Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Dennis Kawaharada
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Dennis Kawaharada (DK) on July 10, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Donald Carreira Ching (DCC) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is the second session of two.
Dennis Kawaharada and Donald Carreira Ching have reviewed the transcript and made their corrections and emendations. This transcript has been edited for readability by the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Some language in this transcript may be offensive. It is presented as it exists in the original audio recording for the benefit of research. This material in no way reflects the views of the Oral History Project or of Bamboo Ridge Press.
DCC: Last time, we discussed when you had started working on your dissertation, and also when you had also gone to San Francisco to lecture at UC Berkeley for two years. One thing that we didn’t get to talk a lot about was the influences on your writing and your writing style and what got you interested in local writing.
DK: I mentioned earlier my first experience teaching English 100 at the Naval Air Station at Barbers Point and teaching James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.” That essay had a very strong influence on me because Baldwin was non-white and he was talking about his family and his experiences as Black in America, and that’s kind of what I wanted to write about from a Japanese American perspective. I’m thinking that that essay planted the seed in my mind about writing essays about personal experiences. And when I was at Berkeley, I got to teach Baldwin’s work, “The Fire Next Time” and other essays, as well as his novel, If Beale Street Could Talk.
Later, when I read Haunani K. Trask’s From a Native Daughter, I recognized her allusion to Baldwin’s essay and was thinking she must have been reading James Baldwin in college, too. At Berkeley, I also taught Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon about a character named Milkman Dead III’s discovery of his identity and family roots in the South, and that no doubt led me later in life to Japan to look for my family roots there.
And I also taught Native American literature. Two strong influences on my essay writing were Leslie Silko’s Storyteller and N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. I liked the way they wrote narratives that wove together personal history, family history, historical events, and cultural myths and traditions, from different layers of time, going back and forth between layers. Also, I recognized in Silko’s [Laguna –Ed.] Pueblo traditions the same kind of closeness to and caring for the land that I admired in Hawaiian traditions.
When I started writing Storied Landscapes, my first collection of essays, that’s what I was trying to do. The metaphor I was using was that the land, Hawai‘i, was layered with stories, i.e. storied, told at various times, starting with the stories of the first people who came here. I wanted to learn more about those stories, which is why I started researching Hawaiian literature and oral traditions. After that, Europeans and Americans and Asians came, and they started telling stories. So then their stories were layered over the Native Hawaiian stories. And then by the time I got here, I was the third-generation of Japanese ancestry, so there were stories that were told by my grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation and then my generation, but in order to understand our experiences in Hawai‘i, we had to go back to all the other layers of stories, to understand who others in the community were and how their ancestors got here and why they believed in what they believed and how what they brought with them affected the lives of my family.
My idea was that you had to go back to the very beginning to understand the experiences we had growing up and how the community we lived in came to be. And you didn’t necessarily have to mention all of it in your writing, but you had to write with an awareness of what had gone on before. I thought that weaving together various layers with an understanding of how what happened before influenced what we experienced now would make an essay interesting. And so that’s what I tried to do.
DCC: Storied Landscapes was published in 1999. Was that when you really started to work on that style, or is that something that you were working on over the years?
DK: I started writing the first essay around 1991 or 1992 and published the collection in 1999. It took about eight years to write the six essays I included in the collection.
DCC: Did you see the layering or weaving as a metaphor for colonialism?
DK: Well the two metaphors are different. With layering, each layer might simply bury the earlier layers, and that could be a metaphor for colonialism, with whites and Asians writing about their lives as if nothing happened in Hawai‘i before they came. You have to dig down through the layers to get the complete story. And so I thought the more weaving back and forth between the layers, the more interesting the essays would be, so that’s what I was trying to do.
DCC: So, weaving was more of a response to the layering?
DK: Yes, if you keep the layers separate, then you get the colonial effect when a writer writes without acknowledging what happened before, out of ignorance, or purposely ignoring it or even demeaning it. That’s what I was trying to avoid by including a knowledge of different time frames and cultural traditions and histories in my personal essays.
DCC: With multiculturalism, there’s the problematic metaphor of the melting pot, and layering reminds me of the melting pot metaphor because with each generation that comes, stories get lost, histories get lost, so I am interested in when you sort of started to become aware of that layering. But since that’s further in the timeline, maybe we should go back to the ’80s and when you started working with Bamboo Ridge. Do you recall how you initially got involved with the Bamboo Ridge, or who got you involved?
DK: Before we get into that, I should mention that I see the melting pot as different from layering. The melting pot metaphor suggests that ethnic cultures get melted down into a universal American identity, rather than each group maintaining a separate ethnic identity while sharing American values. Multiculturalism suggests, on the other hand, that each ethnic group maintains its cultures, but learns to get along with other groups with whom they share a country.
I see myself as American, raised in Hawai‘i, but a person of Japanese ancestry, with Japanese traditions that my grandparents brought from Japan and that my parents passed on to me. I never had to “turn Japanese,” as David Mura put it in his memoir about growing up in a Jewish Midwest neighborhood, where the U.S. government relocated his family from the West Coast during the hysteria following Pearl Harbor. His father changed the family name from Uemura to Mura, so their ethnicity would be more ambiguous, so David had to recover his Japanese heritage later in life.
As part of a multiethnic community, I was aware that there were people of other ancestries who were my neighbors and had different traditions and beliefs. I was curious about what those traditions and beliefs were and wanted to understand them and even help perpetuate the ones I thought might contribute to the well-being of the community; but that didn’t mean I wanted to practice those traditions or join another ethnic group. I learned a lot from reading Baldwin and Momaday, but I never wanted to be Black or become a member of the Kiowa tribe.
Someone of mixed ancestry might have a more complicated view of multiculturalism, perhaps adopting traditions from two or more ancestries as part of a complex multicultural identity; or perhaps choosing one ancestry as the basis for an identity. People of mixed ancestry are becoming the majority in Hawai‘i. I know a lot has been written about it and more will be written about it in the coming years.
Anyway, getting back to how I got involved with Bamboo Ridge, as I mentioned earlier, after coming back from the UW, I went to parties where local writers were invited, and somehow ended up in the Bamboo Ridge study group, but I don’t recall who invited me to join.
DCC: Did you run into Eric at those salons?
DK: Probably, but I don’t recall hanging out with him. But after I joined the study group, he and I used to have long phone conversations on literary topics related to local and Asian American literature. The writer in the study group who had the most influence on me, though, was Rodney Morales because of his interest in Native Hawaiian issues and George Helm, and his collection of short stories, Speed of Darkness. I felt connected to the stories because they reminded me of my growing up years and the stuff we used to do. Rodney is a year younger than me and went to Farrington, but we’re contemporaries, so when I read his stories, I recognized what he wrote about. From reading his stories, I thought that I could write about my personal experiences growing up, too. The difference between us, of course, is that he’s a fiction writer, and I just couldn’t get the knack of writing fiction, so I ended up writing essays instead.
DCC: Did you two ever exchange drafts, or do you have any memories of Rodney that you want to share?
DK: We workshopped a couple of his stories in the study group, but it’s not like he and I were in personal communication about his work. It’s more that we were on the same wavelength and interested in the same kinds of things. Later he asked me to read a draft of his novel When the Shark Bites, and I sent him some comments, but we never tried to influence each other in terms of our writing. Just reading what he wrote influenced what I wrote.
DCC: I can see that in the way he weaves history into his writing. Anyone else left an impression on you during those two years?
DK: I guess all the other writers in the study group did, you know. They all wrote from their particular personal perspectives, but they were all writing from a local perspective, and so that was definitely an influence on me. But again, it wasn’t like I exchanged manuscripts with anyone or tried to get their advice or gave them advice. It was more like we were hanging out together at the study group, sharing a potluck, being friends, and talking about what we had written.
DCC: Unfortunately, Marie passed away a few years ago. Anything that you kind of remember about her or kind of her influence on you or just kind of her presence with the press?
DK: Marie used to hold some of the study group sessions at her house in Makiki, where she had grown up. She was a good person, always supportive and very caring. I thought of her as being motherly, perhaps because she was raising her two daughters at that time, so yeah, just a kind of a nurturing figure. Of her writings, the most memorable for me was a spooky story, “Go to Home,” from her grandmother’s plantation days in Kohala on the Big Island. It ends at a funeral, where the corpse of a woman who died young from TB vomits blood in the casket as a sign to her grieving husband. Also memorable was “Watching Fire,” a quirky reminiscence about New Year’s Eve in Makiki in 1952, which featured a kid named Sparky whose skyrocket starts a fire at the sugar cane patch of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association experimental farm—a reminder of the cane fires that burned when cane was harvested on the plantations. I started living in Makiki in the ’70s, so I got into the way it once was, during Marie’s small-kid time in the ’50s. Both stories were published in her Bamboo Ridge collection, Bananaheart and Other Stories, published in 1994.
DCC: Did you keep in touch with her at all after you left Bamboo Ridge?
DK: Yes, I did. She lived nearby, and her husband, an architect, is one of my brother’s good friends. I kept in touch with Marie, but it was a friendship rather than a literary collaboration.
DCC: What were some of the challenges you saw at the press during that time or after?
DK: While I was managing editor, it was all fun. It was very easy for me to do. I could write grants, I could edit, and I could get things organized, so it was just a fun time cruising with people that I got along with.
DCC: You worked with Dana Naone Hall on Mālama: Hawaiian Land and Water. I know that was a special one for you, what was that like?
