A few hours were spent with IRS papers, and getting them to the UNM student attorney. Universities with law schools have student tax attorneys who help people like me. Lucky thing that is.
I also did some Agent Orange research until I got angry. Anger causes stress which makes me feel ill - and it doesn't bother the offenders at all. I searched for evidence of people I knew in high school still being around. I found everyone I looked for, well employed, right on Kauai. I already knew one lives in Florida, one on Hawaii Island and a couple live in Honolulu. I found them all, but one. He went to Vietnam in 1967, a victim of the John Wayne marine roundup. He sent me a bright pink satin pillow cover embroidered with hearts and arrows like it was 1942. For a moment, I felt like Mrs. Miniver. He was a helicopter gunner. They have an average life expectancy of three minutes in a battle situation. Anything in the air was bombarded with Agent Orange. Even the mechanics who stayed at the basis got really sick from the residue on the aircraft. I know he made it back home. I try to imagine being poisoned by death and chemicals in Vietnam and coming home to more exposure to the same poisons. I remember thinking when he left the island that the Marines ought to pay him like a real important specialist. I remember him scaling the wet slippery rocks with slick red mud at Waipahe slippery slide. Someone from, say, Cincinnati, Ohio would not be able to do that. I remember his tiny grandmother sitting on the front porch smoking little green cigars. The house was surrounded with big green trees and flowers. When he saw the poison falling on the forest and the Vietnam civilians, did he think of her?
I continued to write to him, but left the island before he came home. During the summer of 1967, I was 16 and drifted off into new local friends who were home from college on the mainland. That was one of the summers of continuous spraying above where I lived. It was hard for us to imagine what was going on in Vietnam. There was no television on Kauai. It all seemed surrealistic and remote. We had radio news. We had Vietnam soldiers on R&R. We had the Garden Island paper. When I was in California later in 1968, my girl friends who had graduated from high school before me, were dealing with their boyfriends coming home. No one knew what was happening. The men were sick mentally and physically. They were falling to the ground if a car backfired. They were screaming in the night. They were punching at my friends if they touched them when they were sleeping. I have never heard anyone talk about the trauma to the young women. At 18 years old, I skipped the whole generation. My first boyfriend was 29 years old and European. I did not know the war had been in my own backyard.
In 1980, I was driving the Alcan Highway in Northwest Territories. A big storm hit. There were a few cabins on the road with instructions to leave $10.00 in case anyone needed to spend the night there. The doors had no latches, and I had no gun because it is illegal to travel into Canada with firearms. I had my Siberian Husky. There was major brown bear activity in the area. To keep my brain from freaking out I lit a candle and wrote a letter to one of my friends from those summers in Wailua. I sent it general delivery to Kapaa, but probably there were too many people there by then for it to be delivered. A year later, my mother from Hawaii drove the Alcan Highway to Alaska alone, fishing and camping through Canada, the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Alaska. I guess it's a genetic problem.
Today I am going to figure out how to follow this site properly. So far success has been accidental in nature. I have two posts to research and answer and will do that this evening.
I discovered the link between the Navy and UofH. I also found an article written by a Puerto Rican concerning a sort of underwater Star Wars project in Puerto Rico and Kauai. Time frame? Like these two places covered the whole mainland - at the expense of those who live there. I also found a story about a 2005 student protest concerning these operations during which they occupied the UofH chancellor's office. That would be exactly where my sister was working as assistant to the chancellor, but I do not know how major universities are set up. Maybe there is more than one chancellor. I went to the University of Alaska which doesn't count. It seems I am still looking for reasons she did not know what happened on Kauai. Still stupid after all these years.
The new UofH president came from University of California, Santa Cruz. This is a school that is so liberal in nature that it makes Berkeley look far right. They have no letter grades, etc. If any fraternization were to occur between the school and the military, the whole place would be burned down to the ground. ROTC is not permitted on campus, etc. In fact, no public high school in any upper income area of northern California permits ROTC or any type of recruitment on campus. The parents would go nuts. I tried to go to high school in California in 1966 and in 1968. I didn't last long there, but I saw this double standard. I remember Joan Baez being thrown off campus in 1966 when she turned an English class into a platform for anti war "propaganda." MORE HYPOCRISY. White people with money did not want any anti war sentiment around, but did not want their children gathered up and sent off to be killed "for their country." Poor things.
