Thursday, October 16, 2008

Creating Change

Mercury Retrograde, Lisa says! And Lisa, that sounds like a hella good explanation to me. CRAZY STUFF! This astrology biz trips me out sometimes.

This explains it all.


It is most definitely a huge time of reflection for me - has been since a couple weeks after my arrival here. About the world, my world, my communities, my life.

And I have decided that if I am going to happy for the rest of my life, I need to work in the community, organizing and working towards effecting change. If I don't, I will quite possibly go crazy.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this longer quote from Haunani-Kay Trask's book, the first paragraph of an essay entitled "Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture." It might make you think twice about saying I'm lucky I'm in Hawaii for all the reasons most people would say it.


I am certain that most, if not all, Americans have heard of Hawai'i and have wished, at some time in their lives, to visit my Native land. But I doubt that the history of how Hawai'i came to be territorially incorporated, and economically, politically, and culturally subordinated to the United States is known to most Americans. Nor is it common knowledge that Hawaiians have been struggling for over twenty years to achieve a land base and some form of political sovereignty on the same level as American Indians. Finally, I would imagine that most Americans could not place Hawai'i or any other Pacific island on a map of the Pacific. But despite all this appalling ignorance, five million Americans will vacation in my homeland this year and the next, and so on, into the foreseeable capitalist future. Such are the intended privileges of the so-called American standard of living: ignorance of and yet power over one's relations to Native peoples. Thanks to postwar American imperialism, the ideology that the United States has no overseas colonies and is, in fact, the champion of self-determination the world over holds no greater sway than in the United States itself. To most Americans, then, Hawai'i is THEIRS: to use, to take, and above all, to fantasize about long after the experience.

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