and he was really, really, black, and he took me to meet his family and...

And she said, "AND YOU WENT? HAVEN'T I TOLD YOU NEVER TO DO THAT?"

I thought she was being a little crazy. So I didn't argue with her. I just nodded and said, yes Mommy, I shouldn't have gone to see them. I knew I broke the Sunday Rule. I promised never to do it again.

The next morning I woke up with crease marks all over my chest. You know how when you sleep on wrinkly sheets you get crease marks all over where the wrinkles were? I had that. Only I'd never noticed having it before.

Suddenly it dawned on me! That's why my Mother got so over the top about me breaking the Sunday Rule! It wasn't the breaking of the Sunday Rule that had her upset, it was that they were black!

It's contagious!

Good News, Bad News

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened following my fourth birthday in 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Alaka'i returned two weeks after my 4th birthday. The head injury hadn't killed him, but had weakened him. He said he was there for the prolonged rape, but couldn't intervene because he was too weak.

Then the bad news: Alaka'i couldn't find the Hawaiian anymore. He could remember having spoken it, he could remember all the conversations with Lani and Lono, just as I've been relating them. But he couldn't remember the Hawaiian.

I didn't lose my ability to speak Hawaiian over years of disuse. I lost it in one day by an act of attempted murder. I say attempted murder, because Alaka'i could remember Hawaiian up until my Mother, in her frustration at not being able to force me to speak Hawaiian, attempted to smother me. It was the asphyxiation, not the concussion, that erased the memory, as far as Alaka'i could tell.

Or, maybe it was the trauma. Alaka'i could still sing the songs but he wasn't sure what they meant anymore. I like to think the loss of the language was psychological and reversible. I've been hoping for that for 54 years, so I'd say the evidence is feeble.

Another loss was the eidetic memory. Alaka'i thought it was a lifting of a curse. "Now we can finally forget some of this." There was an hour or two when I sat outside under some pine trees and Alaka'i arranged visual memories in my head as if moving photographs around on a table. Some of the photographs were place on top, some were buried below. Those were the ones to forget, for now anyway.

Then Alaka'i said goodbye to Kona. He said he was going to leave Kona in charge. He wasn't going to try to go away physically this time. He was just going to go to sleep. Maybe forever.

For the next couple of hours, as Kona, I had to come to grips with the new losses. Alaka'i was gone. The Hawaiian was gone. Only Alaka'i could sing the songs then, so even the songs were gone.

Then I had an "accident," and discovered a horrible new reality. Alaka'i had been in control of my excretory functions!

Next: Mother has to toilet train all over again, and she's not happy about it.

No Escape

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the day of my fourth birthday, July 9, 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I regained consciousness on the porch. My Mother was talking to herself loudly and excitedly. She cursed my Father for driving off with the only car and ditching her with me. She cursed me for bleeding. She cursed me most for waking up. "Why doesn't he ever die?"

She said, "What am I going to do? If I take him inside he'll bleed all over everything! I don't want him bleeding all over everything!" This was the argument that prompted her to get rags from the kitchen and wrap my head with them. It would be nice to think that some mothering instinct was at work but it's very hard to say.

Once I was wrapped up she dragged me in to the kitchen. She complained that my rags were already soaked with blood. I was fading in and out. Sometimes she seemed distant. My vision occasionally blurred and doubled. My head was pounding. She took off the first set of rags, lifted me up and rinsed my head under the faucet, and then wrapped me in fresh rags.

By now, her running monologue was veering into a new subject: what sort of permanent damage might have been done. She started to say things like, "What if he can't speak anymore? What if he can't speak Hawaiian anymore? That was the only chance he had of being useful! What good would he be then?" She interrupted her conversation with herself to demand me to speak.

"Talk to me! Say something! Damn it, say something right now, or I'll take you and bury you in the woods out back right now!"

I managed to say something like, "I can talk, Mommy, I'm OK, don't worry about me."

She laughed and said, "You're the one who'd better be doing the worrying if you can't still speak Hawaiian!"

Then she took me by one arm and half dragged me and half made me walk up the stairs and around to the bathroom next to the master bedroom. She stripped me and made me stand in the tub, and began raping me anally with her fingers. She said, "I want to hear Hawaiian! Now!"