The chill that was coming across the Hopi rez in AZ yesterday is in northern New Mexico today. The trees on the big mountains and at the house are turning gold. In September I start to feed a cup of rice bran to the horses. The fat makes their coats come in soft and thick. They have no shelter here except big cottonwood trees by the river. By November they will look like big sheared beavers. Some people make fun of this, but they are never shivery in winter. Horses from open Navajo range can survive any weather - 115 degrees with no shelter, and 20 degrees below zero in the wind with no shelter. No water too. The ones who eat when they do not have water don't make it. The ones who don't eat until they have water survive.
Donkey stud chaos is over. He disappeared some time yesterday. I hope no little mules pop out next fall. That would be a lot of work with a baby just in time for winter. I can hear him heehawing back at his place. He is calling to my mares who are ignoring him.
Just heard some talk radio about censorship on the rez and how Hopis and Navajos need to do their own reporting. This sounds familiar. A Dine woman from Window Rock called and announced a new small radio station is starting up just off the rez because the tribal government is censoring all the news coming over rez stations. The only news there is CNN generic. This woman also stated that all previous small rez stations have been "gobbled up by the religious people." They are trying to do live streaming at 89.9. It is KNIZ.org. It's hard to say Hopi and Navajo in the same sentence. There is a white guy on the Hopi rez who keeps moving the fences into Navajo territory. This is because there are valuable resources there. My Dine former significant other has a ranch that backs up onto Hopi territory. I have never taken orders very well, but after about 2 years I learned that when he told me to get into the pickup, something was happening. "GET IN THE PICKUP." Ok. The rez boundary was far off, but somehow the Navajo "telegraph" got the message about trouble to ranch headquarters. In a flash everything got real quiet, riders would show up, others would mount up and they all headed out with rifles. Nobody but the riders knows what happens out there.
The Mormon missionaries would show up at my place on the rez when I first moved there. I was selling hay and I had an electric fence up around the hay shed and hogan to keep out the open range horses. Those pale sick looking guys would actually jump the hot wire which was almost never hot. The first time I saw that, I waited until the second one was straddling the wire, opened the door and said, "That fence is hot." He jumped all right. Later I found out the Mormons regularly talk people out of their children by telling them they can educate them and give them "opportunity." Many of the kids were taken to old Mexico and worked as migrant farm labor. When they tried to escape they could not get back across the border - no papers and they were taken for Mexicans. Many were lost in Mexico. That happened to my former significant other, but he was pretty smart. When they asked him what kind of place he wanted to go to, he told them he wanted to go to a family with a swimming pool. At 10 years old he figured a family with a swimming pool wouldn't be farming. He was right. Later when he got back home, a rancher from Utah saw him riding broncs and offered him a job. He was told to pack up and someone would be back for him in a couple of days. Turned out the man owned a huge cattle ranch that spanned from Telluride Colorado down to Arizona. Those were some of the last big cattle drives in history down from Telluride through The Valley of the Gods to where the cattle were shipped out. In 2002, we went up to the ranch headquarters where he had worked over 30 years before. The ranchers son immediately recognized him. A lot of the ranch had been sold off due to rich people and real estate brokers inflating property values up by Telluride. Taxes were too high. There was a 9mm handgun on a side table by the front door.
I guess I have seen enough about what happened on Kauai. Sometimes searches come up with site summaries referring to remaining toxicity on Kauai. But the site is not found. Imagine that. If only someone had told me! I would have known that I did not have to move my daughters 19 times while they were growing up. As long as I was in a mold free, uncarpeted house in a place with no row crops and malathion mosquito abatement, I was as good as I was going to get. I learned that the brain of a 15 year old child is still developing in the frontal lobe. This is where the cognitive area is and where extensive IQ testing in a Harvard Study in 1985 showed deficits in my brain. It has been scientifically proven that dioxin causes this brain damage including brain atrophy. At the same time I was found to have anti myelin and anti smooth muscle antibodies also proven to be caused by dioxin exposure. The myelin sheath covers every nerve in the body including the brain. This is the cause of constant pain of neuropathy. Smooth muscle is the intestinal tract which metabolizes all nutrients needed for survival. It is also the liver. What else I don't know. These chemicals are all estrogen hormones (E2). They were originally developed to promote plant growth, but were found to kill plant growth in higher applications. Monkeys developed endometriosis and other reproductive problems when exposed to dioxins. Just like me. I also had ruptured ovarian cysts with internal bleeding and "primary ovary failure." Low E2 (scientifically proven to be caused by dioxin exposure) plus high FSH results in "primary ovary failure." A paper by an Egyptian doctor states that his study indicates the failure is more attributable to the relationship between E2 and FSH hormone than the low E2 hormone. Makes sense to me. In the 80s I developed toxic shock syndrome on a remote location in Alaska. Then multiple esophogeal ulcers the next year. No source ever identified for either of these. Most of this started in the early 1970s. Some in the 1960s. Some in 1980s. If Harvard had known about the extensive dioxin exposures, the study results could have been used in a constructive way to help all the people who were poisoned.
