The 'olelo above could be interpreted in many ways, and may serve as a guiding principle in helping us to think about the relevance of history to the present. What has been interesting to me in my recent readings as well as teaching a semester in the history department has been to play close attention to people's idea of what they mean when they say, "ka wa kahiko."The question of time came up pretty early in the semester when one of my 200 level introduction to Hawaiian history students asked me, "when are you going to start teaching history?" The question amused me and made me think---well, what did I think was history, that she considered as simply something else.I gave a defensive and pretty smart a** remark, after I realized that what she meant by history was marked by an attention to chronology, of dates that could only arise after the arrival of Captain Cook organized our history into a BC / AC timeline in much the same way the birth of Jesus Christ operated for World Civ, or the Greco-Roman World. Anyway, I tried to explain that the three weeks devoted to Hawaiian history before Cook, was still history, but found myself reverting to phrases like "the oral tradition," and "Hawaiian culture," in ways that sought to legitimate and approximate her idea of "history," but largely failed to communicate----well, it was only the third week of class.As the semester progressed though I found that I was fairly surprised that many of my students applied the phrase "Ka wa kahiko" which they seem to translate as 'in ancient times," to the time of Kamehameha. Through this move, my students granted the early 19th century a patina of antiquity in ways that seem incomprehensible given the wealth of orature that has been passed down through the mouths, memories and pens of Hawaiians, who recorded these traditions during that "wa kahiko."Here's another thing that caught my attention, namely that a lot of people venerate the "wa kahiko." But a time, as process cannot be considered static or captured and neatly bundled as a set of practices or beliefs that never change or transform over time, hence my second difficulty with the "wa kahiko" designation as the past which we mine for "momi" (the current term of art in Hawaiian language and lit circles---which in unsettling ways seem to mimic the practices of strip mining ethnographers of Pukui's time) so that we can map "authenticity" onto our present day lives.Hence my query, my question, a process of searching; how can we problematize and theorize our connection and thinking about ka wa kahiko without making a period of time static, "the source" and well, "history" in its most unflattering sense: the detritus of passed lives that are no longer relevant to today, in other words, that can no longer speak to us in meaningful, deep ways.
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