Kinship Flows in Brandy Nā Lani Mcdougall's The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa'akai

I Wai No'u (Give Me Water): A Thirst for Sovereignty

Inspired by an ‘evocative and impassioned explanation’ of the phrase ‘i wai no'u’ given by poet No'ukahau'oli Revilla, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, in an introduction to a special issue on Hawaiian sovereignty, draws from its simple meaning—give me water—to speak to more complex ‘facets of urgent desire, constant seeking, and yearning, all crying out to be quenched’ (Kuwada et al., 2010: 1). Kuwada therefore makes a connection between a thirst for the literal waters of Hawai'i and the ‘deep thirst [that] defines and motivates the contemporary cultural and political movement to recover Hawaiian sovereignty, language, tradition, and stories’ (Kuwada et al., 2010: 1). Reclaiming waters and homelands on an individual and collective scale in Oceania is also part of Hau'ofa's point—sovereignty efforts work in conjunction with, and are an integral part of, ‘Hau'ofa's reframing of the (colonially imagined) Pacific as the (Indigenously imagined) Oceania’ (Te Punga Somerville, 2012: 112). An Indigenously imagined Oceania is, as Hau'ofa makes clear, ‘additional’ to other identities, especially those ancestral and cultural identities that are so essential to struggles of sovereignty within settler nation-states (2008: 42). McDougall's poetry cannot be thought apart from aloha ‘āina (love for the land, patriotism, nationalism), mo'okū'auhau (genealogical connection to the land and to other people), and kuleana (a sense of responsibility); nor can it be thought in isolation from the ‘contemporary Kanaka Maoli Literary Movement’ that is reflective of ‘ongoing [expressions of] Hawaiian sovereignty’ (McDougall, 2010: 51; emphasis mine). Though there is growing public awareness of Hawai'i's current colonial situation (Kuwada et al., 2010: 1), what is still unknown to many who have settled in or visit Hawai'i is the fact that sovereignty in Hawai'i is ‘not an objective that Kanaka ‘Ōiwi are fighting for but it is a political condition they have never lost’ (Fujikane, 2012: 196; emphasis mine). Such claims to sovereignty are complicated by the continuing presence of white and Asian settlers in Hawai'i who are implicated, even if unwittingly, in the colonial erasures of the US settler state by contributing to the dispossession of Indigenous lands and waters (Fujikane and Okamura, 2008).

I argue that McDougall's poetry frames resistance to ongoing colonial scripts and presences through articulation of ancestral flows. Given US colonial impositions that quantify, by blood, Hawaiian claims to identity and land (see Kauanui's Hawaiian Blood: Colonization and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity), this resistance entails a revitalization of genealogical practices among Hawaiians that emphasize the importance of kinship over blood quantum in Indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies (Kauanui, 2008: 2). McDougall's poetry explores the exchanges that take place between Kanaka Maoli and ancestral lands, waters, and oceanic navigation via an ethos of ‘reciprocity' ⁴ . A reading practice that follows water as ancestral, reciprocal flow demonstrates how poets like McDougall contribute to these acts of resistance through works that simultaneously assert the sovereignty of Indigenous Hawaiians and enact the ‘world enlarging’ project of Oceania that Hau'ofa maps out. I start, then, with the salt-laden winds of McDougall's collection, which situate Hawai'i's history centrally within the great ocean continent and guide us through historic and contemporary sites of exchange.

Salt-Water

In coastal areas in Hawai'i, salt from sea spray is picked up by wind, leaving a fine layering of salt on cars, clothes, plants, houses, skin. But the eponymous Salt-Wind of McDougall's collection carries more than just salt. It carries the deeper truths held by an ocean that has borne witness to all manner of sea travel, exploration, and exploitation.