It always worked before. Whenever she raped me, Alaka'i would come to Kona's rescue. Kona never had to bear being raped. Alaka'i was the "older" personality. He was the one there for the first birthday. He was experienced with horror, so he would bear it and shield Kona from it. Then, he would curse my Mother out in Hawaiian, which she would think was beautiful because she didn't know one word he was saying. Maybe I get my xenomania from Mother. Everything is connected to everything else.

It didn't work this time. I was there as Kona. Alaka'i didn't arrive. That rape was my first as Kona. As Kona, I didn't speak Hawaiian.

It went on for a long time. I don't know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe only half an hour. She raped me until after I lost control of my bladder and bowels. She washed me with water, then raped me some more. I would have spoken Hawaiian to make it stop if I could.

During the raping I became light-headed and felt my consciousness fading, only to be screamed at, "You're not going to faint on me!" and have cold water splashed in my face and up my nose. There was no escape.

Finally she gave up and took me in and laid me out on her bed. I was glad that the raping was over for the moment, but I was in a panic about Alaka'i. It suddenly occurred to me that when I was in the driveway and thought I was dying, it could be that just one of us was dying, and that the other one would have to go on without any help.

But my Mother's monologue was now all about killing me. Her speech was racing. She paced back and forth in front of me at the foot of the bed. She was saying that my Father was probably gone for good, and there was no way she was going to take care of me by herself. She discussed with herself, as if I wasn't in the room, how she could finish me without being charged with murder. The discussion was frantic and chopped, with different refrains mixed together, repeated over and over again.

"John was the one who punched him. He's the one they'll convict," was one refrain. Another was, "I can smash his head with a shovel, and bury him so far in the woods they'd never find where I did it." Another was, "I don't have to smash his head, if I bury him he'll die soon enough anyway. Just so long as the police can't hear him making noise when they come looking for him."

Finally she decided she wanted to "get it [my dying] over with." She said I'd be easier to bury that way. She took the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face. As Kona, I felt relief again that I might be able to join Alaka'i in the ultimate escape. But I struggled anyway, because you can't help it. When someone's smothering you, the panic and fear and struggling just happens.

Boys Bleed

My 4th birthday was uneventful until my Father arrived home from Fort Devens. There were presents. I remember two of the presents.

One was a Fisher-Price educational toy that consisted of a plastic weighing balance with weights in the shapes of digits. The weight of each digit was proportional to its value. So you could learn adding by discovering that 2 and 3, for example, exactly balanced 1 and 4, but not 8 and 9.

One was a Raggedy Ann doll. I really despised that one. It looked like an evil witch to me. I hated her almost as much as "Teddy", the bear my Dad gave me on my first birthday, the birthday that by now was a nightmare best forgotten.

I didn't get long to play with the presents because my parents said that for another present they were taking me out to a nice dinner. The self-serving aspect was obvious to even to me, the 4 year-old. But I shrugged it off, knowing that I was going to be leaving for Hawaii. Or half of me was.

My Mother was slow getting ready. She had to "put on her face." So Dad and I went out alone to the car. He got in the driver's seat. I slid into the back seat from the right side. Alaka'i assumed control, and said, in Hawaiian, a short speech he had composed and memorized. The gist of it was, "Father, though we have had our difficulties, you are an honorable man. So it is right I tell you I leave now for Hawaii. Keiki Kona will stay, so you won't be losing a son. I am sorry to have to leave, but since we can't get along, this is for the best for both of us."

Alaka'i's idea was that he would give the speech first in Hawaiian to give my Father an opportunity to show off his knowledge of that "beautiful language", and then, only if necessary, translate. Translating became urgent when my Father turned red and screamed, "HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK LIKE THAT! YOU SPEAK ENGLISH AND SPEAK IT NOW!" He jumped out of the front seat and ran around to the passenger side of the car.

So Alaka'i said, quickly, in plain English, "I'm going back to Hawaii. Goodbye, Daddy."

As the words left my mouth, Dad was at the passenger-side back door and hauled me out. He shouted, "YOURE NOT GOING ANYWHERE! YOU'RE NOT TALKING TO ME LIKE THAT! NO KID OF MINE IS TALKING TO ME LIKE THAT!"

My Mother walked up, face intact, in time to hear that and see him draw his fist back and give me a roundhouse punch on the left side of my head. The force threw me to the ground, where my right temple struck a large rock jutting up from the earth.

