Our Voices, Our Histories

Asian American and Pacific Islander Women

Shirley Hune, Gail M. Nomura

• Editorial: NYU Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479840014
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Gender Studies

An innovative anthology showcasing Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women's and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories.

Part I

Early Era, Indigenous and Global Roots

Part I emphasizes the early era of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s diverse histories in a broad sweep, from creation cosmology to the late twentieth century for Native Hawaiians and from the 1500s to pre–World War II for Asian Americans. Integrating indigenous approaches and the dimensions of globalism and transnationalism, exclusion, empire, colonialism, and gender and intersectionality, three chapters reconsider how, when, where, and why Asian American and Pacific Islander women become part of the history of what is now the United States. The authors bring early women out of the shadows by featuring noteworthy Native Hawaiian and Asian American women as historical agents of change. Class as an intersectional element also helps to explain women’s disparities in opportunity, treatment by US society, and access to resources.

We begin with Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, who examines the roles and agency of Native Hawaiian women historically from the creative and reproductive female forces of nature to high chiefesses and national leaders to family matriarchs, educators, and healers. These powerful and enduring female ancestors provide cultural guidance to heal and nurture families, communities, and nation, and they are sources to draw upon for meeting current and future struggles in everyday life. Utilizing the multigenerational wisdom and experience of the ancestors, contemporary Native Hawaiian women leaders are empowered to redress a history of colonialism and homeland destruction and to address disparities, such as income, education, and health.

Global and immigration historians like Erika Lee are reassessing early Asian emigration, especially under empire, and providing a new history of their pre-nineteenth-century lives in the Americas. Lee discusses how the “roots” of early women’s migration from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and South Asia were shaped by colonialism from the mid-1500s to 1815. Vignettes of individual women of variable class backgrounds document their gendered emigration patterns, their work and family lives, and state officials’ and others’ treatment of them as determined by ideologies of women’s subordination and as dependents in their homelands and the United States. They also confirm the women’s agency in challenging adverse conditions and discriminatory laws and practices so that they could play a significant role in helping to build early Asian American families and communities before World War II.

Masako Iino’s chapter discusses the transnational lives of two sisters from Japan’s elite. Ume Tsuda was one of a number of Asian women who came to the United States in the nineteenth century for education. She arrived in 1871 at the age of six, earned a degree from Bryn Mawr College, and chose to return to Japan to found Tsuda College for women in 1900. Her younger sister, Yona Abiko, immigrated to San Francisco and became a leader in the Japanese American community. Both sisters developed a network of American women friends who supported their efforts to empower women through education. Their remarkable lives among the educated US elite expand understandings of the intersections of race, gender, class, religion, friendships, and individual will in advancing women’s aspirations.

These three chapters underscore that early Native Hawaiian and Asian American women were more diverse in background, circumstances, and access to resources, networks, and opportunities than has generally been appreciated, yet they were actively engaged in similar efforts to determine their lives. Hence, their futures varied. Their distinct histories allow us to focus more attention on indigenous and transnational experiences, intersectionality, Hawaiʻi, region, class, and cultural knowledge as influences on the women’s ability to exercise their agency and forge new paths and identities in the early era.

1

Mālamalama

Reconnecting as Native Hawaiian Women through Cultural History

Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor

Reflection

Kohemālamalama O Kanaloa—the shining birth canal of Kanaloa—is one of the original names of the island, that, by my generation of Native Hawaiians, had come to be known as Kahoʻolawe.1 The island was bombed and used for military training exercises from December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, until a vibrant Native Hawaiian movement that started in 1976 succeeded in stopping the bombing on October 22, 1990. As a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, I engaged my students with the movement—circulating petitions, setting up informational tables, organizing teach-ins—but I had only reached the shores of the island in 1983. Impressed by her stark beauty, despite gaping erosive wounds, I had joined the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana (hereafter ʻOhana) to stop the military assaults and to work to heal and restore her landscape and resources.2

The ʻOhana delved deep into Kahoʻolawe moʻolelo (historic stories), chants, and place-names. Through kūpuna (elders), we learned her original names and sacred nature as a manifestation of Kanaloa, Hawaiian god of the ocean. It was a center for the training of navigators in the arts of wayfinding. As we rededicated cultural sites under the guidance of Aunty Edith Kanakaʻole and the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation, we revived Hawaiian spiritual beliefs, customs, and practices, and these spread throughout Hawaiʻi. We began to observe the natural phenomena that our ancestors experienced at these cultural sites and realized that they had been constructed to mark the passage of time with the daily and seasonal movement of the sun and the monthly cycles of the moon. In 2014, as the ʻOhana planned for the island’s future, we reached the collective insight that the island actually serves as a portal through which we reconnect with our ancestors; their wisdom, experience, science, and beliefs; and the natural life forces that they honored as deities. In an “ah-ha!” moment, as we searched for the translation of “portal” into Hawaiian, came the insight that the deepest meaning of the name, Kohemālamalama O Kanaloa, is that of the ultimate portal, the passage from the realm of creation into the realm of the living. Our ancestors, too, had experienced the island as a sacred portal.

