Where east meets west bounded by the Aloha spirit

Read Part I here

HONOLULU, Hawaii – Arriving mid morning after a 13-hour flight from rain-soaked Manila, the clear blue sky of Honolulu dotted with white clouds and the circle of green mountains were a welcome sight —truly Aloha, which means the breath of life.

Ray Ong, a well-known botanist and chemist, and an annual habitué of Hawaii to collaborate with experts at the Tropical Plant Research Center of University of Hawaii, accompanied my Science teacher Al Alanano and I to attend the 21st World Bromeliad Conference at Ala Moana Hotel and to visit the numerous horticultural landscapes and parks all over Oahu, the most populated of the four major islands of the country. Ray has been helping us set up a botanic park to conserve endangered plant species of the Philippines in our 16-year-old multi-crop school farm in Alfonso, Cavite at the border of Tagaytay.

Birth from fire

In the Hawaiian chant of creation the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian Islands emerged from the dark depth of primeval night. Geologists claim that in the mid-Tertiary period, around 25 million to 40 million years ago, a rift opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, and fires from the molten core of the earth began spewing magma through the fissure.

Over the course of 44 million years, this hot spot has cooked up the 82 volcanoes that form the backbone of the Hawaiian archipelago, and the cauldron is still bubbling. Since it began its current eruption in 1983, Kilauea Volcano has added more than 550 acres to the Big Island of Hawaii. In the last two weeks, lava from Kilauea has continuously flowed to two highways of the Big Island, forcing families to evacuate.

Since volcanoes are the very bones of the Hawaiian Islands, much of their study is conducted here. Even one building in its premier museum of Natural and Cultural History, the Bishop Museum, houses in the ground floor a model of a smoke spurting volcano, its base descending to the basement room where a fiery furnace representing the inner core of the volcano can be viewed.

King Kamehameha the great

On a night in 1758, when Halley’s Comet streaked across the Hawaiian sky, Chieftess Kekuiapoiwa gave birth at the sacred stones of Kohala, near Mookini Heiau. Because of the omen in the sky, a prophet predicted that the child would become “a killer of chiefs and ruler of all the islands.” Accordingly, the ruling chief ordered him killed. Loyal retainers hid the infant in Waipio Valley where he was raised in secret, and schooled in the arts of warfare and statesmanship. His name was Kamehameha.

Being a brilliant strategist and a courageous warrior, he soon launched a campaign of conquest that eventually united all the islands into one nation. Kauai alone was not conquered, but voluntarily joined the union. As was the custom of the day, the king had many wives. Keopuolani (1778-1823) was his Sacred Wife, the one through whom the kingship passed. But Kaahumanu (1772-1832) was his favorite wife, whom he likened to a lehua blossom. He said: “She rides the waves like a bird; she knows the heartbeat of the people.”

Kamehameha proved as wise in peace as he was ferocious in war. His subjects said to him, “He is our Father. He is the taro of the land.” Upon his death in 1819, his son Liholiho (1796-1824) by Keopuolani succeeded him as Kamehameha II (R. 1819-1824), with Queen Kaahumanu reigning as co-regent. Kaahumanu invited the young king to dine with her publicly, thus violating the law against men and women eating together. When people saw that the divine retribution did not fall upon the pair, they rose up throughout Hawaii, destroyed their temples, and overnight became a people without god and without the structure of religious law that had governed them for centuries.

Missionaries and the rise of American business

Into this vacuum, the first party of Christian missionaries from New England came upon the request of a group of Hawaiian students studying there at that time. The band of 14 men and women, headed by dedicated evangelist Hiram Bingham (1789-1869) of Bennington, Vermont, arrived in 1820 to “bring the heathens to the mansions of eternal blessedness.”

When Kamehameha II saw that the men had brought wives and families, he welcomed them, and gave them permission to preach and build their churches. At that time, they were more welcome than the other foreigners in Hawaii, who were mostly shrewd sandalwood traders, sailors, whalers and opportunists. Their value system, which consisted of the pursuit of demon rum and willing women clashed with the Ten Commandments brought by the missionaries.