The dispossession and environmental destruction of Hawaiian lands and waters by years of colonial, imperial, military, tourist, and corporate incursions is well documented (Trask, 1999; Kajihiro, 2008; Shigematsu and Camacho, 2010; Fujikane, 2012). ⁵ Absent from the fictionalised version of Hawai'i many of us have come to know through the tourist industry is the fact that for over a hundred years, Hawai'i has been a nation illegally occupied by the United States. On 17 January 1893, the Kingdom of Hawai'i was overthrown by US military force. US Public Law 103–150, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, apologises for the overthrow of ‘the indigenous and lawful Government of Hawaii’ by armed naval forces, recognising an unlawful abuse of authority with both immediate and insidious ill effects for Kanaka Maoli. Public Law 103–150 acknowledges that Native Hawaiians ‘never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States’. ⁶ Loss of Hawaiian sovereignty, however, did not begin with the overthrow, but had its roots in the 1848 Māhele, which marked the legal transition in land tenure from communal to private ownership. ‘Āina (the land) is, as Kame'eleihiwa points out, ‘the basis for all sovereignty in Hawaiian society’ (1992: 13), and so the dispossession of both the land and the water that runs through it struck a forceful blow to fundamental Hawaiian beliefs and traditions that see and treat land and humans as related and interdependent, obligated to one another for both spiritual and physical survival.

The ravages of colonial encounters in Hawai'i are recounted—but also decentred—in the very first poem of McDougall's collection, called ‘Pō’, which references night, chaos, darkness, the ‘primordial female element necessary for all creation’ (ho'omanawanui, 2010: 32): ‘Before the land was tamed by industry,/ the oceanside resorts and pineapple plantations,/ before the cane knife's rust, the dark time of sickness,/ the coming of cannons, the bitter waters drunk,/ before the metallic salt of blood […] There was darkness without breath and Pō’ (McDougall, 2008: 3). Regarding Pō, Lilikalā Kame'eleihiwa argues that ‘mana wahine represents a “force that men must never ignore, for in a world where genealogical ranking [means] everything, the first ancestor [Pō, the female night who gives birth to herself] is the most powerful”’ (Kame'eleihiwa, 1999: 3, quoted in McDougall, 2006). Necessarily wading through these muddy waters of history to return to a time before creation long before Cook's arrival in 1778, the speaker, honouring and embodying the creative element of the first ancestor, births the Hawaiian world into being through poem.

The Salt-Wind, salted by ocean, and carrying on its wind the history and memory of sea, courses through the collection and speaks to both Native Hawaiian historical stories and ecologies that underwrite and continually renew the poetic voice, and draw attention to historical annexation and colonial incursions by archiving their material remains (i.e., the salt of blood and bone). Micro- and macro-histories of the island—including those both familial and cultural—can be read through traces of salt: ‘the metallic salt of blood’ (McDougall, 2008: 3), the ‘salt-swept waves’ (ibid.: 6), ‘the salt/ of tears, of bone’ (ibid.: 12), the tide's ‘lei of salted steam’ (ibid.: 13) and ‘the salt-pricked wind’ (ibid.: 61). The salt of blood, of waves, of tears, of bone, and of wind variously marks ‘The History of This Place’, as the title of one poem gestures, from the time before tourism and plantations, to the massacre at Olowalu (McDougall, 2008: 11), to the arrival of Captain Cook (ibid.: 52), to a father's embarrassed tears (ibid.: 44), to visitations from ancestral spirits (ibid.: 45), and so on. Ancestors whose ‘bones lay sleeping’ in ‘sand dunes and caves’, now disturbed by the encroachments of foreign development, bear the salt of sea and history (Andrade, 2010: 221). Salt is the sediment of this movement, the left-behind of tears, sweat, voyages of sea, labour, love, melancholy, joy. It stays ashore when the waters of life have long since washed away. Oceanic, ancestral, and bodily memory and movement are crystallised, then, quite literally, in the flowering of water to salt (Peek, 2012).

At the same time that salt acts as a kind of witness to a violent history of settler colonialism in Hawai'i, the salt-laden wind that drifts through McDougall's poetry serves as a gentle but persistent reminder that all Pacific Islanders are connected through Moana Nui, through their deposits of salt. In the collection's foreword, Māhealani Perez-Wendt writes, ‘salt adds its savor throughout the collection—it pulsates in the blood, forms rivulets of tears, is spun fine by time, washes over rocks, etches glass, is sieved through valley rains—it is the commonest of elements and the poet reminds us that we are part of its vast surround. Our home is ocean, and we, too, are carried on the winds; we, too, will return, and return again’ (2010: xii). That the people of Oceania are watered like the ocean, and that they too, like the ocean, leave their salt, is echoed in the final lines of ‘Over and Over the Return, Mo'okū'auhau’.

