Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This presentation discusses how contemporary community bonds to storied places (wahi pana) like Kīlauea volcano and Waipi'o Valley on Hawai'i Island constitute enactment and articulation of survivance, while also producing meaningful frameworks for practicing cultural identity in a colonial setting.

Paper long abstract

Hawai'i’s colonial context of Americanization, settler-dominance, and oppression of Native Hawaiian culture and language have influenced the narrative traditions within which Hawai'i’s storied places are made meaningful for contemporary islanders. Contemporary narrative folk traditions about storied places span from everyday culture to tourist-lore and other types of commercial texts (disseminated online, in brochures, or orally conveyed by professional tour guides) to stories told in educational settings or regurgitated and reconfigured in the contemporary literature of Hawai'i. In the highly diverse landscapes of Hawai'i Island (aka the Big Island of Hawai'i) storied places (wahi pana) like Kīlauea volcano and Waipi'o Valley are closely related to Native Hawaiian storytelling (mo'olelo), the practice of caring for the land (malama 'āina), and the ongoing bond building (pilina) between people and land as expressed in chants (mele) and proverbs ('ōlelo no'eau), such as “the land is the chief, man is its servant” (“he ali'i ka 'āina, he kauwā ke kanaka”). The social stratification between land and people and the cultural values expressed in Hawaiian oral traditions frame contemporary perceptions of Hawaiian identity as tied closely to the land, in particular the storied places of Waipi'o Valley and Kīlauea volcano, where the enactment and articulation of belief narratives reinforce humans’ responsibility (kuleana) to honor their relations (pilina) to the land. This process may be seen as survivance, both resisting the hegemony of American colonialism while sustaining the survival of cultural identity. Concepts and expressions from Hawaiian epistemology will be used to analyze this topic.