Pure Manaʻo

Now that I am of that age where retirement is closer than the climbing years, I often think about this idea of legacy. Like Ozymandias, does my ego get left behind like a plaque outside of a teacher's room "This room belonged to Ms. Beth Powers who taught at Kamehameha for 50 years." The plaque does not talk about her disdain for us brownies, or the way her red pen slashed through our essays like a knife carving out vitriol with each stroke. It does not talk about her blatant racism towards us dumb Hawaiians or the colonizing arrogance that she, not even an English major, was the best choice to enlighten the illiterates  for 50 years. If the generational trauma she left behind for 50 years is what a legacy is about, let me walk quietly through the exit doors, silent as the mist, anonymous as a shadow let me be a wondering by random strangers long after I am gone. 

When I am weary, I remember a picture of my grandmother, Mary Uilani Kaumeheiwa Sodetani. She is sitting on the puʻunene with her feet up  Her long legs stretched out toward the ʻAuʻau Channel Her blue bandana Her long, brown arms clasped gently around her stomach Her eyes looking into her beloved yard. Once as a young child, after some nasty comments my grandfather said to her, and after his swearing that stuck out to my young ears  as sounding very much like the way my father talked to my mother, I asked grandma, "why do you let him talk to you like that?" Her eyes were tearless, steady. She looked at me and the sides of her eyes crinkled and her mouth, in the side smirk said,  "I just let it go one ear, and come out the other." I thought as a kid it was a way of forgetting. As she stared into her yard in that picture, I always thought it was what Sandra Cisneros described in House on Mango Street, "My Name," She looked out the window her whole life, the...

  Photo by Daian Gan Pexels Author's note: what color is nothing? was the prompt that led me to this rabbit hole. I'm not sure what I want to do with this. I am thinking I would like to know what unexpected lessons others have learned about themselves through teachers. I feel like the dumb girly is a different piece or I need to weave it better into the end in order to justify the space I give to the dumb girly thing.  In 7th grade art class, Ms. Glazer taught us about mixing water colors, the color wheel and the potential of water. She also told me that I was not an artist. It stopped my random doodling on the margins of my Holly Hobbie journal. It made me hesitant when I had to take industrial arts in 8th grade because we had to design a t-shirt for silk screening. How do I design on silkscreen when I have lost the ability to art?  Despite my lack of talent in art, I did remember that black can represent the presence of all colors. White is colorless. But at the end of ...

  My first job out of high school was as a student assistant with the pig eradication team at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. As a 17 year old, I was trained to trap, radio collar, and chase after wild pigs in the rainforest. I was assigned to the scientists, but I also accompanied the hunters and their dogs. I learned enough to know that I did not want to spend my career in green rubber boots and muddy jeans, but the lessons I learned from the wild boars have stayed with me in my 30 plus years in education. Pigs are very similar to humans and their bodies are studied in place of humans because of this. We have deemed this knowledge ethical to humans. Not necessarily ethical to pigs. I learned that humane treatment goes beyond just humans. The ʻāina, the kai, the animals, the birds, the fish are all sacred and have as much mana as the kanaka. How we treat each living entity defines our own humanity.  Wild pigs are vegans. I used to be a vegan. It was a lot of work. I used to ...

  Author's Note: This is going to be about how I got into teaching as a 3rd generation teacher. I guess I was fighting being a teacher, but my experiences outside of teaching led me to the fact that teaching was always going to be the choice. I have not regretted the acceptance of my role in the 30 plus years that Iʻve been doing this.   At 17, I was a pig hunter for the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. Well, actually, I was a pig trapper, pig radio collar "hunter," bait girl, pig mama. I did not accompany the hunters and scientists with a gun, knife, rope. Just me and my green rubber boots, Leviʻs 501 button downs, and my favorite purple and pink Izod shirt.  On the day that one of my snares caught and killed a pig, my title changed to forensic science assistant. At 17, the title made me important enough to drive the official national park F150, pick up the police forensics guy at Kilauea Military camp at 7 am, open the evacuation locks, trek him through the rain forest ...

  Author's Note: I'm not sure what the story will be. I ended my first independent writing time with the first two lines and perhaps an idea that I would be writing about the things I lost in the fire, or maybe things I gained from the fire.  After the daily conversation about the prompt with teachers talking about events like 9/11 and Columbine, it seems to be the beginning of  a connection with some national/international shared traumas and how that linked to my own life and also shifted at that moment how I choose to live life. I am letting this just reveal itself so any feedback is welcome as I try to see what sticks.  6/5/24 On the night Lahaina burned, August 8, 2023, Tuesday, I dreamt about my great grandfather's church burning as if I was somehow in the graveyard looking toward Lahainaluna Road only to wake up to the photo of the Waiola Church social hall burning. Not a dream, more like a portal that opened up, or my spirit traveling to say goodbye one last t...