DK: That anthology was special to me because before that I was familiar with Hawaiian folktales and legends, but hadn’t read much contemporary Hawaiian literature, so Dana’s anthology opened my eyes to a whole range of what was being written at the time. I wrote a grant for the publication.
DCC: Do you remember what inspired that particular collection? Because I mean, I think at that point that’s the first collection Bamboo Ridge puts out that had a Native Hawaiian focus.
DK: Before Dana’s anthology, Bamboo Ridge published Ho‘i Ho‘i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, an anthology Rodney edited in 1984, which included not just his short biographies of George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, but also works by Native Hawaiian writers like ‘Ilima Pi‘ianai‘a, Imaikalani Kalahele, Joe Balaz, Kalani Meinecke, Emmet Aluli, and Walter Ritte, Jr.; lyrics by Hawaiian songwriters like Jon Osorio, Malani Bilyeu, Alvin Kaleolani Issacs, Sr., and Harry Kunihi Mitchell. It also included an excerpt from George Helm’s diary and a speech. Hawaiian poet Wayne Westlake contributed a selection of poetry and prose by children of all ethnicities from his Poets in the Schools classes on Maui. Eric also contributed a poem.
Darrell and Eric were open to publications of Hawaiian language and literature, so when Esther “Kiki” Mookini, who taught Hawaiian language at Kapi‘olani Community College, came with a proposal to publish ʻO Nā Holoholona Wāwae ʻEhā O Ka Lama Hawaiʻi/The Four-Footed Animals of Ka Lama Hawaii, they accepted it, as long as I could get a grant to fund the publication. It was a collection of articles written in Hawaiian about animals, originally published with illustrations in the nineteenth-century Hawaiian language newspaper Ka Lama Hawaii. I had never seen a book published in Hawaiian language before, so I was interested in it, even though I couldn’t read it. In general, I love all languages for the diversity that they embody. I wrote a grant and got funding to publish the book in 1985. The book contained both the Hawaiian language articles and Kiki’s translations of them, along with the illustrations.
I found out later that the articles that Kiki translated were originally translated into Hawaiian from an English natural history textbook, to teach Hawaiian students at Lahainaluna School about animals that were foreign to Hawai‘i. I realize now how strange the publication was—articles originally written in English, then translated into Hawaiian for a newspaper, then translated back into English by Kiki. Only in a multicultural place like Hawai‘i would something that strange take place!
I should mention that Kiki was of Japanese ancestry, married to a scholar and college administrator of Hawaiian ancestry, which is perhaps where her interest in learning and teaching Hawaiian language came from. But she grew up Japanese in a plantation town on Maui, in Pā‘ia, near where my father grew up in Kuiaha, on Maui’s north shore. They were born about a year apart.
Since Bamboo Ridge published Rodney’s anthology and Kiki’s translation, Frederick Wichman approached the press with Kauai Tales, traditional stories of Kaua‘i, retold, with pen and ink illustrations by Christine Fayé. Frederick was from an old haole family on Kaua‘i. I wrote a grant for Bamboo Ridge to publish his collection.
Dana’s anthology of Hawaiian literature came out after that. Dana knew Darrell and Eric because we all knew each other and hung out together at literary events, so when she approached Bamboo Ridge with the anthology idea, they accepted it.
DCC: And you had worked with Dana before or you knew her before?
DK: We knew each other from two of Peter Nelson’s courses at the UH, Eng 410: Form and Theory of Poetry, in fall 1973 and ENG 411: Poetry Writing, in spring 1974. She was also the editor of the UH’s English department’s Hawai‘i Review in 1973–74. I found out later that Dana was also from Kāne‘ohe. By the ’80s, Dana had moved to Maui with her husband Isaac, a lawyer and community activist. They worked on various community issues on Maui, including the restoration of an ancient trail and protecting Hawaiian burial sites against development.
“Working with Dana” wasn’t quite what it was. I wrote the publication grant for her anthology, but it’s not like I sat down with her and went over the manuscripts. She was on Maui and I was in Honolulu. I left the anthology up to her because I was going to have Bamboo Ridge publish whatever she submitted. She did everything. She contacted all the writers and gathered and edited all the contributions.
One thing I recall is that Darrell and Eric were kind of worried because it was taking a while, but I knew Dana would deliver. I didn’t have to call her and ask her, so where are you now, how far along are you, can you give me a progress report? I knew she was going to put together a great anthology. We just had to be patient. She sent me the anthology as a completed manuscript, which Bamboo Ridge published, as is.
After that I went off to Berkeley, and a whole new experience teaching Black, Chicano, and Native American literature. When Genny [Lim –Ed.] and I visited Maui, we met with Dana and Isaac to find out what they were working on. Dana invited us to a party in Hāna. Coincidentally, over two decades later, in 2018, Genny was emceeing the American Book Awards ceremony for the Before Columbus Foundation in San Francisco, and Dana was one of the awardees, for her book Life of the Land: Articulations of a Native Writer. Genny emailed me a photo of the two of them together at the ceremony.
DCC: So did Dana help you get into Hawaiian literature after you got back from Berkeley?
DK: Dana was on Maui, so I wasn’t in contact with her when I got back from Berkeley. When I began applying the multicultural approach to literature I learned at UC, I adapted it to Hawai‘i and assigned readings by local and Native Hawaiian writers, like Rodney, Milton Murayama, Dana, Wayne Westlake, and Joe Balaz. I also wanted to assign a selection of traditional Hawaiian stories, so I looked for teachable ones in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century publications of Fornander, Thrum, and others. My guide was UH professor Amos Leib’s Hawaiian Legends in English: An Annotated Bibliography, published by UH Press in 1979 [2nd edition –Ed.]. I took a course from Leib in spring 1971, ENG 471: American Literature, but he never mentioned this interest in Hawaiian legends, probably because it wasn’t relevant to the course. Kiki Mookini may have given me a copy of his book.
A year or so after I got back from Berkeley, Kiki Mookini showed me a translation of a traditional Hawaiian narrative that she had just completed with Sarah Nakoa, a professor of Hawaiian language who was her teacher at the UH. The original narrative, by Moses K. Nakuina, was published as a book in Hawaiian in 1902, under the title Moolelo Hawaii o Pakaa a me Ku-a-Pakaa, na kahu iwikuamoo o Keawenuiaumi, ke alii o Hawaii, a o na moopuna hoi a Laamaomao!
Kiki asked can we publish this? and I replied, oh yeah, I think we can because I know how to write a grant for it. To get a grant from the Hawaiʻi State Foundation for Culture and the Arts, I had to apply through a nonprofit organization, so I applied through Hawai‘i Ethnic Resources Center: Talk Story, Inc., which was a nonprofit that Stephen, Marie, and Arnold had set up before the Talk Story conference in 1978. Bamboo Ridge got its grants through Talk Story until it got its own nonprofit status. I asked Marie if I could apply for a grant through their nonprofit, and she said yes.
That’s how Kalamakū Press started—I established it to publish Kiki’s book. I knew that for schools and colleges in Hawai‘i to teach Hawaiian literature as part of a multicultural curriculum, they needed more texts like Kiki and her kumu’s translation. I edited and annotated the text, then published it in 1990 as The Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao, which was a phrase in subtitle of the original Hawaiian publication, “ka ipumakani a Laamaomao.”
Mark Hamasaki of ʻElepaio Press designed the cover using one of his prints. His brother Richard was teaching at Kamehameha Schools, and after the book was printed, he assigned it in his literature classes at the school. I also taught it in a World Literature course at Kapi‘olani Community College. After The Wind Gourd came out in 1990, we decided to print the original Hawaiian version of the narrative, so I got a grant from the UH Committee for the Preservation of Hawaiian Language, Arts and Culture to publish it. Mark got permission from the UH library to photograph the pages of the original book, and we sent those negatives off to a printer on the continent, so the book was a facsimile of the original.
Between 1990 and 2018, Kalamakū Press published sixteen works of Hawaiian, local, and Asian American literature and distributed over 35,000 copies.
DCC: So, how long have you known Richard and Mark? Was that about the same time when you were working with Bamboo Ridge? Is that how you met?
I met Richard when he came to Hawai‘i from Boston University in the early ’80s. He was into Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. I don’t remember how we met, probably at some literary reading or party, but I recall being in an informal Ezra Pound seminar that he hosted with professor and poet Jack Unterecker, who was also into Pound. The group met one night a week in a Kuykendall Hall classroom at the UH to read The Cantos, one by one, and discuss each one, line by line.
I first worked with Mark in 1985, when he printed Kiki’s ʻO Nā Holoholona Wāwae ʻEhā O Ka Lama Hawaiʻi for Bamboo Ridge. Mark designed the book and printed it on an offset Multilith 1250, which printed four pages on a sheet, back and front. We collated the pages, then Mark took them to be bound into books. In 1981, ʻElepaio Press had used the Multilith 1250 to publish a Hawaii Edition of Mana, A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature, which Richard edited with Wayne Westlake, featuring a multiethnic selection of literature and art from Hawai‘i. In 1983, Mark also printed Poets Behind Barbed Wire for Bamboo Ridge on that press, and for ʻElepaio Press, A Pacific Islands Collection, an anthology of poetry, prose, and art by multiethnic writers from Hawai‘i and all over the Pacific, which Richard edited in. The collection was dedicated to Wayne, who died in a tragic traffic accident on the Big Island in 1984.