(McDougall, 2008: 86)

Here the wind picks up shards of interwoven histories, the salt of its journey a reminder and material trace of what has come before. Salt clings to bones, words, winds, surviving and defying a colonial project of erasure. The Salt-Wind, like the kūpuna (elders), carries important and difficult truths, but returns again and again to offer its gifts.

In 1896, three years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, English was elevated to the official language of Hawai'i, while ‘ōlelo Hawai'i was relegated to the status of a foreign language. Reflecting on all the lost words left unspoken by the introduction and privileging of English, ‘Ka ‘Ōlelo’ is a series of five sonnets that explores ‘native-language loss and acquisition’ (Perez, 2010: 90). In the first sonnet, the speaker mourns the loss of words, including those that were given to the winds and the rains that, as Perez observes, wait for their reclamation (ibid.: 91). Winds and rains of each district in Hawai'i were named for their scent, the nature of their caress, and their ‘manner of travel’ across land and sea (McGregor, 2010: 213). The Salt-Wind, then, is named by McDougall for the difficult and joyful histories that persist into the present, its salt continually beckoning back to an ocean that whispers, ‘This is where you belong’ (McDougall, 2008: 23).

Salt does not signal the evaporation of sea, then, but is its fine material imprint. The Salt-Wind and the ocean it emerges from are also sacred in their incantations. Being that makani (wind) also means spirit, the Salt-Wind alludes to the spirits that ride on and accompany the different winds of the island. There is an epistemological turn across various academic disciplines, all invested in challenging the ‘interpretive epistemologies we have inherited from the secular, Euro-American Enlightenment tradition’ (Coleman, 2012: 54), towards a grappling with the spiritual profiles of (human and non-human) existence. As Leilani Holmes reminds us, ‘political and social history does not exist in a different realm from indigenous [Hawaiian] cosmology; rather, it intersects with that cosmology’ (Holmes, 2000: 38). Mary Kawena Pukui, a much respected kupuna and translator of Hawaiian-language texts (chants, songs, histories), writes, ‘In old Hawai'i, one's relatives were both earthly and spiritual’ (Pukui, Haertig and Lee, 1972: 168). Likewise, Mohawk writer Taiaiake Alfred cautions against a purely materialist orientation of politics and social reality, and pushes for a move towards ‘a restored spiritual foundation’ (Alfred, 2005: 22). McDougall's The Salt-Wind does not simply remind us of the necessity of such projects; like many others the world over reclaiming the experiential, spiritual and embodied knowledge of Indigenous people, texts like The Salt-Wind are the reason for—not the result of—such essential academic and ontological moves. The Salt-Wind demonstrates that the spiritual is not only epistemological (Alexander, 2005: 293), but a regenerating, life-giving force that guides diplomatic, socioeconomic and political relations in a world devastated by ongoing forms of imperialism.

How then does water (salt and fresh) facilitate genealogical—and spiritual or cosmological—flow in McDougall's poetry? And how does this thirst for water—as desire, as sustenance, as contention, as corrective, as cosmology—motivate and inform ‘Hawaiian sovereignty, language, tradition, and stories’ (Kuwada et al., 2010)? To continue to formulate an answer I turn towards the subterraneous flows of fresh-water, and finally over and across the ocean to offshore relations with familial others.

Kinship Flows

In among poems recounting conversations across oceanic divides, the mana of rain forming puddles at a young girl's feet, and a journey to Maui's Haleakalā, the last section of McDougall's collection, titled ‘Hāloa Naka’, follows the slow but hopeful process required to tongue anew a language silenced by years of settler colonialism, and reclaimed by a wide open sea, English proving inadequate to the task of encompassing ‘the land's unfolding song, nor the ocean's/ ancient oli’ (McDougall, 2008: 66).

The poem ‘Hāloanaka’, which appears midway through this final section, speaks to the islands’ splendid offerings that form the basis of Hawaiian kinship relations. To understand just how, it is useful to chart the complex cyclical chain of extended atmospheric and familial relations that are set in motion by the birth of Hāloanaka. Embedded in this foundational relationship is an ethic of care and reciprocity, and an epistemological and spiritual relation to time and place.