I sprang to my feet immediately and ran from my parents around the front of the carand south along the long driveway in front of the house toward Leominster Road. I would escape yet running that way. I got about 100 feet and felt a wetness and heard my Mother scream "LOOK AT THE BLOOD! HE'S GOING TO DIE!"

I thought she couldn't mean me. I was alright. I stopped and turned around to see who was going to die. When I looked back I noticed out the corner of my right eye that a fountain of blood was striking the dirt to that side. I felt sick to my stomach as I realized it was my fountain of blood, from my temple.

My mother had been bringing the dog Koko out to go with us. She was preparing to put him on a leash. In the excitement he got free and ran toward me. He ran up and found the puddle of blood that I was creating, and he began lapping it up.

My Mother couldn't take the sight of that. She could demand my Father kill me, over and over again, but she couldn't deal with anything as gross as the dog licking up my blood. I can't complain. I'm alive today because of her revulsions.

She started yelling at the dog now. "You horrible, horrible, animal! Get away!"

She ran up to us and chased Koko away from me, just as I dropped to my knees dizzy from the loss of blood. I said, "Please don't hurt him. Let him drink, he's just a dog, he doesn't understand." At the same time I saw the car's tires spin gravel out as my Father drove off by himself, and turned back once more to see him leaving.

The car with my Father driving passed Koko, who was by now twenty feet from my Mother and I. Koko was standing there looking back at me and my Mother, and she yelled at him, "GET AWAY, YOU MONSTER!" and he ran off at top speed in the direction of the receding car as if in obedience.

I was left alone with my Mother. I passed out, relieved at the thought that I was dying, and that Koko had also gotten away.

The Growing Gift

Even at the time, at the ridiculously young age of 3 and a half, I had enough sense of irony to realize what a joke it was that my Mother suspected Lani of being a pedophile. I think now it was based on 1) racism, 2) the fact that he was much older than she expected him to be (she later said she thought he'd be six or seven), and 3) she was a rapist, so it was easy for her to think anybody could be.

I've often noticed that the people I most have to worry about stealing from me are the ones who most often voice such suspicions of others. They suspect others because they do it themselves. If a priest berates his congregation about tithing every week, I bet he cheats on his taxes. My Mother taught me the pattern early.

Seeing me talking with Lani set her at ease, though. I assured her he was good, but I think what really settled her was how comfortable I was with him.

I explained how suspicious my Mother was to Lani, and pointed out the irony. I told him she thought he was evil like herself. He asked if I was really sure she didn't understand Hawaiian, and I proved it by looking at her and insulting her with a smile on my face. She just smiled back.

My Mother began asking him questions through me. I already knew the answers to a lot of her questions but she insisted on answers from him, so he had to say he was from Ni'ihau and a maintenance worker, etc., so I could translate and say the same things I already knew to my Mother.

Then she asked him things I didn't know the answers to. She asked him how old he was. The answer was a word I didn't recognize. Lani then showed that he knew some English words after all. He said in English that he was nineteen.

She asked him how well I was speaking Hawaiian. He said I was speaking just right for my age, and was ready to start school. She was surprised and said, "Start school? How old do you think he is?" He said he thought I was five or maybe six. She laughed and told me to tell him how old I really was, and I held up three fingers plus one bent finger to show the half.

So all along Lani and Lono had thought I was about two years older than I was, probably because I was bigger than a typical Hawaiian child my age, and they'd grown up among Hawaiians on Ni'ihau.

Lani said that, if I was that young, then my speech was very good for my age. He said my main difficulty was with number.

That one stray comment had a major impact on my life. I now realize that he meant grammatical number. Grammatical number is much more complicated in Hawaiian than in English. As well as singulars and plurals, there are duals, and additional sorts of "we" and "us" depending on how many of us there are and whether you are included in us, and different kinds of theys than in English, and I hadn't got it all down yet.

But I thought at the time he meant counting numbers. So later on I became obsessed with learning all about counting numbers, thinking I would make Lani proud. This ultimately led to a doctorate in mathematics.

Had I understood better what Lani was saying, it might have been a doctorate in linguistics.