To weave another thread in here, after The Wind Gourd was published in 1990, Richard gave a copy to John Dominis Holt. He knew John from literary readings that ‘Elepaio Press organized. John also had a press, Topgallant, to publish his literary and scholarly works. John invited me up to his house, which was this beautiful mansion on Pacific Heights where he lived with his wife Patches Damon. He was very erudite. He knew Hawaiian literature, but also world literature. He knew Japanese literature and talked about The Tale of Genji.
After a good conversation, he gave me a couple of manuscripts to read. One was a collection of essays on different members of his family at different periods of history, as well as on his memories of growing up, and his reflections about all of it; the second manuscript was a collection of folktales of Moanalua Valley, which his wife’s family owned at one time. There was a story about a migration to the valley by a female navigator from Kahiki, as well as legends set in the ahupua‘a. He was thinking of publishing both manuscripts and wanted them edited for publication. He asked me if I was interested, and, of course, I said yes. I took the manuscripts home and read them.
DCC: What was that like? Did you folks have a lot of sit downs and interviews?
DK: No, not at all. At the next meeting, he gave me a check for $2,000 to prepare the essays about his family and his life for publication. He wanted them to be read as a book rather than as separate essays, so I sequenced the essays to read as a family history, and did only minor editing on the prose, for consistency and transitions between essays and so on; the individual essays were already well-written. A couple of months later, I delivered the text to his mansion and never heard back from him. A couple of years later, in 1993, the year he passed away, Recollections: Memoirs of John Dominis Holt, 1919–1935 was published, pretty much as I recalled having laid it out, but illustrated with many family photos.
DCC: Thinking about the kind of writing you were doing and your interests, it kind of fits with that too, right?
DK: Yes, and Holt’s memoirs were a huge influence on my writing. What I got from reading his essays is that wow, you know, he lived through the same era as my grandparents and parents and I could see the connections between the historical events that he was describing and what my grandparents and parents lived through. So that was a way of seeing how the histories of two different ethnic groups intersected. It was not just here’s Japanese American history, they immigrated here and accomplished this and that after they came. There was a broader context and other things that were happening and impacting what the Japanese did. So after reading Holt’s family histories going back to the nineteenth century, I thought of monarchs like Kalākaua and Liliʻuokalani as not just historical figures, but people relevant to today. What they did affected my grandparents’ and parents’ lives and my life. That’s when I got the idea of the immigration of my grandparents as a continuation of the Japanese immigration that Kalākaua started in the late nineteenth century, although when my grandparents arrived, the Kingdom had already been overthrown, and Hawai‘i had been annexed to the U.S.
There was one story, not in Holt’s book but that I found later, about the deposed Queen Liliʻuokalani attending a Buddhist service at the Honganji in Nuʻuanu, not the one that’s there now, but the original one, on Fort Lane, where the Nu‘uanu YMCA is located today. The queen attended in 1901, when Buddhism was not generally accepted yet among the non-Japanese in Hawaiʻi. The queen’s attendance at that service was in the news and made the Buddhists, made the Japanese immigrants, feel more welcome in Hawaiʻi. My mother’s family worshiped at the Honganji in Hilo during the first decades of the twentieth century. So things like the queen’s attendance at a Buddhist service, that kind of openness and kindness, affected the quality of life of my grandparents and parents.
The queen was invited to the service by Mary Elizabeth Mikahala Robinson Foster, a Buddhist convert who donated land near her home in Nu‘uanu for the first Honganji, built in Hawai‘i in 1893, the year of the Overthrow. That was the Honganji where the queen attended a service in 1901.
Later, Foster also donated the huge garden around her house to the City of Honolulu, and it became Foster Botanical Garden. As it turns out, Foster was an aunt of John Dominis Holt. Holt talks about her in an interview he did for the Watamull Foundation. Apparently she was viewed as somewhat of an eccentric by the family, riding about with her “swami” in a car called a Locomobile, which John thought of as a pun on “loco.”
My favorite chapter in Holt’s memoirs is the one about his boyhood years in Kalihi. It reminded me of growing up on Kea‘ahala Road. Like Kea‘ahala Road, Kalihi was a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood where people of different ancestries lived together and learned how to get along with each other. When I read that, I realized that here was someone who grew up in a wealthy hapa-haole family with ali‘i ancestors, yet there was a connection to the world from which I came.
Holt recalls U. Yamane, a Japanese store owner in Kalihi, who invited Holt’s father to parties on New Year’s Eve to drink, and his father loved those parties. Yamane reminded me of my grandfather in Hilo, who also established a store. They both ended up sending their first sons to Waseda University in Tōkyō to study commerce, so that the sons could come back and take over the family stores. Yamane ended up much wealthier than my grandfather. He owned the Kamehameha Shopping Center and other properties in Kalihi. Connections like that emerged from reading Holt, and that got me into researching that period of Hawai‘i’s history and earlier periods.
DCC: Is that what led you to your work with Hōkūleʻa?
DK: Well, that wasn’t directly related to the work on Holt’s memoirs, although Holt was a supporter of the Hōkūleʻa and Polynesian Voyaging Society [PVS]and I ran into him at the dock one day when the voyaging canoe Hawai‘iloa was preparing to go to Alaska. My involvement with PVS had more to do with the publication of Kiki’s book, The Wind Gourd. Around that time, Kiki was a volunteer with PVS. Nainoa was really supportive of education—he felt that the knowledge the PVS had recovered and discovered about traditional voyaging and migration should be preserved and perpetuated. He wanted it taught in schools and universities. Kiki was on the Education Committee, and she invited me to a meeting at the Bishop Museum in 1992. The Wind Gourd was kind of an introduction to Hawaiian voyaging because it was about two masters of sailing and navigation, Paka‘a and Kūapaka’a, a father and a son who were descendants of the wind goddess La‘amaomao. And so, I went along with Kiki to the meeting and met Nainoa.
Before the publication of Kiki’s book, I already had an interest in Polynesian voyaging and migrations because when I was living in San Francisco, I found Peter Buck’s Vikings of the Pacific in a bookstore in Chinatown. Buck tells the history of Polynesian migrations, from the very beginning up to the migrations to Tahiti, the Marquesas, Hawai‘i, Aotearoa, Rapa Nui, and so on. I read it, and was like, wow, this is the kind of stuff I want to know more about. I knew how the Japanese immigrants and plantation workers from other ethnic groups got to Hawaiʻi, but how did the Hawaiians get here? Where did they come from? That book answered those questions.
Nainoa was looking for volunteers to help at dry dock to prepare Hōkūleʻa for a voyage to Tahiti and the Cook Islands in 1992. Kiki was a drydock volunteer, so she asked me if I wanted to go with her and help out. I mentioned earlier that my dad introduced me to boat building and fishing in Kāne‘ohe Bay when I was growing up, so I felt comfortable about going to help out at the Hōkūleʻa dry dock. After a while, Nainoa asked me if I wanted to train as a crew member—he asked that of everyone who came by regularly to work on the canoe—so I decided to do that.
I began sitting in on Nanioa’s crew training sessions, and when he needed someone to write up some of the information he was teaching the trainees, I started to do that for him. Probably the first thing I wrote up was an annotated list of the stars he used in navigation, with both English and Hawaiian names. I learned the Hawaiian names from Rubellite Kawena Johnson’s Nā Inoa Hōkū: A Catalogue of Hawaiian and Pacific Star Names and Maud Makemson’s The Morning Star Rises: An Account of Polynesian Astronomy. I was also teaching myself how to use a computer drawing program at the time, so I used it to do illustrations for Nainoa, of the four starlines that he used in his navigation and astronomical diagrams.
After my first crew assignments sailing interisland from Honolulu to Hōnaunau, and then from Tahiti Nui to Huahine and Ra‘iātea, in the so-called Society Islands, Nainoa and his dad Pinky, who was president of the board, hired me to write education materials for PVS. Kamehameha School Press also contracted me to write updates for its student publication on Hōkūle‘a voyages.
I worked for PVS for about nine years, from 1993 to 2002, then served as a volunteer until around 2016, when I stopped, because my aging mom needed my help with her shopping, chores, and errands and taking her to medical and dental appointments. My last crew assignment was to help out with the PVS education program in Aotearoa as part of the Worldwide Voyage.
DCC: What was it like working with PVS?
DK: It was amazing. PVS assigned me to short interisland voyages, not long voyages, just so I would gain enough experience to understand what I was writing about. I sailed across the channels between the Hawaiian islands, and along the cliff of Kaholo on Lāna‘i to Kaho‘olawe, and along the north coast of Moloka‘i to Kalaupapa.
I learned so much from Nainoa and PVS navigators Bruce Blankenfeld and Chad Baybayan about the geography, winds, weather, and oceans currents of Hawai‘i and Polynesia, which was the kind of knowledge the Polynesians had to have centuries ago, to discover and settle small islands scattered across a vast ocean.
I sailed interisland in the Marquesas Islands with Chad and traveled from Vancouver to Juneau on the Hawaiʻiloa with Bruce and Nainoa, and then from Shikoku to Yokohama on Hōkūle‘a with Bruce and Nainoa. Doing research for the sail into Yokohama in 2007, I learned about the historical connection between the Thompson family and the Imperial family of Japan. Kālakaua sent Pinky’s maternal grandfather, Isaac Harbottle (1871–1948), to Japan to study Japanese language and culture, so he could serve as one of the statesmen that would handle Japanese affairs for the Kingdom. Harbottle attended the same school as the future Emperor Taishō.