In the epic tradition of Wākea (Sky Father) and Papahānaumoku (Earth Mother), the birth of both kalo (taro) and Kānaka Maoli is recounted. Wākea and Papahānaumoku have a daughter named Ho'ohōkūkalani. One night, Wākea seduces Ho'ohōkūkalani, and together they have a child whom they call Hāloanaka (long quivering stalk). Hāloanaka, stillborn, is buried in the earth, and from Hāloanaka's body grows the first kalo plant: its leaf is named laukapa-lili, and its stem, Hāloa. The second child of Wākea is called Hāloa, named in honour of his elder brother, after the stalk of the taro plant. Hāloa, in turn, is ‘the progenitor of all the peoples of the earth’ (David Malo quoted in Handy et al., 1972: 80). Hāloanaka (elder sibling), in the form of taro, ‘must feed and care for younger sibling [Kānaka Maoli], who returns honor and love’ (1999: 59). From this relationship a fundamental tradition is born: Mālama ‘Āina, or ‘caring for the Land’ represents ‘the reciprocal duty of the elder siblings to hārtai (feed) the younger ones, as well as to love and ho ‘omalu (protect) them. […] So long as younger Hawaiians love, serve, and honor their elders, the elders [the ‘āina, the kalo, and the Ali'i Nui, or chiefs] will continue to do the same for them, as well as to provide for all their physical needs’ (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992: 25, emphasis in original). The poem ‘Hāloanaka’ begins, then, with a gracious address to Hāloanaka, common ancestor to all Kānaka Maoli, for whom the poem is named:

Hāloanaka not only signifies the earliest of cosmological kinship ties between Kanaka Maoli and their land, but goes on to play a central role in Hawaiian culture as a major source of sustenance. A semi-aquatic plant, the taro cannot exist without ‘earth and light,/ salt-wind sieved through valley rains’ (McDougall, 2008: 71)—that is, an abundant supply of rain, sunlight, and fresh-water, the latter of which flowed from mauka to makai in running streams that ran through irrigated terraces and were diverted back into those same streams during the pre-contact era (Sproat, 2010: 188). The entire subsistence economy of Hawai'i pre Western contact was determined by this economical and sustainable course of fresh-water streams and ditches, whereby the ‘streams and ditches were the regulator the law givers, in communal relationship; not directly, but because upon their water depended the taro, and upon the taro depended man’ (Handy et al., 1972: 76; emphasis mine). Furthermore, the fresh-water that fed into the near shore marine areas in pre-contact times, comments Kapua'ala Sproat, ‘provided nutrients for our estuaries and fisheries and were really the nursery ground for the animals in our ocean area’. ⁷ Water flowing from mountain to sea sustained all life across this terraqueous terrain infiltrating all aspects of public and private affairs, and demonstrating the deeply rooted nature of the ‘land/sea continuum’ (Andrade, 2010: 218) in Hawaiian stories of origin and belief. Hāloanaka is thus also associated with Kane, one of the Hawaiian pantheon's four principle akua (gods, ancestors). Kane is the god of freshwater sources and the embodiment of male procreative energy in sunshine and in the fresh-water that flows in springs, streams, and rivers and falls as rain (Handy et al., 1972: 64). Life-giving waters are therefore deemed sacred as ‘a physical manifestation of Kāne’, and for this reason could ‘not be commodified or reduced to physical ownership’. ⁸

A reading conscious of kaona explores how each word, each reference, opens up a deluge of interrelated meanings and worlds. In the brief opening lines of ‘Hāloanaka’, while never explicitly detailing this complex chain of relations, or the role of water in sustaining them, the speaker weaves her way through a cosmological genealogy of origin, with allusion to the role of earth, light, salt-wind, and rain, not only in the cultivation of taro but in the spiritual regeneration and continuity of Kānaka Maoli. The taste of the taro plant unfolds on the tongue as waterlogged, sun-soaked earth—enfolding past, present, and future in this act of absorption.

Hāloanaka's birth is far from a singular offering. The final lines of the poem read, ‘Still, you give yourself over/ and over again, e hiapo,/ your sacrifice made ripe/ in the soil's short incubation—/ so that we may live knowing love/ and ‘ohana, our bright belonging’ (McDougall, 2008: 71). ‘Ohā refers to the corm or the sprouts of the taro plant, and is the root of the word ‘ohana, the word for family in Hawaiian, in a much extended sense of the term. Further, taro has for thousands of years been cultivated across Polynesia, Melanesia, Indonesia and Southern Asia, though nowhere else cultivated as ‘intensely or as skillfully as it was in the Hawaiian islands’ (Handy et al., 1972: 79). Thus, taro becomes identified as both primordial and pan-Polynesian (ibid.: 79), connecting Hawaiians to, through, and across the familial Pacific.