Sometimes symptoms are transient. For a long time I had no spatial orientation - could not tell if I was standing in a line unless I touched the person in front of me. Once I could not see chalk writing on a green board in a college class - teacher was writing and I could not see anything. I walked around the amphitheater room in case there was a glare or something. Still could not see the writing. Picked up my books and left. That math class was in a science building. In about 48 hours I got really sick. Maybe it was the chemicals coming from the science labs. The delay in illness caused a problem for years figuring out what was going on. It was all crazy. My daughters were 8 and 10 then. I had to draw maps from their school and daycare to where I was going or I would forget how to get to where they were - no matter how many times I went there. Once when I was trying to apply for food stamps, a worker came out to the front counter with an aerosol can of disinfectant and sprayed down the whole counter (and me) so she wouldn't "catch" what I had. The Lysol spray made my brain stop working completely, I could not give her my address or telephone number, she decided I was lying about everything and denied my application. Then I had to drive to pick up my daughters. Now I see a few veterans brave enough to talk about these same kind of insane experiences.
I have always thought my brain somehow compensated for these problems. Gradually each problem improved. That had the effect of leaving me even more confused. Had it really happened?
I believe I survived so far by orneryness. I also credit doctors in remote Alaska clinics who were from town going crazy trying to figure out what was going on without lab results and no team of specialists. I remember an older doctor in a hospital in Sitka (where my daughter was born) physically pushing another doctor out of the way who was saying nothing was wrong with me. That doctor had me in surgery quickly to remove a massive blood clot connected somehow to an ovary. I also had a retained placenta in a hospital that did not have oxygen in the rooms yet. They wanted to take me to Mt. Edgecomb Hospital which is a very well equipped Alaska Native hospital, but they wouldn't let me in.
Note: Mt Edgecomb Hospital is the best Native hospital in the state. It is accessible by boat and air only. No bridge. This is where the famous Sarah Palen "bridge to nowhere" was located. This is not nowhere.
Nothing hormonally related was working properly in my body. I also remember a doctor in California putting a stop to a truly evil stepmother's attempt to have me permanently committed to a mental institution including taking my daughters away so none of this would cost her any more money. She was on the way to being arrested for demanding copies of all my medical records so she could give them to a specific doctor. The doctors' personal attorneys and the hospital's attorneys had recorded the telephone conversations. One of the doctors was not taking any new patients, but he saw me for over a year - every week - just to protect me from them. He did not know what was happening to me, but he believed it was medically, not psychologically, oriented. This horrible wife of my father liked to buddy up to me, find out who my doctor was, call them and tell them I was just trying to get drugs. Later, the blood vessels in my eyes started breaking during blood pressure spikes related to neuropathic pain issues - or something. I was so dehydrated from intestinal failure that no one could get an IV in me. That still happens now.
One of the medical theories of the course of disease after exposure is that the endocrine system is disrupted. The pituitary gland is not working properly which runs the whole deal. And the hypothalmus part of the brain is not working properly either. Someday I will try to figure out what they are talking about.