It has been said that the missionaries came to do good, but that was only partly true. Most of the missionaries did indeed work tirelessly as doctors, ministers, and teachers, but it was their children, upon rising to positions of power and influence, who eventually overthrew the monarchy and establish themselves as a ruling oligarchy.

Ancient Hawaii before Captain Cook’s discovery

The Hawaiians, deeply aware of the finite resources of the island environment, became excellent stewards of nature. They named and classified each creature, and divided the land into pie-shaped segments called ahupuaa, each stretching from a mountain summit, down through fertile valleys, and to the outer edge of the reef in the sea.

A freshwater stream ran through the ahupuaa with strictly regulated areas for various functions, such as bathing and irrigation. No one was permitted to enter the water above the area designated for drinking water. Below the agricultural terraces, the stream was ingeniously engineered into a series of traps to catch silt so the water entered the ocean clean, thus maintaining the reefs.

A strict system of kapu, or religious laws, governed every aspect of life, from conservation practices to the status of women. A loose translation of the word kapu could be “forbidden.” The laws of the kapu were administered by the nobility and the kahuna (priests). Death was the penalty for violation of the kapu. So deeply rooted in spirituality was this system that offenders were mortified, and sometimes literally died of shame, before they could be apprehended and executed. On a daily basis, no task was begun without prayer. Every beauty beheld, every gift received was acknowledged as coming from the gods. Communion with the divine was not just an act of worship but a way of being.

Education was conducted primarily by the family in the home. Gifted children were apprenticed to master in arts such as healing, canoe building, navigation, and hula. Without a written language, the Hawaiians kept their records in a rich store of oral history composed of chants, hula and epic stories of their gods, kings, and migrations.

The evening of January 20, 1778, the H.M.S. Resolution and H.M.S. Discovery, then en route from the South Pacific under the command of Captain Cook, landed on the Hawaiian Islands, breaking centuries of isolation for the Hawaiian people. Life was to change forever. For during the two weeks Cook and his men spent in Hawaii, they inadvertently introduced European diseases to which the native people had no immunities. Until 1799, some 45 foreign ships called. They brought more disease, hard liquor, tobacco, material goods, weapons of war, and grazing animals. In less than 100 years, 90 percent of native Hawaiians were thought to have died. Their culture was eclipsed and their environment exploited by men from vast continents with no idea of stewardship of resources.

A rainbow of people

With interracial marriages hovering around 50 percent, it has become more and more difficult to tell not only who’s who, but also who’s what. Are you Hawaiian if you are Hawaiian-Filipino-Japanese? The count of pure Hawaiian today is less than one percent of the population. However, part-Hawaiians are the fastest growing ethnic group in the Islands.

No matter what their mix, most identify culturally with their Hawaiian heritage. There is pride in being a keiki o ka aina, a child of the land. In addition to the Hawaiian and part Hawaiians, who are 21 percent of the population of 1.4 million (2013 census), today’s racial tapestry is woven of approximately 22 percent Caucasian, 18 percent Japanese, 13 percent Filipino, 3 percent Chinese, and 20 percent non-Hawaiian racial mixes, with other Asians, Pacific Islanders, and African Americans composing the rest.

Ua Mau Ke Ea Ainai Ka Pono – Hawaii’s national motto

On the front gate (ocean side) and back gate (mountain side) of the Government House in central Honolulu are the seals of the state of Hawaii, the 50th state of the United States of America. Emblazoned on each seal is the national motto in Hawaiian words Ua Mau Ke Ea Aina I Ka Pono - “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” To this day, the Aloha spirit lives.

When you say “Aloha” to someone, you are acknowledging that the two of you are standing in the presence of God, and so all your words, thoughts, and deeds should be virtuous. It is a tender word that has the power to shape a life. It is the single word that sets Hawaii apart from any place else in the world, enabling many races to come together.

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