Figure 1.1. Aunty Edith Kanaka‘ole, distinguished kumu hula of Hālau O Kekuhi, and the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation guided the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana in the revival of Native Hawaiian religious practices on Kanaloa Kahoʻolawe, which has spread throughout the islands of Hawaiʻi. Photograph © Franco Salmoiraghi.

I share this story as an example of an indigenous approach to problem-solving and planning—upon recognizing a problem, an injustice, a challenge, start to intentionally research cultural histories—Hawaiian sources and practices—to derive alternative insights, narratives, approaches, and strategies. These provide excellent models for planning actions.

This chapter shares the vital role and agency of Native Hawaiian women throughout history as an inspiration and resource for dealing with contemporary problems. It opens by acknowledging the challenges that Native Hawaiian women face in 2018, which is reflected in the health and well-being of Native Hawaiian women compared to non-Hawaiian women in the islands. It then examines the central and powerful role of women historically in Hawaiian cosmology, traditional Hawaiian society, and in the nineteenth century, where royal women challenged American imperialism and used their own resources to provide for our people in perpetuity. Next, the chapter explores trends in the livelihoods and living conditions in the twentieth century and women who distinguished themselves as perpetuators of Native Hawaiian beliefs, customs, and practices despite the colonization of Hawaiʻi as a US territory. Finally, I discuss the ways in which Native Hawaiian women find inspiration, agency, and insights from our historic deities, chiefesses, and leaders in taking up the challenges facing Native Hawaiian women today.

Disparities

Hawai‘i is an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean with eight major islands. Native Hawaiians sustained a healthy self-sufficient social and governance system until contact with the West in 1778. Foreign diseases, a capitalist plantation system, Western settlers, and Asian immigrant contract labor caused the population to collapse and the sociopolitical and economic dislocation of Native Hawaiians. At 21 percent of the population in 2010, Native Hawaiians are a minority within the homeland.

In May 2018, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs published a report, “Haumea: Transforming the Health of Native Hawaiian Women and Empowering Wāhine Well-Being,” which provided statistics on disparities faced by Native Hawaiian women, or wāhine.3 The report notes that economically, wāhine aged twenty-five and older hold 14.3 percent fewer postsecondary degrees than the statewide average.4 In 2016, the mean earnings for wāhine was $44,620, or $5, 967 less than non-Hawaiian females.5 In the 2010 US Census, wāhine comprised 43.7 percent of the women’s prison population.6

With regard to mental health, from 2012 to 2016, nearly one in five wāhine (19.3 percent) considered their mental health “not good” for one to six days of the month.7 In the same period, more Native Hawaiian females in public high schools (24.1 percent) seriously considered attempting suicide compared to non-Hawaiian females (18.7 percent).8 In health issues, between 2009 and 2013, wāhine had the highest incidence (17.4 percent) of and mortality (13.4 percent) from breast cancer among women in Hawaiʻi.9 Between 2012 and 2016, wāhine also had higher rates of chronic disease in comparison with non-Hawaiian females in Hawaiʻi: 11.2 percent versus 8.5 percent for type 2 diabetes; 37.7 percent versus 17.6 percent for obesity; 3.4 percent versus 2.1 percent for heart attack; and 3.7 percent versus 2.8 percent for stroke.10 Stark disparities exist in birth statistics, as a ten-year aggregate shows 45 percent of the extremely preterm births in Hawaiʻi occur with Native Hawaiian mothers,11 and Native Hawaiians have the highest rates of infant mortality in Hawaiʻi, 2.3 times higher than Caucasians.12

Similar to the planning approach suggested in this chapter, the report invokes the female deity Haumea (also known as Papa) and customary Native Hawaiian approaches, sources for inspiration, and methods to empower wāhine to improve our health.

Inspiration

Hawaiian moʻolelo demonstrate that women hold powerful positions, play vital roles, and are central to the documentation and transmission of knowledge through the generations. In traditional moʻolelo, Native Hawaiians acknowledge the creative and reproductive female forces of nature as being powerful and vital in and of themselves and in complement with male forces of nature. For example, Papanuihanaumoku (Great Papa who gives birth to islands, or Papa) embodies the female elements and processes from which life evolves in the Hawaiian Islands through her relationship with the male procreative element, Wākea, the deity of the sky. According to Pualani Kanakaʻole Kanahele, Hawaiian ancestors also identified Papa as the organizer of scientific observation and documentation.13 In her analysis of the Kumulipo, a chant documenting the origin and evolution of life in the Hawaiian islands, Kanahele explains that the thirteenth wā, or era, of the chant describes how Papa organized scientific observations and knowledge into three schools of science—Papahulilani, Papahulihonua, and Papahanaumoku.

Papahulilani is the school of knowledge about natural elements that exist in the atmosphere, the sky, and the broad universe—corresponding to meteorology, atmospheric sciences, and astronomy. Papahulihonua is the science of the earth corresponding to geology, geography, oceanography, and other earth and ocean sciences. Papahanaumoku is the science of reproduction and life process of all living beings and organisms, from humans and animals to insects and microbes, and corresponds to medical ...