After Hōkūle‘a arrived in Yokohama, Nainoa and a couple of the navigators met with one of the princesses of the Imperial family and took her sailing in Tōkyō Bay. So that was another connection between two cultures in Hawai‘i. I felt honored to be on the Yokohama crew with Nainoa, Bruce, and Leighton Tseu and Kaniela Akaka who represented the Royal Order of Kamehameha; it was significant to me because in 1907, my mother’s father left from Yokohama on a steamer to come to Hawai‘i. The world had changed tremendously in the century in between.
DCC: That time in San Francisco really changed you?
DK: Everything changed me. The University of Washington changed me, and Bamboo Ridge changed me. Berkeley changed me. When I came back, other changes came about from meeting Holt and reading his memoirs and meeting Nainoa and working for the Polynesian Voyaging Society.
All of this was serendipitous. It wasn’t like I went to college to take the required courses in a major in order to teach what I was taught or to perform a job using that knowledge. I just followed my interests and read whatever I found interesting, and connections started forming and growing and moving in this direction and that direction. I was curious and open to change, to explore and learn new things because my mom was like that and encouraged me to be like her. I wrote about those changes in essays like “Where to Go, What to Do,” “Local Geography,” and “Crossing Seas,” in Local Geography: Essays on Multicultural Hawai‘i, 2004.
DCC: We’ve talked a lot about that time period when you were at Berkeley and then when you were working with Bamboo Ridge and sort of the trajectories from that point, but when do things start to change for you and you decide to leave Bamboo Ridge and do something different? Because what I’m thinking is, you got back from Berkeley in the late 80s, then you start working on your first essay from Storied Landscapes, and you kind of get a draft out in 1992, and then we have 1994 and your essay, “Toward an Authentic Local Literature,” coming out of some of the controversies during that time period, so I guess I maybe want to focus on those four years and what happened.
DK: Well, when I got back from Berkeley, I wasn’t planning to work with Bamboo Ridge again. I knew other writers and supporters had joined the study group and the press, like Juliet Kono and Cathy Song, so the press was doing well. At the time, I was more interested in Hawaiian literature than in local Asian American literature. As I mentioned earlier, I began looking for and reading Hawaiian legends. The one that really captured my imagination was the legend of Kūʻula-kai, a Hawaiian fishing god. The translation was done by Moke Manu and published in Thrum’s Hawaiian Annual in 1901. Kū‘ula-kai may have been a master fisherman who lived in Hāna, on Maui; he and his son, another master fisherman, became deified and worshiped as fishing gods. The interest in the story was there for me because my dad had introduced his sons to fishing on Kāne‘ohe Bay, and also because the story took place on Maui, where Dad grew up.
During the summers of the ’60s, we visited the Kawaharada family home in Kuiaha, and one summer, we drove the newly repaved highway to Hāna, where Kū‘ula-kai lived. As I was reading and researching the legend, I was thinking like, wow, you know, we drove past these legendary places, but I never knew their stories. In Hāna was a rock formation that was the backbone of a giant eel that Kū‘ula-kai slew after it broke into his fishpond and stole fish. I didn’t know this when we went there; we just visited the Hasegawa General Store, then turned around and drove back home to Kuiaha. Back then, to me, the road to Hāna was just a scenic winding road with waterfalls. Without any knowledge of place, we were just tourists. After reading the legend, I decided I should go back to visit some of the legendary places.
I flew to Maui and drove to Hāna, stopping to photograph a few places mentioned in the legend, and when I got to Hāna, I went to talk with Clifford Hashimoto, who was the director of the Hāna Historical Museum. Kiki told me I should talk with him if I wanted to know about Hāna. Clifford was a descendant of a nineteenth-century Japanese immigrant who married a Hawaiian woman on the Big Island. His grandfather may have been one of the first Japanese migrant workers in Hawaiʻi. Clifford grew up in Hāna. I shared my family background with him, and how my grandparents established a restaurant in Kuiaha in the ’30s, and my dad grew up there, and how we had visited Hāna in the ’60s. Eventually, I asked him if he knew about the rock formation of the Kū‘ula-kai legend, and he said yes. He decided he would take me to see it, so we met the next morning and went through a couple of locked gates to which he had the keys, and he showed me the backbone of the eel on the rocky shore. I used the photo I took of it for the cover for a collection of Hawaiian fishing legends [Hawaiian Fishing Traditions –Ed.] I published in 1992.
Seeing the rock formations sparked this sense of wow, here’s the ancient history of Hawaiʻi, about which I knew practically nothing. And that sense of discovery was what I tried to capture in “A Search for Kū‘ula-kai.” That essay led to the other essays. I began researching the history and traditions of places where I visited or lived, but didn’t really know anything about, like Kāne‘ohe Bay and Makiki and Mānoa Valleys. In 1999, I published Storied Landscapes: Hawaiian Literature and Place.
DCC: So, then what leads you to 1994 and your talk/essay “Toward an Authentic Local Literature of Hawaiʻi”? You’ve talked about it to some extent, but let’s maybe focus on that time.
DK: Well, from my own experience, I had this sense that the local Asian Americans of my generation and the writers associated with Bamboo Ridge, other than Rodney, didn’t know much about Hawaiian culture and traditions, about Hawaiian history and prehistory. Of course that was because the schools and colleges we went to didn’t teach us much about it, and we didn’t learn it from our parents who went to the same schools, or our grandparents, who in my case, grew up in Japan. But my sense was that unless you know such things, you don’t really know Hawaiʻi, so how can you call it your home? So the point of “Toward an Authentic Local Literature of Hawaiʻi” was that if we’re going to write local literature, if we’re going to write about Hawai‘i, if we’re going to call Hawai‘i home, we need to know all its history and cultures going back to the first people.
I guess what I said was misinterpreted by some people. Like one Bamboo Ridge writer told me, so what, we all gotta write about Hawaiians now? And I was like, is that what you think I said? I didn’t think that’s what I said. Really, I was just advocating for more knowledge and awareness of the first people and their culture who were here before haoles came and before Asians came. And whether you write about it directly or not, that wasn’t the point. The point was that you need to write with an awareness of it. It can inform what you think about as being local—for example, just knowing what place names mean, or going past a place and knowing that there is some legendary history associated with it.
And it was not just about reading about Hawaiian culture, it was also about learning to take care of the islands from the traditions of a people who had been here for something like 1,600 years or more. Can we sustain the island community for another 1,600 years and beyond? Reading Hawaiian literature was a way of starting a conversation about that. That was the idea behind the talk.
DCC: What was the conference like? Because if you look at the proceedings, you weren’t the only one necessarily advocating for that either, so I don’t know, do you remember the conference?
DK: I don’t recall being involved in the conference. I was given an opportunity to speak and so I showed up and spoke. I remember being in an auditorium and reading what I wrote, but I don’t remember discussing what I said with anybody there.
But you’re right, other writers, artists, and UH professors like Rodney, the Hamasaki brothers, and Paul Lyons agreed with what I said and were saying the same thing, that not only writers and people living in Hawai‘i needed to be aware of Hawaiian history and traditions, but that the education system needed to change, that the Department of Education and the UH system needed to teach students more about Hawaiian traditions and literature, more than they were doing because I knew they were doing it or trying to do it, but they weren’t doing enough of it. There needed to be more taught, there needed to be better texts, and the presses in Hawai‘i could contribute to that by publishing more of it. Paul told me later that one of the students who read a copy of “Toward an Authentic Local Literature of Hawaiʻi” posted it on a bulletin board at the English department in Kuykendall Hall.
At the conference, there were some UH professors in the audience, but I didn’t hear back from anyone except Paul. Later, though, another Asian American writer told me, you know you were really rude at the conference and ungrateful to the professors that helped you educate you. She felt that I had been invited to speak in their house—the UH—and that I was disrespectful toward my hosts by criticizing them. I was like okay, wow, so I can’t criticize the UH? Why not? Is the UH a house that was paid for by the professors who graciously invited me as a guest there to talk? Or is it a public institution, paid for by the community, for the exchange of ideas and for debates about public issues? Is the community paying the professors to teach us whatever they decide is best for us, or can we give them some feedback? Yes, they helped educate me, and as I mentioned in our last session, I learned a lot there about American and European literature and writing poetry, and I appreciated what I learned, but that was kind of beside the point. I was making a different point now.
DCC: It’s interesting that there were no comments, no interactions or conversations during or after the conference other than the ones you mentioned. Did it change anything for you?
DK: What changed after the conference was that I thought that if I was going to criticize the UH English department for teaching mainly white literature and not enough local literature, I should be consistent and also criticize Bamboo Ridge for publishing mainly Asian American writers. I knew that publication was one of the keys to education because teachers needed texts to teach in the classroom.
The Bamboo Ridge editors called their journal “Hawai‘i Writers’ Quarterly,” but most of the writers published were Asian American, and most of the people in the study group, except for Rodney, were Asian American, so it looked like a skewed representation of Hawai‘i. There was no one of Hawaiian ancestry in the group. I knew the percentages of writers published by Bamboo Ridge were skewed because I tallied the writers by ethnicity. Yes, Bamboo Ridge published Dana’s Hawaiian literature anthology and Rodney’s anthology of writings about Kaho‘olawe and remembrances of George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, but the other writers published were predominantly Asian American. Of course if Bamboo Ridge wanted to publish mainly Asian Americans, that was okay, too, just call the journal “Hawai‘i Asian American Writers’ Quarterly.” Otherwise, the point I wanted to make was that Bamboo Ridge needed to be more inclusive.