I showed Lani the ball my Father had given me. He said it reminded him of something he had for me. He reached into a deep pocket and pulled out something. It was a sliding whistle. On top of it was mounted the carving he had been working on for months. It had turned into a bird which was painted red. The basic whistle itself, he said, was store-bought. It was white to begin with, and he had added decorations in red and black along the sides. He attached a feather to it. He apologized for not being able to get an 'i'iwi feather. It had to be a dyed feather. He also apologized for the shape of the bird's beak, he couldn't do a long 'i'iwi's beak with the wood he had.

He said that he made the whistle thinking I was older than I was. It was made as a hō'ano'ano gift.

'Ano means kind. 'Ano'ano means seed or to grow in accordance with one's kind. Hō'ano'ano means to help cause something or someone to grow the way they are meant to grow. Lani said that it was a tradition for a kahuna expert in such things to give a hō'ano'ano gift to each child when he or she reaches the appropriate age. Since human beings are creatures of ideas and imagination, the seeds of humans are ideas also. The gift is designed by the expert based on his knowledge of the individual child, to point to and stir the germinating idea that is already trying to grow in the child.

Lani said he was giving me the whistle even though I was younger than he thought, because he wouldn't be able to give it later. He told me I was supposed to meditate upon it once a day. It wasn't the physical object that was important, but the idea of it.

That, he explained, was why he worked so slowly and carefully on the carving. It was why he only carved it in my presence. Seeing him carve it was part of the gift.

He explained a little of the symbolism. The red bird is my 'aumakua because I was drawn to it by its song. Therefore there must be a song inside me, as part of my seed. Some of the decorations on the whistle represent the drum music I loved, and some pointed to questions about life I asked. There was a design that stood for flight, and for imagination, and the feather also did that.

But the main idea was that the bird needed the whistle to sing. The bird was very red and very Hawaiian, but he needed the white non-Hawaiian whistle to be heard. Lani said I wouldn't be able to sing my song to the world in Hawaiian.

[Below: Just an artistic suggestion of it, not really accurate.]

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor by helicopter:



[Ford Island is mislabeled.]

When I told Lani and Lono that I wasn't allowed to speak Hawaiian at home they were clearly saddened by it, but they told me I needed to do what my Father said. At the time I was only speaking an occasional word of English when Lono "practiced" English with me. He asked if I was speaking more at home, and I had to tell him (in Hawaiian) I was speaking less there. They asked why and I wanted to say it was ugly, but didn't know the word, so I called it 'ino, which is more extreme (it means more like foul and evil) but definitely gets the point across. They laughed, and told me that Hawaiians call Western languages, especially English, namu'ana, which means "chewing", because English speakers sound like they're chewing as they talk.

They also talked about how English speakers speak from their noses, while Hawaiians speak from their lungs. Then they told me of a Hawaiian word game that involved seeing who could speak the longest clause unbroken by a breath stop. That was followed by another game of reciting longer and longer sentences entirely lacking in consonants. Since they both knew all the sentences the other was reciting it wasn't really a competition, it was more oral entertainment, like sharing in the singing of verses of a song everyone knows.

At home there was no such thing. Speech wasn't for play and entertainment, it was for domination, for asserting power, winning arguments, and put downs, or it was for submission, saying pleases and thank yous. I wasn't speaking more than a few words of English, and already my Father was make noise to the effect that I should be calling him Sir, rather than Daddy. What would the other officers think of his command authority if they heard his own son calling him Daddy rather than Sir? Horrors.

My Mother pointed out that it was silly to expect me to accord military honors to my Father when I didn't know what he did at work. Maybe I needed to see him at work giving out orders to Lieutenants and Sergeants.

I'd actually seen him ordering native civilian workers around, using a lot of Pidgin, saying silly things he was taught would work well such as, "wiki, wiki, chop, chop" for "get it done fast" and "pau?" for "finished?" But that was just out in the front when some workers were making a delivery. Going to where my Father worked would be an adventure.

As soon as we were in the car heading toward Pearl Harbor I started commenting on what we doing in Hawaiian. It's one of the few times I remember any of the actual Hawaiian words I used. Holo'ana (driving), ka'a (car), and hana (work), we're definitely in the mix. At hearing "ka'a" my Father corrected me, telling me to say "car" instead. I acted as if they were exactly the same thing, and deliberately kept saying ka'a over and over. I just didn't want to say car. For one thing, I didn't do "r's" very well. In his frustration he extended the rule against speaking in the house to the car, commencing immediately.

