Big Maka, Little Maka

Lani wanted to teach me Kahiko. He never had time to teach much, but he wanted to teach as much as he could. The biggest barrier, besides time, was the lack of props. He tried to explain the old living arrangements, but it was tough getting the ideas across without the aid of pictures or models. Likewise, with just Lani and Lono to talk to I never got to hear women speaking, or interactions between men and women.

Early in my teaching Lani focused on the cast of spiritual characters and spiritual entities that made up the Kahiko world. The major gods were described. Their dependence on mana was emphasized. Mana was all important. Gods were nothing without mana. You can get too much. You can get more mana than you're ready for.

Moving down the hierarchy, there's the great ancestors. These were the 'aumākua, who acted as family and personal gods. You could have more than one. An 'aumakua could take the form of any sort of animal, or even a plant. The taro (kalo) plant was an 'aumakua to everyone. Poi is made from it, that's why you don't argue when the poi can hear.

Lani and Lono told me a story about a shark that protected and saved someone from danger. I was a little bored by the story itself. I think they thought it would interest me because the protagonist was a boy, but I didn't care about the kid in the story. What I wanted to know was, what's a shark?

Try it yourself. Try explaining to a 2 or 3 year old what a shark is, without the use of pictures. We ran into additional confusion because of a peculiarity of the word for eyes in Hawaiian. Maka doesn't only mean eyes, it also means face. So when they said the shark has a big wide face with little eyes, it came out "big maka, little maka." I don't think I knew what a shark looked like for another two years.


I asked if I had any 'aumākua. They said they couldn't know what my family's 'aumākua could be, but asked if any animals had seemed special to me. I mentioned the red bird that I'd seen the day my Father went to Korea. I imitated the red bird's song from memory. They both recognized the song and could name the bird. I believe now that they said it was an 'i'iwi.

Then I told them for the first time about how my parents had arranged to run me over with the car, and how seeing the red bird in my imagination saved my life. I figured that if the red bird really was there to save my life, that would make him an 'aumakua for sure, but since he was just there in my thoughts it didn't count.

Lani's answer to that was that thoughts count more than anything. Thoughts are driven by mana, thoughts are how the gods work on people. If a thought of a red bird saved you, that's mana flowing through you. The 'aumakua is anyway only a sign for that working.

Not So Bad Ancestors

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. This is the first one after a 3 month hiatus, due to Shelby our manager having a baby girl. -- wes]

My last name is Browning and I've been aware for a long time that the "Brown" part of it came from the Normans -- a fact that, when I first learned it, gave me no pleasure at all. It was as if I learned my ancestors were slave-owners, or the Taliban. What does history have to say about the Normans? Well, they spoke French, badly. They all were named Brun or Bill, Rollo or Roland. In the mid 11th century their Duke Billy got it into his head he was the King of England, so he decided to conquer it, sort of like Hitler woke up one morning and decided to be King of Poland. As a result all of us who speak English now speak French badly, as when we say beef instead of boeuf.

Aside from that, the Normans are mainly famous for their crummy rule of England. The Sheriff of Nottingham was a crummy Norman. Robin Hood's band of Merry Men were not, whatever Robin Hood was. So basically, all my life I have thought of my Norman ancestors as the guys you boo at in the movies.

Then Saturday I read in the Seattle Times that the Island of Sark, in the English Channel, still retains mostly Norman law and custom and that one of these laws is the law of "Clameur de haro." I looked it up and sure enough, it's a real law established by none other than Rollo "the Viking" Jarl of Ortney (855-931), Founder of the Normans, and it means "Cry of distress," and the law goes like this:

Say someone's messing with you. In front of them and a witness, you first get down on one knee, like you're really humble. Then you say "Haro! Haro! Haro! À l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort," which means "Hey! Hey! Hey! Help me, Prince, I'm being messed with." Then you say the Lord's Prayer in bad French.

The result is they have to stop their messing with you until the courts straighten it out! Is that cool or what?

The lesson I take from all this is that no matter how crummy you think your ancestors, or your loud drunken neighbors, or clog dancers, are, you could still find out something cool about them before you're sixty.