After I made these comments at a conference, somebody sent me a copy of a talk that Darrell gave at an Asian American conference on the continent, not criticizing me directly, but referring to people who said that Bamboo Ridge was colonial or neo-colonial, and something about how termites had gotten into the house of literature that Bamboo Ridge had built, and were eating away at the foundation. I was like, really? I’m sure some people with Bamboo Ridge were thinking that I was very rude and ungrateful to criticize it, since I benefited from being published by it and had been paid a stipend to serve as its managing editor. But as I said earlier, I appreciated my time with the press and what I learned from the study group about writing local literature. But now I was making a different point.
DCC: Eric Chock’s “The Neocolonialization of Bamboo Ridge: Repositioning Bamboo Ridge and Local Literature in the 1990s” came out in 1996, but Darrell gave a talk before that?
DK: Yes. I guess people got a little testy about what I said and wrote things to defend Bamboo Ridge. I heard indirect feedback that people were saying that I was trying to be Hawaiian. That made me laugh. So if I read some Hawaiian stories to inform myself about Hawaiian history and culture and write about and publish some stories, that means I’m trying to be Hawaiian? And if I listen to reggae music, and write about it or record it, that means I’m trying to be a Black from Jamaica? And if I read Shakespeare and James Joyce that means I’m trying to be white? I thought, really, the level of local thinking was pretty low.
DCC: From what you were saying just a few minutes ago, your intention was awareness and we need to be aware of this, schools need to be aware of this, like this is happening and we need to stop turning a blind eye to it, but it sounds like the backlash was harsher than maybe you were expecting, so how did you feel at that time?
DK: As I mentioned earlier, the Bamboo Ridge supporters got a little testy, so I got a little testy. One of Richard Hamasaki’s former Kamehameha students, Michael Puleloa, was majoring in English at the UH and became the editor of the English department’s Hawaiʻi Review. Michael asked me to write something about the controversy for the Review, so I wrote “Local Mythologies, 1979–2000” to refute false assumptions, false claims, and non sequiturs in what was written about what I said. Hawaiʻi Review [no. 56 –Ed.] published the article in 2001.
DCC: When you look back on that particular period, how do you feel about it now?
DK: I think Bamboo Ridge changed after that and became a little more inclusive, and it began involving a wider range of writers, although it’s still pretty middle class, probably because generally the middle class is the main producer and consumer of literature nowadays. I recall a line by Cathy Song, something about how people who drive Volvos suffer, too, which is true.
I wouldn’t attribute the change to anything that I said or wrote. I think most people, including those involved with Bamboo Ridge, realized after a while that it needed to be more inclusive, especially if it was going to use State Foundation money, public money, to publish what it advertised as Hawai‘i’s literature.
Today there’s a greater diversity of publications, not just a few small presses, and with so much being written and so many ways to get it published, I think whoever wants to publish now can get published. I post whatever I want to make public at my WordPress site, and if I want it to be in print, I send a pdf to Amazon for on-demand printing. We’ve come a long way since the days when Mark and Richard were printing books for ‘Elepaio and Bamboo Ridge on an offset printer at home, or when I had to design web pages and websites myself to post things online. So the issue of what Bamboo Ridge publishes isn’t that important anymore, and I don’t pay much attention to it now.
DCC: You offer a couple of different definitions of what an “authentic” local literature is or what it should include. How would you define authentic local literature now? Do you still find the term relevant?
DK: The term “local” just means “of a place,” right? If you live in Hawai‘i, grew up in Hawai‘i, and write about Hawaiʻi, that’s local literature. “Authentic” just adds to that idea. When people ask what’s Hawai‘i about, it’s not just the history of Asian Americans here, or the history of haoles, or the history of Hawaiians, it’s all of the above, the whole thing. Of course, not every story is gonna tell the whole thing, but the idea is that the writer needs to be aware of all of the above. It’s hard to define what I mean by awareness. You could write something that was aware of Hawaiian culture without even mentioning anything Hawaiian in it. But I think you can tell—as a reader, I think I can tell—whether a person at least has that awareness of all that Hawai‘i really is, all the different aspects of it.
DCC: Is that what you think of as an authentic local literature, writing with an awareness of the history and socio-cultural politics of Hawaiʻi?
DK: Yes. When I wrote The Life and Times of Gunichi Kuwahara (1888–1962) and The Life and Times of Matsuko “Mitzi” Kawaharada, I wasn’t only interested with the individual lives of my maternal grandfather and my mother, I was also interested in the socio-cultural-historical context that shaped their lives, the times they lived through. It was an interest that I can trace back perhaps to reading Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in high school, which I mentioned in the first interview session.
DCC: In my research, I found a 2008 interview where you said you were less optimistic that an authentic local literature could be maintained. How do you feel about that now?
DK: I’m not sure what I meant by that, but maybe I meant that because of the way media has expanded electronically, and there’s so much more influence from outside Hawaiʻi, people can grow up here and not make any kind of deep connection to Hawai‘i because they’re gaming or watching or listening to or reading things on a television or a computer or a phone. When I grew up in Hawaiʻi, outside influences were strong, but there were enough local influences that you still had that connection to place, maybe because we spent more time outdoors and interacting with people rather than inside staring at a computer screen.
DCC: I think what’s interesting is how local is used as exclusionary to some degree, but that’s typically like local versus haole or local versus the continent, but the conversation around what is “local” is one that’s still ongoing.
DK: Yeah, I see the inclusive-exclusive dynamic. But local literature is just literature “of a place,” not connected to any ethnicity. Whenever we try to be simplistically either/or, we run into problems. Like, one thing I notice is that because it’s so easy now to do research on the Internet and more writers that have been here for like five years can write with an awareness of Hawaiian culture and local history, so they’re doing what I thought should be done, but they’re doing it after living here for five years, so is that local literature? How many years do you have to be here to be local? Could you be local after six months, or a year, depending on how well you research things? Do you have to be born and raised here, in which case, I’m not really local because I was born on Guam and spent my first two years there.
Can a reader tell the difference between something written about Hawai‘i by someone who has never lived in Hawai‘i or been here only a short while, but has researched the history and is able to make allusions to things that happened in Hawaiʻi, versus something written by someone who has lived here all their lives who maybe just started to do some research on local culture and history? The term local becomes a little murky, but in the end, who cares? If something is well-written and well-researched, and I’m interested in the topic, I’ll read it; if not, I’ll put it down.
DCC: If I’m thinking about local literature and an “authentic” local literature, I like your comment that it’s inclusionary and of a place, but that it also has to have that awareness. Because you talk about how do you know the difference between someone who just came here and did their research and someone who is from here and has done their research, and it comes down to that awareness and the little details that you can’t research. It’s the nuances.
DK: So, we have a couple of questions left. I don’t know if you want to speak to the role of Pidgin in an authentic local literature, or maybe you want to describe how your perspective has changed, or maybe Bamboo Ridge’s impact over the years, although I think you’ve talked a bit about that already.
DK: I mentioned a couple of things about Pidgin when we talked about Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body, and about the children’s story I wrote with Pidgin dialogue in it. I don’t write anything in Pidgin now except when I put a bit of dialogue in an essay about growing up here. I’m not as obsessed with Pidgin as part of local identity as some writers are. I notice when I talk, depending on who I’m talking to, my Kāne‘ohe Pidgin accent comes out, and sometimes I wonder, should I really be pronouncing words like that, especially if there are very young kids around who I know aren’t going to grow up like I did, talking Pidgin. But in the end who cares? Times change, what is local will change. It’s all good.
Looking back, I don’t have any negative feelings about Bamboo Ridge. It contributed a lot to local writing and literature, and to my own writing, and the longevity of the press speaks for itself. It’s still here, and it’s found a new generation of writers and supporters to take over.
DCC: It reminds me of Talk Story and the discussions around local literature, and how people said that you have to have the writing and the criticism and critique to grow and change and become something better. You know, your essay “Local Mythologies” reminds me of Rodney Morales’ literature piece on multiculturalism. Have you read it?
DK: Yeah, I read it before he published the first version in 1998 because he asked me for comments. I didn’t have much to add, though, because he and I pretty much agree about local literature. In his article, he mentioned my writings about and publications of Hawaiian literature as part of what he calls Hawai‘i’s “contentious multiculturalism.” He was right about the contentiousness, of course, and after his piece was published, the contentiousness continued into the next decade, and what I wrote and published in ’90s was criticized.
DCC: I was going to ask how you felt about the critiques of your work.
DK: Well, it’s a long, complicated story, but if you want to include it, that’s okay with me. It has to do with the continuation of what Rodney called Hawai‘i’s “contentious multiculturalism” in 1998. Before I get into the criticism and its motivation, I should mention that what I wrote and published in the ’80s and ’90s was generally well received by reviewers and scholars, Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, at least by those who published reviews or gave me feedback in person. All of them felt it was generally a good thing that have more Hawaiian literature in print and being taught in schools and colleges. Not that criticism would have been bad. Criticism is a good thing because, as you said earlier, because it helps make the story better the next time you tell it.