When I say my Father worked at Pearl Harbor I mean he was assigned to one of the many military reservations ringing the harbor. Probably he was at Fort Shafter, which is a mile or so from the harbor at the western edge of Honolulu and close to Tripler Medical Center.

The day I spent with my Father at his office was mostly a bust. He was called away to some business while I was there, and I was left in the care of some guy he called his secretary. When he came back the secretary was given my Father's camera to take this picture of my father. My Dad also took pictures of stuff on the desk, including a close-up of the "see no evil - speak no evil - hear no evil" monkeys. It didn't occur to him to have a picture taken of him with me, or for that matter, any pictures of me that day. I only just now noticed, 54 years later.

So, Who's On First?

Since I didn't yet speak English, I was exercising my speech throughout this time by talking to myself in Hawaiian. I supplied a running commentary to everything I did. My Mother heard all this and started to guess I was speaking Hawaiian. When she told my Father, he didn't believe it.

My Father was very proud of his language skills. Part of his job involved directing civilian workers on base, many of which were Hawaiian natives. But none of them that he knew spoke Hawaiian. Instead they spoke the creole that is usually called Hawaiian Pidgin. Modern Hawaiian itself borrows vocabulary heavily from English and other colonial languages, but the underlying grammar is all Old Hawaiian. Pidgin is more like English with heavy borrowing from Hawaiian, and other colonial languages.

To do his job my Father had a little black pocket Hawaiian-English dictionary that he used to translate individual words and short phrases, to be able to order the Pidgin speaking natives around. Since all the natives he'd encountered had spoken Pidgin and not Hawaiian, therefore in his mind I had to be speaking Pidgin. He guessed that I was getting it second and third hand through neighbor kids.

It started to get on his nerves. He claimed his problem with it was it was keeping me from learning English, but I know it was largely vanity. He couldn't take the fact that I didn't need the black book. He couldn't be cool with the fact that a two and a half year old can learn a language faster than he could. It didn't help that just a year earlier it was looking like I might never speak at all. At learning Hawaiian words he was being outpaced by a retarded kid, from his perspective.

So he started yelling every time I spoke Hawaiian around the house. It was upsetting, but I couldn't see what I could do about it.

Then one day my father was out in the front yard watering the grass with a hose. I was really excited by this because it was one of the first times I'd seen him doing something I knew anything about. Being with Lani and Lono I'd learned all about watering lawns.

In Hawaiian, the word for watering, as with a hose, is just like one of the words kids say "urinate" in English. It's pīpī, which sounds like peepee. It also can mean "urinate" in Hawaiian, but for me it meant to water or sprinkle a lawn, exclusively. In my excitement I shouted out "PīpīDaddy! PīpīDaddy! " so loud all the neighbors could hear.

My Father turned red, grabbed me by the arm and yanked me into the house, where he proceeded to spank me and scream at me all at once. I couldn't keep track of what he was saying.

My Mother intervened. She'd witnessed the whole thing and told him he was being foolish. She informed him that I had never used the word peepee to mean urination, so I must have meant something else. My mother could be surprisingly sharp from time to time, when she put effort into it.

It took a while. He kept yelling, and now he was yelling at her, "You really expect me to believe that shit?" But finally she got him to look in his black book. And, of course, he read that pīpī meant to water, or sprinkle. Like a lawn.

So he calmed down finally, but got all Father Knows Best on me, which in retrospect might have been worse than the screaming. He sat down at the table he worked the budget out at, and laid down a new Law. The new Law was that speaking Hawaiian was OK, but not in the house. There, it was forbidden. He said, "Do you understand?" I nodded yes. "he said, "I want to hear you say it, so I know you understand." So I said, "'Ae, pāpā."

"Yes, I'm Daddy", he said, "but do you understand?" So I said, "'Ae, Hawai'i 'ōlelo pāpā." He said, "Yes, yes, I'm your papa, but you aren't telling me what I want to hear."

We went a couple more rounds like that, when finally my Mother broke out laughing. My father said, "What are you laughing about?"

She said, "I think I just figured out what he means by papa."

He said, "He means Daddy, what else would he mean?"

She said, "Why don't you look it up in your black book and find out?"

He grumbled, but he looked it up, and found out "pāpā" means "forbidden".