From taro comes poi. And poi opens up the body to receive the foundational flows that have sustained Hawaiians: the speaker's taste in ‘Hāloanaka’ summons Hawaiian gods and immerses us in historic flows as terrestrial ecosystems filter water into precious aquifers and set into motion profoundly rooted socioeconomic and spiritual relations. Such imagery reflects new directions that Pacific writers are taking, where Indigenous writers call on a deep history of visual culture in the Pacific that has provided the visual roots of Pacific literature (Teaiwa, 2010: 735). One must Imagine the flows of fresh-water in order to appreciate how they sustain relations between Kanaka Maoli and the taro plant. Hāloanaka's coming into existence through water, earth, and sun reflects a relation that is physical and spiritual at its core, and illustrates that Hawaiian kinship swells from the subterraneous ground up. To harvest both wetland and dryland taro, water is essential. The water that lines the lo'i kalo drenches the muddy earth from which the taro grows. It is at times barely visible beneath the mass of heart-shaped leaves, but it is there, always there, as a reading conscious of kaona might reveal.

Oceanic Crossings and/of Poi

Traditionally in Hawai'i, most of the water used for taro cultivation was returned to the streams so that water always remained in the watershed and could be communally accessed. Fresh-water streams from almost every watershed in Hawai'i have, since the establishment of plantation agriculture in the nineteenth-century, been diverted to service sugar plantations for private profit, and following their decline, are being used as a source of profit for water companies that have emerged in their place. In order to accommodate new demands for water, large-scale irrigation systems were constructed that circumvented natural watersheds and redirected them from ‘wet, Windward, predominantly Native Hawaiian communities, to the drier Central and Leeward plains where sugar was cultivated, and wells siphoned ground water’ (Sproat, 2010: 189). The diversion of water away from the lo'i kalo to service plantation agriculture, and now other ventures of capitalist enterprise, is a violation of long-held customs and laws in Hawai'i that hold that water is a public trust (Sproat, 2009). The loss of this public trust resource is about a loss of relations as much as it is about water shortage; that is, projects of colonial or corporate development enact psychic, economic, spiritual, cultural, and geophysical alienation. Given the diverse life forms dependent on the free-flowing waters of Kāne, by restoring stream flow in Hawai'i, all manner of traditional economic, ecological, social, and recreational practices can be revitalised. When the island of Maui saw the restoration of two legendary streams—Waihe'e River and Waiehu Stream—that were part of a water system that interconnected taro patches before their diversion, the effects on plant, animal, and human life were immediate, as the streams feed estuaries that replenish food supply from the ocean and are crucial to wetland taro cultivation. ⁹

Lack of water and access to taro-growing lands also affects the deeply rooted and watery kinship connections that find expression in the making and sharing of poi. Made from the corm of the taro plant, poi, a staple of the traditional Hawaiian diet, continues the ethic of care and reciprocity that informed Hāloanaka's birth and lives on in the cultivation of taro. In McDougall's poetry, then, the return to/of water is part of a wellspring of resistance (re)surfacing across the islands, taking many interrelated forms: the revitalisation of genealogical practices, stream flow restoration, oceanic criss-crossings and exchange.

The poem ‘Hāloanaka’ is directly followed by ‘On a Routing Slip from the US Postal Service, Pukalani Branch’, which reproduces a loving note from the speaker's grandfather, appended, fittingly, to a package of poi:

As the original food plant of, and sibling to, Kānaka Maoli, taro's origins and respect for kūpuna are expressed in the customs of eating poi. Mary Kawena Pukui warns that there shall be no ‘quarrelling, haggling, or arguing’ when the poi bowl is open as ‘this would offend Haloa who was present in the form of the poi’ (Handy et al., 1972: 81). ¹⁰ The custom or protocols of poi incorporate a reciprocal relation of care, reiterated in a series of poi haiku called ‘Poi-ku’ by McDougall: ‘Light stirred into earth./ Wai stirred into pa'i'ai./ Huli replanted’. ¹¹ Light and water infuse hand-pounded taro, and the top of the taro plant returns to the earth to be replanted. The poem continues to describe how mākua (parents and main stalk of a plant) share with keiki (children or shoot of the taro), again referencing Hāloa as ‘ohana to Kānaka Maoli. The last lines of ‘Poi-ku’ read, ‘Poi/dries around your mouth like skin,/ like it always was’. ¹² The cultivation and sharing of poi embodies the foundational and intergenerational respect for and relation to Hāloa, passed on from stalk to shoot, from parent to child, from poi to mouth. As one Maui taro farmer, Kyle Nakanelua puts it, the relationship of the mahi'ai kalo (taro farmer) to Haloa is one of stewardship, mutual obligation, and extended familial relation:

But even this most foundational relation has been subject to the imposition of state law and regulation. From the 1911 House Bill 160, which restricted poi production to factory-like settings, ¹³ to more recent regulations set by the Department of Health, which forbade the public distribution of pa'i'ai (hand-pounded poi), labelling it as a “‘potentially hazardous food”’, state law has not only failed to ‘recognize the traditional methods of hand-pounding taro as a time-tested, safe precedent that [has] fed Hawaiians for over a thousand years’, ¹⁴ but such laws continue to alienate Hawaiians from genealogical, traditional, and physical sources of sustenance. In ku'ualoha ho'omanawanui's poem ‘The protocols of poi’, the speaker says, ‘No leave poi on da sides of da pakini, cuz goin’ look kapulu [careless/unclean] an / tūtū going get huhū [angry/ offended]./ Hawaiians clean clean people, brah, especially wit food/ wit poi’ (ho'omanawanui, 2011: 33). Cleanliness is not only an integral part of the traditional practice of making poi, but also a show of love and respect to one's ‘ohana, to one's immediate, extended, and cosmological family.

In ‘On a Routing Slip from the US Postal Service, Pukalani Branch’, the travel of poi across the Moana Nui, the ocean continent, shows the ways in which families continue to take care of each other across great distances despite state-based regulations, and speaks to the kind of constitutive flows that are not, at their core, debilitating, Euro-American, one-sided characterisations. Embedding many instances of kaona—hidden (and humorous), but also political meaning—this poem reproduces a note written by McDougall's grandfather that was sent to McDougall appended to a package of poi while she was living for a year in Aotearoa, ‘where it is too cold to grow taro’, and where ‘poi refers to the poi used for kapahaka, and of course, looks very different’ (McDougall, 2012). A scientist, McDougall's grandfather set out to find a way to send poi to McDougall; deciding that freezing poi was best, he sent it by Global Express mail, but neither he nor McDougall predicted ‘the way New Zealand would receive and inspect it’ (ibid.). As the month-long gap between the date sent and date received implies, there was, of course, ‘no way of saving the poi after being “inspected” for so long’ (ibid.). (Despite these state-imposed obstacles, he was eventually successful.)

Sending poi to his granddaughter ensures the continuity of the loving, ancestral ties that, though birthed on Hawaiian lands, through Hawaiian waters and gods, remind readers that Hawaiians are ‘a voyaging people’ (Kauanui, 2007: 115) with ties that travel, ties that are both rooted and routed. ‘On a Routing Slip’ also acknowledges the many diasporic Hawaiians who, though off-island, continue ‘to return time and again as part of their ongoing on-island attachments’ (Kauanui, 2008, in note to readers). We can glean from ‘Hāloanaka’, a short yet expansive poem, how oceanic peoples do ‘not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions’ despite their alleged isolation, their universe comprising the underworld, the ocean, the constellations above and everything in between (Hau'ofa, 2008: 31). ‘On a Routing Slip’ is similarly expansive, gesturing to the ongoing world-enlargening project of Hawaiians as a navigational people. The transit of poi is subject to the protocols and restrictions of settler nation-states, but by placing ‘On a Routing Slip’ after ‘Hāloanaka’ such impositions are subordinated to the inseparable relation between Kānaka Maoli and Hāloa, privileging Kanaka Maoli histories, protocols, and exchanges.