In 2008, a critique of my work appeared in “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Was My Land,” an essay by Ku‘ualoha Hoʻomanawanui, who was hired by the UH English department in 2007. Apparently, she thought that what I wrote and published a decade earlier had somehow contributed to her land being stolen from her. Her essay was included in Asian Settler Colonialism, an anthology that UH press published, co-edited by Candace Fujikane, who was hired by the UH English department in 1995. Both of them complained that someone of Japanese ancestry like me shouldn’t have written about or published Hawaiian literature because only Kanaka Maoli had “kuleana over Hawaiian culture, history, and the [re]telling of it through our mo‘olelo.”
Like others, I thought Fujikane’s introduction to Asian Settler Colonialism and Hoʻomanawanui’s essay were uninformed and poorly researched. Particularly annoying was the inflated tone of two young professors who at the time didn’t seem to know enough about what they were writing.
I wasn’t aware of what was published because I wasn’t interested in Asian American Studies at the time. I learned about the criticism of my work through photographer and artist Kapulani Landgraf, a colleague of mine at Kapi‘olani Community College. She emailed Fujikane asking why Ho‘omanawanui’s essay was included in Asian Settler Colonialism because the essay mischaracterized my writings and publications. Fujikane responded to her email, and Kapulani forwarded the response to me, without comment.
Kapulani was a former student of Mark Hamasaki at Windward Community College, and was friends with his brother Richard and with Kiki Mookini. After Kiki, Mark, Richard, and I worked together on publications during the ’80s, Kapulani worked with us on various projects during the ’90s and beyond. Kapulani gave the name “Kalamakū” to the press I started to publish Kiki’s translation of Moolelo Hawaii o Pakaa a me Ku-a-Pakaa in 1990. I was going to call the press Mo‘ae, “trade winds,” but she told me no, don’t do that, the trade winds are associated with haole because that’s how they got here, on sailing ships.
In 1994, I proofread the English text of Kapulani’s first book of photographs, Nā Wahi Pana o Ko‘olau Poko: Legendary Places of Ko‘olau Poko, published by UH Press, which documented wahi pana [famous places] in the district where Kāne‘ohe is located. Kapulani grew up in Kāne‘ohe and had published a book of photographs and oral histories of Hawaiian residents.
Kapulani gave me permission to use two of her photographs for the covers of Kalamakū publications—Voyaging Chiefs of Havai‘i in 1995 and Storied Landscapes in 1999. During the ’90s, Kapulani and Mark documented in photos the destruction of the land during the building of the H-3 through Hālawa Valley and Kāne‘ohe, and in 1998, they exhibited the photographs at the Honolulu Advertiser building in Honolulu. After the exhibition, they wanted to publish the photographs in a book and asked me to write an introduction for it. The book, Ē Luku Wale Ē was published by ‘Ai Pōhaku Press in 2015. Richard wrote the foreword to the book.
In 2005–2006, Kapulani, Kiki, Richard, and I worked on and published an edited, annotated version of Martha Beckwith’s translation of S.N. Haleole’s La‘ieikawai, which was published in 1919, so Richard could assign the text to his students at Kamehameha Schools.
In her email to Kapulani, Fujikane asserted that she and Hoʻomanawanui objected to what I wrote because I “insert” my “settler family history into the genealogy of Hawaiian land” and “claim a position of authority on Hawaiian mo‘olelo.”
Well, I do write about my grandparents’ emigration to Hawai‘i and my parents’ and my growing up here, but those stories are from the period when Hawai‘i was not “Hawaiian land,” but a U.S. Territory, then a multicultural U.S. state. So I don’t “insert” my family history into “the genealogy of Hawaiian land,” or as Fujikane contended, “conflate” it with Hawaiian genealogy. My family stories are from the most recent layer of Hawai‘i’s history. As I mentioned earlier, I quote and summarize from Hawaiian stories from previous layers of history to acknowledge that I’m aware that before the islands were part of the U.S., they were Hawaiian land for a much longer period of time.
Ho‘omanawanui was apparently also upset by my use of summaries and quotations from Hawaiian stories and genealogies from the translations by white scholars of the writings of Samuel Kamakau and other Native Hawaiian writers, which I found in public libraries and in bookstores. For example, the essay “Voyaging Chiefs of Kāne‘ohe Bay,” in Storied Landscapes, starts with the launching of Hōkūle‘a at Hakipu‘u-Kualoa in 1975, then presents summaries of stories and excerpts from genealogies of ancient chiefs from Kahiki who landed in the bay. The essay ends with the story of Nainoa and the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s [PVS] revival of ancient voyaging traditions.
The point of that essay was to connect the relatively recent launching of Hōkūle‘a to the stories of ancient voyaging chiefs because Nainoa was a descendant of one of those chiefs. During Hōkūle‘a’s 1992 voyage to Tahiti, before I was under contract with PVS to write about Nainoa and voyaging traditions, KCCN Hawaiian Radio asked me to write fifty vignettes on ancient and modern voyagers and voyaging traditions for broadcast during the voyage. Those vignettes were the origin of “Voyaging Chiefs of Kāne‘ohe Bay.”
Ho‘omanawanui complains that Native Hawaiians like Nainoa “are not permitted to speak or share their mana‘o of the ‘āina to which they are genealogically connected.” I “permit” Natives to speak by quoting or summarizing from their published writings, with the authors identified as my sources. The readers can go to the sources to get the full story for themselves directly from Native Hawaiians writer and speaker. I was writing an essay, not compiling an anthology of Native Hawaiian writers or of excerpts from Native Hawaiian sources.
I had already featured Nainoa’s “mana‘o” extensively on the website I developed for PVS in the ’90s, taking excerpts from transcripts of his speeches and interviews and sequencing them to tell his story and the story of PVS—sort of like what I did with the essays that J.D. Holt contracted me to prepare for publication in 1991. So, much of Nainoa’s story is told in his own words.
I knew Nainoa fairly well back then because I went over to the Thompson family home in Niu Valley regularly for staff meetings and crew training sessions and dinners. He ran voyaging programs for high school and college students that involved sailing a coastal canoe around O‘ahu, so I assisted him with educational materials and logistics for those programs and for his crew training sessions. Around that time, Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, who joined us as the protocol officer on the crew of Hawai‘iloa for the 1995 arrival in Juneau, began teaching a UH Hawaiian Studies course in Polynesian navigation and used some of the PVS educational materials.
My impression was that Hoʻomanawanui’s criticism of my work was motivated by a need to establish herself as an authority on mo‘olelo and to publish something, so she could get tenured and promoted at the UH. In 2007, she was the first hire of Native Hawaiian ancestry in the English department. I assumed that she was hired to be the department’s expert on Hawaiian literature and to teach it. In 1994, I advocated that the department teach Hawaiian literature, so I thought it was good that someone was hired to do that, although over a decade had passed since I made the suggestion. Ironically, the person that the department hired decided that one way to gain recognition as an authority on Hawaiian literature was to criticize my work. However, instead of pointing out inaccurate summaries, questionable sources, or faulty interpretations, which is what scholars are usually trained to do, she merely complained that I wasn’t of Hawaiian ancestry and also decided to attack my character.
Besides accusing me of encroaching on Native Hawaiian kuleana, Hoʻomanawanui asserted that I was acquiring rights to Hawaiian literature, so I could profit from it. She refers to me as a “businessman.” Actually, most of the stories I published were in the public domain and have no copyrights, so anyone with initiative can publish them, even her.
Many of the stories were translated by haole scholars and appeared in haole publications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for a haole readership that couldn’t read Hawaiian. I republished some of the stories to make out-of-print texts available to contemporary English-reading students and teachers, for use in the classroom as part of a multicultural literary curriculum.
Contemporary translators and writers whom I published, like Kiki, Richard Hamasaki, and poet and artist Imaikalani Kalahele, retained the copyrights of their works, Richard’s From the Spider Bone Diaries: Poems and Songs (2000) and Imai’s Kalahele (2002). The translators and poets could reprint them with whatever press they wanted to or even publish the books themselves. Richard’s book was reprinted by UH Press in 2001.
What I copyrighted were introductions and annotations, so someone else couldn’t just reprint Kalamakū Press books. But anyone with more knowledge and better insights than I had, could annotate or retranslate the stories, then republish them with a higher literary and cultural value.
As far as profits go, I priced the books to break even because inflating the price for profit would make them too expensive for students and teachers, which would have defeated the purpose of publishing them in the first place. The market for such stories is small, which is why they were out of print, so the publishing was worth the effort only if they are grant-funded, or as a public service. The first couple of Kalamakū Press publications were grant-funded using the Bamboo Ridge model. After that, I decided grant-writing and reporting was a pain in the ass, so I paid for the printings myself.
Once the internet was established by the late ’90s, the easiest way to make texts available to teachers and students was to put them on websites with free access, so I posted on the PVS website Voyaging Chiefs of Havai‘i, an anthology of Polynesian migration stories published in 1995, and had the library at Kapi’olani Community College put on its website Ancient O‘ahu, annotated stories from Thrum and Fornander, published in 1996. Teachers in Hawai‘i were able to use the stories and cultural information for class assignments.
Even before the internet, of course, the stories could have been photocopied for free at a library, and teachers could make copies for their classes, but many teachers, students, and readers didn’t have the time or the access to libraries that had the publications that contained the stories.
Free internet access pretty much kills the market for printed books, but broadens the access. I got an email from a Cook Islands native who was happy that he was able to find his ancestors’ migration stories online. In 2015, when I went to Aotearoa during Hōkūle‘a’s Worldwide Voyage to help with the education program for Hikianalia, a new canoe launched by PVS in 2012, the Maori chanter who greeted the crew at a college told us he was inspired by the stories that he read on the PVS website and traveled to the Big Island to study voyaging with Nā Kālai Wa‘a, Moku o Hawai‘i.