Rise Up! Seize the Cookie!

At home I observed my Father in uniform and later described his insignia to my Ni'ihau friends. They told me my Father was a Captain. They were clearly impressed. The word for Captain in Hawaiian is Alaka'i, which also means boss or supervisor, the only name they had for me. They pointed out the connection, and suggested I was taking after my Father already. I had thoughts of becoming a soldier.

I asked if they ever wanted to be soldiers. Lono said he might, for a while, but eventually he wanted to study English more and teach school. This one remark was very important to me. What's English? The language of Britain and of the U.S., where I was from, they said. Not Hawai'ian, but a separate language. It was a revelation that took a while to absorb. There was also a reminder of school. I learned where I would have found it. It was almost twice as far as I had searched.

Lani said he wanted to be an artist. He took a carving out of his pocket and showed it to me. It didn't look like anything but a lump of wood, but he said in time it would look like an animal. When I asked what animal, he said whatever it wanted.

I remember at the time being more interested in Lono's goals than in Lani's. It was about this time though that I learned they were brothers. Lono said they were non-identical twins. They were born at the same time to the same Mother. But they were so different. Lono was so extroverted. Lani was quiet and distant.

At home I had a new kind of problem. The new dog Koko was getting cookies all the time, but my Mother still was not feeding me when my Father was at at work. I was beginning to reach the point where I could start to pronounce English but the words wouldn't come out. I was sure that if I could tell my Mother what was wrong everything would be solved.

I came up with the idea of translating Hawaiian into English. I worked for a long time and came up with the sentence, "If dog gets cookie, boy gets cookie." I tried it out the next time my Mother was dishing out cookies to Koko.

It was probably January, 1952. I'm sure it was after Christmas. I was 2 and a half and it was 18 months after my first word. My Mother's jaw dropped open. Her eyes opened wide. Then she smiled, gave me a cookie and said, "All you ever had to do was ask."

When I told Lani and Lono about it they were stunned, too. Not that I had spoken English, but that I hadn't been doing so. This was they first they knew of it.

It was already decided that I couldn't follow them all day and distract them from their work. Now they laid down a rule that the hour's lunchtime would be divided into equal halves. The first thirty minutes of each lunch break would consist of Lono and I practicing our English. The second thirty minutes would be all three of us speaking or singing Hawaiian.

Lunches were at 11am to noon. I was taught just enough about telling time to know when it was getting close to 11.

About this time, I began to feel bad that my friends were always bringing food to the lunches and I never had any to bring. I think I was picking up on the Hawaiian value of uku, reciprocity. So I worked out how to say, "Want cookies for friends."

Once again, mother was stunned. This time, it was that I had friends. She asked a lot of questions, but I couldn't answer any of them because I hadn't prepared. The only thing I could do was nod yes when she asked if they were bigger. I could only say sentences I'd worked on and practiced for an hour or so. Finally though she agreed to give me a bag of cookies.

A typical day would consist of me getting up around daybreak, playing by myself in the house or close by while my Mother slept off the previous night's drunk. Then around 10:15 or so, I would go into her bedroom and start yelling, "E Māmā, e ala e! E ala ala e!" Once she was up, she give me a bag of cookies for my friends. She knew they were older kids, but had in mind 4 or 5 year-olds, 6 year-olds, maybe. She never dreamed I was meeting 18 year-olds for lunch every day.

Bloody Dog

As I've said before my first word was "Daddy", prompted by my Mother saying, "tell Daddy who your present [the shit] is for!"

After my parents were both dead I found an old album they had of me. It was called Baby's Album, or something similar and equally obvious. The album had ready-made entries for "Baby's first smile", "Baby's first steps", etc., with room for snapshots where appropriate, and blank lines to be filled in with dates and other details.

The entry for "Baby's first word" had originally been "Daddy", but was later struck through and replaced by "shit" in the kind of bad handwriting my Mother had after she came down with arthritis in the Seventies. So maybe she remembered it a little differently. But clearly our memories aren't significantly different.

A few hours later I parroted "Goodbye Daddy" from memory. Then I went to the hospital and didn't speak a single word again until sometime toward the end of November, 1951. I don't remember what I said now, but I remember Lani and Lono placing it in time for me, and saying I had told them they had forgotten to do some one of their chores. It was an entire sentence in Hawaiian.

