Am I Hawaiian enough?

Mac Marshall’s, “Openings” from Namoluk Beyond the Reef really hit a core inside of me. His discussion of how places can trigger self-reflection and cause people to identify with them and others, and how this has led to an ongoing argument in anthropology over this idea of “globalization,” reminded me of a conversation I had a few years back with a good friend. 

Our discussion, which was about how we stood on the issue of the Thirty-Meter-Telescope on the top of Maunakea, had become one of a passionate but friendly discourse. I was currently taking astronomy classes in college, and she was a Pacific Island Studies major. My argument was that I tried to remind her that we were once a people that often looked to the stars, we were all natural explorers. I tried to make her imagine how proud we would be as a people to know that the largest telescope would be available to our own people, built on our lands, and how this would not only help us as Hawaiians, but how it would help the whole world to evolve as a human race. I just didn’t quite understand why we would want to stop this.  Then she went on to make a comment that went something like this, “Oh okay, so you’re for globalization then!”

For some reason her words pierced me. I knew what globalization meant. I knew it in the context of economy, and politics, but not from the perspective that she was coming from; coming from a native Hawaiian who is obviously passionate about being Hawaiian. I knew in her mind it was a “bad” thing; this being for “globalization,” but that’s not what I was at all!

We are both Hawaiian. We were both born and raised in the same place, grew up in the same town our whole lives. Both of us graduated from the same High School.  She speaks fluent Hawaiian; I no longer do. She dances hula; I was taught at an early age but never continued dancing. She seems to connect and identify with being “more Hawaiian” than I do, and her comment about me being for globalization, made me feel like I was the foreigner, just another haole.  Like I wasn’t Hawaiian enough, yet we both knew her skin was whiter than mines. We both knew whose blood ran with more Hawaiian. 

I didn’t have to remind her that both my grandparents on each of my parent’s side were full-blooded. We grew up together, so she knew. She sat there, debating with me in my home, my Hawaiian Homestead home which I acquired on my own, being that my blood quantum is half Hawaiian. I knew that she was barely a quarter of Hawaiian.  But none of this needed to be spoken. I secretly admired the way she spoke with such passion for our land and our people, and I longed to once again feel the same thing inside of me. In her mind and her heart, she was more Hawaiian than anyone, and in my heart I was torn by the labels she put upon me.