Hoʻomanawanui might have gotten the idea that I was competing with her for a position of authority on Hawaiian literature and culture because our essays coincidentally appeared in the same publication twice, once in 2000 and once in 2001. In 2000, three UH English faculty members, Cindy Franklin, Ruth Hsu, and Suzanne Kosanke, re-published “A Search for Kū‘ula-kai” in Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Pacific, a literary anthology they co-edited; they also included Hoʻomanawanui’s “Hero or Outlaw? Two Views of Kaluaiko‘olau.” In 2001, when Michael Puleloa published “Local Mythologies, 1979–2000” in Hawai‘i Review [no. 56 –Ed.], he also included Hoʻomanawanui’s “Yo Brah, It’s Hip Hop Jawaiian Style: The Influence of Reggae and Rap on Contemporary Hawaiian Music.”
Before Hoʻomanawanui’s essay on Kaluaiko‘olau was published in 2000, I had already published in Storied Landscapes in 1999, “A Twisted Tale: Jack London’s ‘Koolau the Leper,’” which contrasted the two versions of the story of Kaluaiko‘olau: “Koolau the Leper,” London’s fictionalized version; and the first-hand account by Kaluaiko‘olau’s wife, Pi‘ilani, published in 1906 in a Hawaiian newspaper. Pi‘ilani’s story was later translated into English by Frances Frazier, with the title “The True Story of Kaluaikoolau, as told by his wife Pi‘ilani.”
It’s not like I came up with an original idea for my comparison/contrast essay. I got the idea from Richard Hamasaki, who assigned the two versions in his English classes at Kamehameha Schools. He told me about how he contrasted the haole and Hawaiian views of Kaluaiko‘olau and gave me a copy of the translation of Pi‘ilani’s story in case I wanted to use a similar assignment in my classes, which I did. That was the origin of that essay.
I didn’t see myself as competing with Hoʻomanawanui and didn’t read either of her essays because I wasn’t interested in reading more about Kaluaiko‘olau, or about Jawaiian music. I also wasn’t interested in a position of authority on mo‘olelo because I didn’t have the training in Hawaiian language necessary to do scholarly work in that field. The best way for Hoʻomanawanui, or any scholar, to establish herself as an authority on mo‘olelo would be to do research and publish a groundbreaking study or translation, like Lilikalā’s A Legendary Tradition of Kamapua‘a, the Hawaiian Pig God, which she published in 1996; or like Puakea Nogelmeier’s translation of the epic of Pele and Hi‘iakaikapoliopele, which he published in 2008 [The Epic Tale of Hi‘iakaikapoliopele –Ed.]. Nogelmeier, a haole from Minnesota and a UH professor of Hawaiian language, produced a translation of much greater literary value than an earlier translation by Nathaniel Emerson, published in 1915 [Pele and Hiiaka: A Myth from Hawaii –Ed.].
In her 2008 email to Kapulani, Fujikane quotes Ho‘omanawanui, who asserts, without any evidence, that “most haole and Asian settlers in Hawai‘i argue there is no difference between themselves and indigenous Kanaka Maoli, despite the vast differences in kuleana that do exist.” Fujikane agrees with her statement; I disagree.
Most Asian and haole settlers I grew up with and associate with today see a vast difference between themselves and Hawaiians; and few, if any, have an interest in taking over the kuleana of Native Hawaiians. For example, the restoration of Hawaiian sovereignty and lands is the kuleana of Native Hawaiians. I’m aware of the diverse views about restoration in the Hawaiian community—some want restoration of some or all of the land and the creation of a sovereign Native nation; others are satisfied with the status quo, or even indifference. I agree with Haunani K. Trask that non-Hawaiians, even a U.S. Senator like Dan Inouye, shouldn’t interfere in the sovereignty process. Whatever is decided by the majority of Hawaiians, or a political entity authorized to negotiate a settlement with the U.S. government, is okay with me.
I was interested in learning about how Polynesians navigated to Hawai‘i, but not interested in navigating a canoe or passing that knowledge on to future generations. Those are the kuleana of Native Hawaiian navigators like Nainoa, Bruce, and Chad.
I researched, read, and published Hawaiian literature in translation as part of my job teaching multicultural literature at a public community college.
In 2009, I posted at my UH website responses to Hoʻomanawanui’s and Fujikane’s criticism. The response to Hoʻomanawanui’s “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Was My Land” was titled “This Land (Native Hawai‘i) Is Your Land, That Land (Multicultural Hawai‘i) Is My Land,” which pretty much sums up my point.
My critique of Fujikane’s introduction to Asian Settler Colonialism was titled “The Myth of ‘Asian Settler Colonialism.’” I point out her misconceptions, and false assumptions and claims about Asian immigration to Hawai‘i. She applies a haole theory of colonial settlers to Hawai‘i’s history, even though the theory doesn’t fit the historical facts. The history was more complicated than she makes it out to be.
What Fujikane was trying to do was write a history that she thought Haunani K. Trask and other Hawaiian activists wanted her to write. In “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” published in 2000, Haunani criticized Asian settlers like Fujikane who claimed that locals, i.e., Asians, had a “nation” in Hawai‘i. Haunani pointed out that only one group has a claim to nationhood in Hawai‘i, and that group is Native Hawaiian, stemming from the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Haunani also argued that the concept of a local nation was a way for Asian Americans like Fujikane to deny any responsibility for the current dispossession and marginalization of Hawaiians in their native land.
In “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony,” Haunani seems to be, like Fujikane and Ho‘omanawanui, attacking settlers and immigrants for taking over Hawai‘i, a revival of the “fear the Japanese takeover” rhetoric that began with the white plantation owners upset by strikes by Japanese workers, particularly those of 1909 and 1920.
The “fear the Japanese takeover” rhetoric surfaces periodically in Hawai‘i’s history in different forms. When investors from Japan were buying up resort properties in anticipation of a Japanese tourism boom in the ’70s and were accused of “taking over Hawai‘i tourism.” In 1991, George Cooper and Gavin Daws published Land and Power in Hawaii to raise an alarm that politicians, Chinese and Japanese Americans, were using their political power to acquire land and wealth. It was concerning, but not especially alarming, however, because anyone who knows Hawaiian history also knows that since the beginning of Hawai‘i’s history, most other politicians, of all ethnicities, had done the same thing.
If “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony” is read carefully, Haunani is not attacking “most Asian Americans,” but two particular categories of them: those Asian American leaders, particularly U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, who were interfering in the sovereignty process; and Asian American and other scholars and teachers who have marginalized Hawaiians by promoting the Asian American success story as Hawai‘i’s story, while ignoring Native Hawaiian history or stereotyping and demeaning Native Hawaiians as failed indigenous people, unable to compete in modern capitalist Hawai‘i due to culture or genetics.
To counteract that story of Asian American success, Fujikane decided she would label Asians as settlers who were oppressing Native Hawaiians, unless they, like her, would support the Hawaiian struggle. That a Japanese American would unjustly attack other Japanese Americans was not unprecedented. On the brink of World War II, a few Nisei who wanted to take over the community from the immigrant generation of their parents, made false accusations to the FBI against leaders of that generation, calling them pro-Japan, to get them arrested, so the Nisei accusers could take over business interests or leadership roles. The Issei called their accusers “inu” or “dogs,” slang for “snitches” or “rats.” Of course, Fujikane wasn’t a Japanese American patriot trying to ingratiate herself to white American patriots, but an activist trying to ingratiate herself to Hawaiian activists like Haunani.
After Haunani’s criticism, Fujikane retracted her claim of a local Asian nation and began to characterize herself as a repentant settler who supports Hawaiian causes. Like many young scholars trying to make a name for themselves, she wanted to be the discoverer of something that few others had known before, so in a 2009 Honolulu Weekly interview, she claimed to be one of the first Asian American scholars to perceive that Hawaiians had issues over the land and sovereignty stolen by the U.S. in 1893 and characterizes Asian American activists of the previous generation, some of whom worked with the UH Ethnic Studies program, as “settlers” […] who had “no perception that Hawaiians have their own struggle,” and that the Asian Americans in that program had formulated the slogan “Our History, Our Way” to tell the story of settler ascendancy in Hawai‘i.
During the ’70s and beyond, Kanaka ʻŌiwi leaders like Daviana McGregor, Pete Thompson, and Haunani were supported by a generation of Asian American activists like UH English Professor Gary Pak and his wife Merle, local activists like Rodney Morales, and haole activists. All of the supporters were fully aware that “Hawaiians have their own struggle.”
In a 2009 letter to the Honolulu Weekly editor, responding to Fujikane’s assertions about the UH Ethnic Studies program, Daviana, a professor in the program, informed Fujikane that Kānaka ‘Ōiwi, not Asian Americans, “were at the forefront of the struggle and the formulation of our slogan.” Daviana also criticizes Fujikane for labeling Asian immigrant workers and their descendants “settlers,” calling such labeling “ahistorical, narrow-minded, lacking in class analysis, and too simplistic to explain our complicated islands’ society.” Rodney quoted Daviana’s criticism of Fujikane in a 2010 update of his 1998 article on Hawai‘i’s contentious multiculturalism.