Things moved quickly after that, and already by December I was carrying on simple conversations with them, entirely in Hawaiian. It would be several months yet before I spoke any English again. But, unlike my insensitive parents, Lono was alert to the fact that I understand a lot of English, and so he alternated Hawaiian and English with me. Lani spoke only Hawaiian.

After I began speaking Hawaiian, Lani began to warm to me. One of the earliest conversations I remember was one I had with Lono when Lani had to leave us for a few minutes. He told me Lani had been keeping his distance because he had suffered too much from the loss of a younger brother. The discussion took some time because I didn't know what a younger brother was.

I still thought Hawaiian and English were one language and every night after going over the day's events and conversations in my head I would try to make English sounds in the hope of extending my speech to that part of "Hawaiian". I deliberately babbled, with the conscious goal of mastering the consonants and consonant combinations.

That was the main problem. Hawaiian has 7 consonants plus a breath stop: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, '.

The brain injury affected my speech motor control. I could whistle like a bird but I couldn't say hard g when I wanted to. Double consonants like gr and bl were even worse. So I worked on making those sounds constantly whenever I was alone. I recall sessions that went "tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, dok, dok, dok, dok, ..." on and on like that, until I fell asleep.

Speaking of "dok", we got a dog right about this time. He was nominally a Christmas present to me. My Father, who was back from Korea in time for the gifting, was sure that the dog was half Springer Spaniel and half Miniature Schnauzer. He named him Koko Head after the Hawaiian promontory east of the more famous Diamond Head. It was a common name that all the haole would give any pet that had dark fur on its head. Get it? "Koko": sounds like "Cocoa"!

But I already knew "koko" to mean "blood" in Hawaiian. I didn't like the idea of naming something with sharp teeth "Blood". I was very suspicious of this "gift", as you can see for yourself. This is the best picture my Father ever took, in my opinion.

The Walks

Here's a recent satellite image of the area of Schofield Barracks where I would find Lani and Lono. North is up. It doesn't look like much has changed.


I met up with Lono the first day at Canby Field to the west. This image shows about two-thirds of the field, which is altogether almost twice as long and twice as wide as a football field. We met at a point beyond the edge of this image. Later I would learn to look for them at the northern end of Morris Road, or a little further northwest from there along Leilehua Road, somewhere between the points marked with the Xs on the map. Leilehua was the avenue my Mother taught me not to cross. We lived a few houses off it on a side road about five or six blocks southwest of the meeting point, about a third of a mile distance.

Much later I learned that with my little legs that third of a mile took me around twenty minutes when I hurried. I'm sure I didn't hurry much on the way home though.

As green and pretty as the neighborhood was with all its plantings and fields, the walk was not always a pleasure because there were mean older children who would push me around and threaten me. Also many people at Schofield let their dogs run free and a few of them were threatening.

As I learned Hawaiian the walk transformed. The world changed for me. Hawaiian is very different from English in many ways. For one, words are run together. In English, words are clearly separate in speech. In Hawaiian, it can be hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. It creates a feeling of all things being connected.

Adding to the sense of connectedness is the fact that so many words have multiple meanings, making it a more context dependent language than English..

Also, there's no verb "to be". "Is" is understood. A thing is, if we're talking about it. This means it is less natural to imagine emptiness. The world is full everywhere you look. It also helps prevent mistaking predicates for identities. Qualities of things don't become the things and take them over, so there is more room for more qualities. In English, once you say the barn is red, you can easily be fooled into thinking you're done. That's what it is, right?

As I started thinking in Hawaiian, colors became brighter for me, and things around me swirled and tangled with one another. In English, there were things and not-things, good and bad. In Hawaiian there were things and more things, good and different good, and the boundaries were not straight lines.

Gradually, those times when I was alone and not being threatened, my walks became richer. I noticed, and I was grateful.

Hula at Folklife

Polynesian dance at the Seattle Folklife Festival, May 27, 2007. This is the first dance, a Hawaiian hula by Halau Hula Pulamahiakalikolehua. It's shaky for the first minute because people are still finding seats. Then it settles down.



Same group, if I'm remembering right. I'm getting so old I should carry a notepad with me at all times to know what I've seen.



This is a dance to a Coming of Pele drum chant.



Cute keiki (little ones) dancing.