Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I like poems that are  simple and sincere, and I like them when they’re fairly short. I don’t like cutesy ones, but I do like playful ones. It’s kind of a miracle when a small string of words can conjure up a potent image in your head, or stirs a feeling that takes its time to fade away. It makes me think of how Barthes describes punctum when looking at a photograph. You just need one little idiosyncratic thing to make that connection, and then it’s magic from there.

The young people I work with LOVE poems, and have got me interested in them again. At the library, I found a book of poems I really like, called “Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights” published by Amnesty International. It’s really good. Many of the poems were composed in prison camps, or during or after experiences of war, political expulsion, and gender apartheid. Or they were written by people facing oppression in less overt form. Either way, here are three I liked the best:

Love – Visar Zhiti (Albania)

How far my night is

           from your night!

Other nights rise between like uncrossable mountains.

I sent the road out for you. But it didn’t find you.

It grew weary and returned to me.

I sent out the roebuck of my song. But

The hunters shot it and, wounded

         it returned to me.

I don’t know which direction the wind took. It got lost

In the trees and in the caverns of pain, and returned to me, blinded.

Rain is falling, robbed of hope.

Tomorrow when day breaks, shall I send out a rainbow

To look for you? Though, as naive as joy itself,

It can only cross one mountain.

I shall set out in the night myself.

I shall search, I shall search, I shall search

Like a hand groping in the darkness of a room,

         to find an extinguished candle.

Irregular Verbs – Aquiles Nazoa (Venezuela)

These are some verbs, that at a snail’s pace

I conjugate

You conjugate

He conjugates

As without constitutional guarantees all become inhibited

I don’t write

You don’t write

He doesn’t write

For to write the things that one holds in one’s head

I am arrested

You are arrested

He is arrested

A Will – Fatiha Morchid (Morroco)

To you my little daughter

The ringing of the murmurs

I silenced

The sad laughter

I drowned

The ecstasy of scents

I buried

When my youth wandered away

To you

All the paths

I never trod

All the waves…

I never struggled with

Fear O my dear

Is the sailor’s enemy

To you

All the fruit

My hands forbore

From picking

Mr. Waltham, you will always be a wiener in my eyes...

Will I miss you

uncanny other

in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave

the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,

and I a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had

give way like coffee grains

brushed across paper…

- Jean Valentine

Reading Hawaiian language newspaper from January 1890

Found a really cool archival website that has Hawaiian language newspapers from the 1800′s and early 1900′s. Link: http://www.nupepa.org/gsdl2.5/cgi-bin/nupepa?e=d-0nupepa–00-0-0–010—4—-text—0-1l–1en-Zz-1—20-about—00031-0000utfZz-8-00&a=d&cl=CL2.46

I shrank one down to use as a prop in my thesis project. Besides being cool, it’s also an important historical detail I always wanted to put in my film. By 1890, over 90 percent of the Native Hawaiian population was literate, an extremely remarkable thing for the time.

The protest was wonderfully organized by the Oceanic Coalition of Northern California (O.C.N.C), and featured Pacific Islander leaders, activists, and students from all over the Bay Area, as well as guests from Rapa Nui and Hawai’i.

I had an amazing time taking pictures, and I got to catch up with a lot of folks I hadn’t seen in a while – as well as meet some amazing new people. Being in a very highly commercial area, it was especially poignant to see all of us gathered for a cause worth a billion times more than anything that could be bought in a store. Rapa Nui is so tiny, and so overlooked or forgotten by mainstream media, that I think it felt really good for everyone to stand in alliance with Rapa Nui and be noisy about it. It brought to mind the the Maori phrase:

Ahakoa he iti, he iti pounamu / Although small, it is precious

The full album can be viewed at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=384105&id=611458377&l=83d168bcd9

Still from my thesis, work in progress! (finally)

Personally, I’ve eaten many a meal with other Pacific Islanders (Native Hawaiians, Tongans, Maori, Samoans,  Fijians and Chamorros to be exact) and nobody ever had pineapple on their plate. Not one. Nobody ever talked about wanting pineapples, or plans to have pineapple later. When you go to someone’s house and their family makes their traditional food, it is pretty much pineapple-free. Except for maybe if they like pineapple upside down cake, which is, of course,  a delicious American creation.

This is probably because pineapples are indigenous to South America, not Oceania. They were brought to Hawai’i in 1813 by Spanish plantation owners, who had previously set up  successful pineapple plantations in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba. They also brought pineapples to the Philippines, Guam and Zimbabwe.

Despite the pineapple being a global fruit (it is also grown in India and in English hothouses), it became “Hawaiianized” in the early 20th century, when James Dole began developing a pineapple empire. He earned the title of “Pineapple King” by creating a massive and successful ad campaign, as well as modernizing and expanding pineapple production and industrialization. In 1922, the Dole pineapple plantation on Lana’i was the largest plantation in the world, with over 200,000 acres of pineapples.

I should also point out that the Dole family in Hawai’i was also instrumental in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which ended Native Hawaiian sovereignty through unconstitutional means.  With his conspirators, Samford Dole helped draft the Bayonet Constitution in 1887, which stripped the Hawaiian Kingdom of much of its authority. King Kalakaua was forced to sign it under intimidation, reportedly with guns pointed towards his head. More importantly, the Bayonet Constitution took voting rights from Native Hawaiians and “all Asian persons” in the years precipitating the overthrow.  After the overthrow  in 1893, a blatant theft of power orchestrated by descendants of American missionaries,  Samford Dole went on to appoint himself the first president of the forcibly imposed “Republic of Hawaii,” a term I put in quotes to highlight its irony. While Samford Dole was not a monarch, this certainly was not a republic.

Under the control of American businessmen, Hawai’i  continued to become a rich agricultural center for sugar and pineapples. These giant plantations were partly the result of the Great Mahele (mahele means “divide”), enacted in 1848 under the Hawaiian kingdom. This act made it possible to privately own land in Hawai’i (Native Hawaiians did not practice Western style land ownership), which ultimately resulted in the displacement of much the native population as American and European businessmen began purchasing much of the land. While the Hawaiian kingdom at the time had enacted the Mahele, it was done at the urging and persistence of the European and American royal advisers.

Additionally, I mention the denial of voting rights to “Asian persons” in the Bayonet constitution considering how much of the contemporary hotel culture in Hawai’i celebrates and romanticizes the “plantation style” aesthetic, which is a very perverse nostalgia. The Hawaiian plantation “heyday” is a time period in which hundreds of thousands of immigrants labored in hot, dusty fields as indentured workers, while their Native Hawaiian neighbors were prohibited by law from speaking their own language. Yes, the aesthetic is pretty, but its social and historical context is not.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the pineapple. It can be very sweet and delicious (I do love pineapple upside down cake)  and in Victorian times, it was considered a charming symbol of welcome. But is it Hawaiian? Or Polynesian? Nope.

If you want to make your food island “island style,” put some kalo on it ;P

Dr. Luana Ross (Picture: "Indian Country Today")

The students at Salish Kootenai College are very lucky to have Dr. Luana Ross as their president. She is not only extremely knowledgeable, but is also a very nurturing  and supportive instructor – with an amazing sense of humor. I’m so happy our paths crossed while she was still at the UW. Congratulations Luana! 

Read more about her at “Indian Country Today”