Fujikane included Hoʻomanawanui’s essay in her anthology because she thought that it supported Haunani’s argument about Asian Americans’ dispossessing Natives. Haunani was a friend of Richard Hamasaki, who had a dinner at his house for her and her partner David Stannard, and invited me. Haunani knew about the work Richard and I did publishing Hawaiian literature and introducing the literature to students; she was supportive of it because she understood that we were working against those in the community and the state, including other Asian Americans, who had marginalized indigenous history, culture, and literature in the curriculum of schools and colleges.
Ironically, by the time Fujikane and Hoʻomanawanui’s criticism of my work appeared in 2008, the focus of my research, writing, and publication had shifted from Hawai‘i to Japan, not because of any criticism, but because by the end of the ’90s, Hawaiian literature was being published by a diversity of presses, including ‘Ai Pōhaku, founded by Maile Meyer of Native Books and book designer Barbara Pope in 1993, and ‘Ōiwi: a Native Hawaiian Journal, founded by poet Māhealani Dudoit in 1999; and a lot was being written about Hawaiian literature and culture by others, Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, local and non-local.
My interest in Japanese history, culture, and literature predated my interest in Asian American, local, and multiethnic American literatures, or in Hawaiian literature in translation. In my second year at the UH, at the end of the fall 1970 semester, my mom took me and her other two children to visit my grandparents’ hometowns in rural Hiroshima Prefecture. My dad had asked her to do that before he passed away in the early summer of that year because he wanted his children to know where we came from.
To prepare for the visit, I took a course in Japanese language in the second summer school session, and a course on Japanese history in the fall semester. After the visit, inspired to learn more about our family’s ancestral culture, I continued taking courses in Japanese language, up to the fourth level. I was thinking of majoring in Japanese until I realized that I would never be as fluent in Japanese as I was in English. My feel for the English language and words was so much greater, from all the reading I had done since childhood, so I ended up majoring in English.
In 2004, after publishing Local Geography: Essays on Multicultural Hawai‘i, which sums up how and why I got interested in local and Hawaiian literature, I spent two decades traveling in Japan with my partner Karen, whose grandparents immigrated to Hawai‘i from Yamaguchi Prefecture. We made one or two long road trips a year, visiting places from the northern end of Hokkaidō to the southern tip of Kyūshū, and in all the prefectures in between. I wrote articles and essays about the road trips, the first one published in The Honolulu Advertiser in June 2004, about encounters with sakura and sacred rocks in and around the ancient capital of Kyōto. Eleven years later, in 2015, I published Roads of Oku: Journeys in the Heartland, a collection of seven essays about Japan. Oku is a reference to the interior of one’s home, or a remote area of a district or region where ancient traditions endure, roughly equivalent to “heartland.”
In 2018, I published Summer Grasses, Autumn Wind, a translation of Bashō’s poetic travelog Oku no Hosomichi [Narrow Road to the Deep North]. To better understand the narrative and poetry, I spent over a decade visiting places the poet visited during his 1689 journey to northeastern Honshū, an area known as Oku, remote from the ancient capital and the newly established city of Edo. The project was an extended version of my day-long drive along the road to Hāna in the early ’90s, to look for and photograph places mentioned in Moke Manu’s Kū‘ula-kai legend.
I first read Bashō’s poems in an anthology of haiku assigned by professor Reinhard Friederich in a World Literature course at the UH in spring 1970. After reading Bashō’s haiku, I went to the UH bookstore and bought the first English translation of Oku no Hosomichi, which was published in 1967 by Nobuyuki Yuasa. I was enchanted by the poet’s poetic narrative and wanted to visit the places Bashō wrote about, but back then I didn’t have the time, resources, or expertise to do that.
Both Roads of Oku: Journeys in the Heartland and Summer Grasses, Autumn Wind were dedicated to my mom for her lifetime of support, and especially for my education and my first visit to the ancestral hometowns. Both publications came out in time for her to read them before she passed away in 2020. As with my dissertation, she had been waiting impatiently for me to finish them.
During the two decades of writing and publishing about Japan, my interest in local writing continued at Kapi‘olani Community College through publishing student writing. I recalled how encouraging it was to see my poetry and prose published in Bamboo Ridge and by newspapers, and wanted to encourage student writers in the same way, so I served as the advisor to student publications. I also designed and taught a course in creative nonfiction to teach the craft of essay writing. The college had a literary journal for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, but I thought it should also have a journal to publish student writings in the humanities and the natural and social sciences, so we revived a defunct journal to do that . We also started a journal for Hawaiian students intending to major in the natural sciences, to publish the research they did with a focus on Hawai‘i. To get that journal going, I worked with Keolani Noa, the adviser of a National Science Foundation-funded program for Native Hawaiian students.
After I retired in 2016 to help my mom as she aged, I began transferring my publications from a UH website to a WordPress site. I decided to revise my hastily written 2009 responses to Fujikane’s and Ho‘omanawanui’s criticism. When I was doing research on “The Myth of Asian Settler Colonialism,” I was surprised to find Fujikane’s article “Mapping Wonder in the Māui Mo‘olelo on the Mo‘o‘āina: Growing Aloha ‘Āina Through Indigenous and Settler Affinity Activism,” published in 2016.
In it, Fujikane does what she said was a no-no over two decades earlier—she “inserts” her “settler family history into the genealogy of Hawaiian land” on Maui, and claims “a position of authority on Hawaiian mo‘olelo.” She provides a detailed, researched definition of mo‘olelo. And on a bus tour, she helps retell the mo‘olelo of the god Maui, even though, in 2008, she and Ho‘omanawanui claimed retelling mo‘olelo was the kuleana of only those with Hawaiian ancestry. Fujikane notes how learning mo‘olelo of a place can lead to aloha ʻaina—taking care of and protecting the land, which is one of the points I made in 1994, in “Toward an Authentic Local Literature.” Not that the notion of Hawaiian culture illuminating a path toward a sustainable future was an original idea. I got that idea from Haunani and quoted her in ”Images of Local Culture,” the Hawai‘i Herald newspaper article I wrote in 1984. In “Mapping Wonder in the Māui Mo‘olelo,” Fujikane also quotes from an article by Ho‘omanawanui, about traditional poetic devices in Hawaiian literature; so apparently Ho‘omanawanui had also moved on, from attacking settlers to producing literary scholarship in order to establish her authority and expertise.
What had changed for Fujikane? Apparently, her self-designation as a repentant settler allowed her to feel comfortable with inserting her family story into the history of Hawai‘i, retelling mo‘olelo, and getting involved in land struggles. She calls what she engages in “indigenous and settler affinity activism.” Whatever it took to get her there, it was a good thing. Her article critiquing some of the practices of the capitalist economy in Hawai‘i in the light of Hawaiian traditional practices was something like what I thought might be written one day when I wrote “Toward an Authentic Local Literature.” Her jargon-filled essay, interspersed with Hawaiian words, foregrounds her self-conscious “affinity activism,” with a land struggle in Wai‘anae as background.
Twenty years earlier, I didn’t feel a need to label myself a settler to work with Kapulani on publications, or with PVS on voyaging education projects. I felt comfortable working with everyone because we shared values, interests, and goals to make the community a better place. A few with PVS might have been uncomfortable or unhappy about my Japanese ancestry, but they had the option of not working with me and not reading what I wrote or published. That sort of thing didn‘t bother me; it was part of living and working in a multiethnic community. I was there because the Thompsons had invited me to be there. Most of the crew were welcoming, and we had a great time sailing voyaging canoes together.
In 2019, a next-generation poet, Laurel Nakanishi, contacted me to review the notes in her first book, Ashore, before it was published in 2021. Her poems include numerous references to Hawaiian traditions and stories, with detailed annotations. Her title recalled for me Stephen Sumida’s 1991 study of local literature, And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i.
In “Acknowledgements,” Laurel thanks those from whom she received feedback, including me and Fujikane, two older writers who had helped her with reviews. Laurel has also published essays, on the eighty-eight-temple tour on Shikoku in Japan, and on places in Montana, where her mother’s family is from, and in Nicaragua, where her partner Alex Salinas’ family is from. Her 2020 essay on Pu‘uloa, “Stories Have Teeth,” features the story of Ka‘ahupāhau, the shark goddess of Pu‘uloa, and the tragic transformation of that sacred ‘āina into a military base known as Pearl Harbor. The essay ends with a description of the effort she joined to restore one of the fishponds there. What she wrote was what I had hoped would be written when I imagined “a local literature” in “Toward an Authentic Local Literature” a quarter century earlier.

Dennis Kawaharada was born in Agana, Guam, in 1951, where his dad moved for his first job. In 1953, the family returned to Hawai‘i and settled in Kāne‘ohe, where Kawaharada attended public schools, graduating from Castle High in 1969.
Kawaharada taught for 35 years at Kapi‘olani Community College, retiring in 2016. From 1985 to 1987, he served as managing editor of Bamboo Ridge. In 1992, he established Kalamakū Press.
Between 1992 and 2017, he was a writer and crew member for the Polynesian Voyaging Society. His writings about Hawai‘i and Japan include three collections of essays: Storied Landscapes (1999); Local Geography (2004), and Roads of Oku (2016).

Donald Carreira Ching was born and raised in Kahaluʻu, on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as StoryQuarterly, Every Day Fiction, and RHINO. In 2015, his debut novel, Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle, was published by Bamboo Ridge Press. In 2018, he received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Emerging Writer, and in 2021 and 2022, he was a finalist in the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Contest. He is currently working on a short story collection, Blood Work and Other Stories.
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