This recentring of Kanaka Maoli movements and stories, in turn, enables Hawaiians to reclaim their place not only in their islands, but also in Oceania or Moana Nui, through emphasis on ‘their genealogical connections to all Pacific peoples’ (Kauanui, 2007: 113). In ‘On a Routing Slip’, the package of poi travels from Pukalani, Maui, to New Zealand, gesturing to long-woven networks of reciprocity both within the immediate Kanaka Maoli family and the familial Pacific. Management of poi—in the form of the ‘careful’ and unnecessarily drawn out inspections of the New Zealand postal service in McDougall's poem, and in one hundred years of state attempts to control the protocols of pa'i'ai in Hawai'i—is overwritten by a much longer view of history with the travel of taro into Polynesia, and here, the seemingly insignificant travel of poi from Maui to New Zealand. Perhaps the travel of poi in this way also gestures to ‘a way of looking at New Zealand and Hawai'i [as] “outside/beyond colonial”’ control (Te Punga Somerville, 2012: 34)—as home to Māori and Kānaka Maoli, Aotearoa and Hawai'i, already connected and in community outside and beyond the settler states of New Zealand and the United States (ibid.: 34). That the speaker herself travels from Maui to Aotearoa—both connected through the pan-Polynesian ancestor Māui (ibid.: 78)—foregrounds a navigational history and shared ancestry that is at once originary and ongoing. The cultivation of taro and the transit of poi harkens back to ancient flows of fresh-water streams and oceanic travel. Revealing the political stakes behind fresh-water and oceanic pathways demonstrates how a thirst for sovereignty and reclamation of ceded lands and polluted waters has far-reaching implications both on-island and as part of a collective challenge to the forces of economic and cultural globalisation.

Such transits and circuits of connection also allude to the ways in which Pacific Islanders are coming together to challenge the laws of settler states that continue to circumscribe Pacific Island traditions and movements. In May of 2011, Senate Bill 101 passed, once again allowing pa'i'ai to be sold and distributed to the public. Given a history of restrictions placed on the making of poi by the settler state, the kinds of dependencies created by US imperialism and globalisation, the radical decline of taro-producing lands with the diversion of fresh-water streams, and the drastic decrease in the varieties of taro since the time of Western contact—which numbered between 300 and 400 at the time of contact, most of which have since disappeared ¹⁵ —the revitalisation of taro cultivation and pa'i'ai not only contributes to increased food self-sufficiency and access to locally produced healthy alternatives to highly processed or low-grade exports, but also demonstrates a renewed commitment to tradition and abundance. If settler colonial capitalism is dependent on the reduction of abundance to scarcity, restoring abundance ‘raises the possibility of just distribution’ through providing an alternative ‘to the scarcity of colonial and imperial capital’ (Fujikane, 2012: 207). This abundance comes in the form of restoration of water to ancient streams, the recreation of taro terraces, and the cultivation of an abundance of taro varieties, challenges that are currently being taken up across Hawai'i in the form of activist efforts that are part of a much broader move in the Pacific to resist, challenge, and expose the damaging and ongoing effects of US imperialism.

Pacific Islanders are often defined from the perspective of the United States by unilateral flows and unequal relationships of aid (Trask, 1999; Keown, 2005; Hau'ofa, 2008). Growing militarised and capitalist interest in the Asia-Pacific region with dire consequences for ‘indigenous peoples, farming and fishing communities, workers, women and poverty-stricken people’ demonstrates that such attitudes go hand in hand with the ongoing imperialism that marks the United States's relationship with the Pacific (Fujikane, 2012: 190). But as McDougall reminds us, everyday people of Oceania continue to expand their worlds, despite global discourses that only see (and indeed create) situations of vulnerability and dependency, as they move between Indigenous spaces, demonstrating not only the ongoing mobility of oceanic people, but the role ‘local principles and cosmologies’ play in ‘radically shift[ing] the terms by which’ Pacific Islanders know themselves and ‘each other’ (Te Punga Somerville, 2012: 5–6). Further, up against challenges that aim to ‘undercut’ genealogical, Indigenous ties to land (Kauanui, 2008: 2), Hawaiian kinship cosmologies challenge the authority of the settler-nation state by articulating earthly and watery ancestral flows that are before, beyond, and above histories that privilege humanist, Euro-American colonial first encounters.