Around that time I saw the first pictures my sister was sending all over the place of herself (of course) and a bunch of other dumb haoles sitting around on the ground in a circle with their arms up in the air wearing mokihana leis around their necks with more on their heads. Apparently, she was the special head kahuna, and had learned this from a secret source. She and the stepmother were hooked up big time. The stepmother claimed to be a practicing witch who could control clouds, people, and (I guess) the entire solar system. This was around the time I was told yogis in India can drink glasses of poison without trouble. Clearly, I was spiritually bereft. Why my father's jesuit catholicism tolerated this nonsense was and is a mystery to me. My sister would fly to California and go to gem shows at the end of the day to buy up suitcases full of cheap crystals and other stuff to take to Hawaii to sell in her new age shops. In the 80's it was easy to sell spirituality to vacant yuppies who thought they were enlightened by secret Hawaiian stuff. Good God. Now in her expansive biography on her web site, she states she ran "three bookstores on two islands." Exactly the type of person my Dine man was terrified to be near. I saw a newsletter from her shop in 1989 advertising that the stepmother was selling ($$$$) seats to a special channeling of the dead in Hawaii. This gives me the chills even to type it on here. I learned enough to block that darkness. Whenever I encountered that type of person at health fairs, I asked them about some of their specific behavior. Without exception, I was told that they would be asked to leave their group.
If my grandpa had been around he would have kicked all their butts and made sure I had a couple of good horses to ride. Now I have horses who are very polite to everyone, but go after people who might be aggressive towards me. I appreciate having 1,100 pound guard animals.
For this bad haole behavior, and many other reasons, I tolerate heavy discrimination loaded on to me - right up until I get threatened, then I defend myself. I find now that I'm getting old, I look somehow defenseless. That opinion doesn't last long. I still don't make a good victim. 30 or 50 years ago, my fine Spanish horse would have eliminated that problem. But the roots of everything have been lost to some.
Right now I am being plagued by my haole Need To Know Why. I am reminded of my Dine man's irritation with this behavior. His short to the point dismissal was this: "It's just like that."
Comments
Lucky me that you can write and writing you do very well.
Our lives are so parallel:
I listen to youtube for my variety of songs
Agent Orange, dioxin, and now DU are all part of my body and in my old age it's wreaking havoc in my whole body.
And yes, I was talking to a girlfriend a few doors away. We were both used in a recent surgery procedure and we are locating others too. We are native Hawaiian women.
Christian, mormon and Salem, Boston are all problems when one is standing up their Ki'i after years of laying down for American Expansionism of the Navy.
Have you noticed the Maoliworld forum today how the Navy Vet work which is why I went to your blog writing. Just to pass the time reading what's out there in the real world.
Early this morning I went to our park to check out the soil. I am checking for trees stomps, soil, iwi (ancient bones) human debrie such as waste (dodo) or garbage. It was pure soil which can be sold because most soils are damaged with contaminants in Hawaii.
Getting back to medical stuff--yes it's happening here too the psycologica nuts farts stuff as oppose to damaged organs seems more of a practice. And when they give you all those medications next level is to accuse you of selling the drugs. So, I laughed when I read the part about selling. I work with homeless closely so I am very aware of the drugs for sale crap out there. First I am shocked that perscription drugs can be sold. Secondly, I am shocked as to why Native Hawaiian woman and other ones too are so 'perscripiton smart'. Thirdly, I don't even take a tylenol, or any of those over the counter drugs--let along the perscription ones. I recently went to the emergency and the intact nurse asked me if I am taking over the counter drugs, I said no. She pulled up my chart and their low and behold a whole list of drugs that I forgot I bought and put away and had forgotten about. So the emergency care went south afterthat. I went home pulled some leaves off my noni tree and stuck it down my panty's and went to bed.
I don't have horses but I have naia (dolphins) and honu's to swim with around with around this time.
Alaska is an experience for me too. I went to Denali National Park for 12 hours and lived on the air base for a few months. I also went to the town bar in Denali and got drunk with some athabastian native women. I'm sexless (no partner) but if I have any(rare) it's with a guy. Not much on same sex although it is pretty much a practice now a days. But, I always tell my daughters that in my next life--I would be a lesbian. They think it's funny when I say that, I think it's soo fricken weird when I say it, but I do just for conciousness and besides two hundred years ago (Kamehameha time) we were a Mahu people. We supposedly only got together when we needed to make babies.
That whole baby making still exist by political crap. It's not about making babies it's about aborting.
We abort our children so that the white man can populate the Hawaiian Islands. How sick yeah?
The roots are similar here, I'm trying to keep it in the ground too.
Thanks for the talk