Forms of resistance to such limiting scripts of Pacific Island life range from envisioning alternative economies and modes of production that embed economic relations into the very fabric and rhythms of society and culture—a society-driven economy (rather than an economy-driven society) that has for thousands of years been a characteristic of Indigenous economic and social organisation the world over ¹⁶ —to literary, poetic, artistic, and activist expression. McDougall, alongside other poets, contributes to this effort by working ‘with an understanding of cultural memory that emerges not from nostalgia but from reappropriation of multiple, emplaced stories [and practices of Hawai'i]’ (Bacchilega, 2007: 26). And by invoking this ancestral connection to the Pacific and to the people of the Pacific, Pacific Islanders are able to come together in a collective refusal to participate in predatory, capitalistic, neo-liberal, and profit-driven relations that currently mark the region by underscoring, instead, the traditional cultural and genealogical practices of Hawai'i and Moana Nui.

Co-Constituted Futures: Navigating Shared Waters of Existence

Earth, light, Salt-Wind, and rain, the elements that sustain the much-valued taro plant and its human offspring, speak to a kinship that is spiritual and ‘ecosocial’ (Justice, 2010) at its core. Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice defines the ecosocial as ‘an understanding of a common social interdependence within the community, the tribal web of kinship rights and responsibilities that link the People, the land, and the cosmos together in an ongoing and dynamic system of mutually affecting relationships’ (Justice, 2008: 151; emphasis mine). As McDougall states, Hāloanaka, the common ancestor, is an intersecting ancestral point to which all Hawaiian genealogies are connected (McDougall, 2012). The story of Hāloanaka's birth reflects the origins of reciprocally constitutive relations between people, land, and cosmos. Genealogy and history here are one and the same—that is, ‘Hawaiian genealogies are the history of the Hawaiian people’ (Kame'eleihiwa, 1992: 21, emphasis mine) and in their re-telling, a constant source of hope and resistance. Like other Indigenous knowledge traditions, ‘Hāloanaka’ encourages apprehension of a world that is concrete and material, as well as spiritual, a vibrant expression of the relationships between ‘people, their ecosystems, and the other living beings and spirits that share their lands’ (Battiste and Henderson, 2000: 42).

The ocean and its Salt-Wind illustrate the constitutive watery flows that define, differentiate, and unite peoples across the Pacific. At the same time that I have been following water in The Salt-Wind I have been contemplating the ways in which Oceania's cosmologies exist in productive solidarity with other Indigenous knowledges. Following the constitutive movement and materiality of water is promising in this way. Understanding the molecular, material, or energetic movement between bodies of water, which takes place at gastrointestinal, psychic, affective, oceanic, and cosmological levels, necessitates coming to terms with our co-constituted futures with watery others living oceans apart (Neimanis, 2009: 87–88). The project of rethinking matter and mobility together through water is necessary and urgent for a myriad of reasons, not least of which is the opportunity to begin to query the role played by our cultural imaginary and inherited modes of thought in the prevalence of environmental, human, and epistemic injustice. But why poetry?

In her autobiography, Queen Lili'uokalani observes that ‘The ancient bards of the Hawaiian people’ gave ‘to history their poems and chants; and the custom is no different to this day, and serves to show the great fondness and aptness of our nation to poetry and song’ (Lili'uokalani, 1898: 53). McDougall continues in this tradition of using poetry as history and chant, ¹⁷ birthing anew old genealogies. ‘Hāloanaka’ and ‘On a Routing Slip’ demonstrate, through kaona, that Hāloa, taro, and poi are Native Hawaiians’ connection to ‘ohana, kūpuna, history, and ancestry. And because none of these can be thought apart from the water that sustains them, the best way to respect that is to ‘give us back some waddah an ‘āina so we can keep growin'/ an grinding ‘urn!’ (ho'omanawanui, 2011: 33). A thirst for water—sacred, imaginative, mobile, past, present—thus flows just beneath the surface of McDougall's words. Akua Kāne, the embodiment of male reproductive energy, and the wellspring of the life-giving waters of Hawai'i, reminds us that the thirst for water speaks to a thirst for life, sustenance, and sovereignty. Salt-Wind is a site of becoming and of going home; the tongue, with the salt of ocean on its tip, is ‘the steering paddle of the words uttered by the mouth’: