There is nothing special about his looks or dress. He is short, wiry, and
grey-haired -- considerably younger than my image of a 75-year-old, but
still unremarkable. He wears boots, blue jeans, a black "Eia Hawai‘i"
t-shirt, bifocals, and a beat-up green hat. You wouldn’t give him a second
glance at Ala Moana Center, Pali Longs, or the Kokokahi YWCA workshop where
I first get to know him. Luckily, though, I am prepared from the start to
pay attention. My sister has already traveled with him to Aotearoa with
the UH Mānoa Hawaiian language club. My father knows a lot about him
from listening to Hawaiian language radio broadcasts of "Ka Leo Hawai‘i."
To them he is already a legend. They tell me that ‘Anakala Eddie Ka‘anana
grew up in Milolil‘i where he learned and mastered the practices
of fishing and taro farming from his grandparents, and where he was raised
speaking ka ‘ōlelo makuahine, the mother tongue, of this land.
They tell me that no one living today is closer to being Hawaiian than
he is. "He is in his 70s, and he was raised by grandparents in their 80s,"
my father says, "so he is a direct link to people four and five generations
older than you are. If you want to know what your great-great-grandfather
was like, he’s probably right there in ‘Anakala Eddie."
Except for students in the Hawaiian language immersion schools, most
kids don’t have a clue about ‘Anakala, and my bet is that even in
schools like Ānuenue, hardly anyone has had a chance to spend three
uninterrupted, 24/7 weeks with him. When I first found out that I had
been selected as a member of the Hawai‘i Delegation to the 8th Festival
of Pacific Arts in New Caledonia, I was truly honored. But what really
got me excited was when I found out who would be the piko, the center,
of our delegation and one of our two cherished elders, our hulu kūpuna:
that would be Eddie Ka‘anana.
In order to take full advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
I hung around him whenever I could -- at airports, on planes and buses,
at meals, meetings, and rehearsals, on dormitory steps and hallways, at
Apia, Sydney, Noumea, Poindimie, and Auckland. Originally, I had hoped
to get a handful of stories and impressions down in my journal as extra-special
memories of the trip. What I ended up with was 22 pages of first-hand
‘Anakala Eddie narrative -- something far more valuable than I ever
imagined.
If I learned anything from my weeks with ‘Anakala, it is the absolute
truth of traditional Hawaiian "indirection." He almost never tells anything
important straight out. He offers his thoughts in usually round-about
stories that start far away and only gradually work their way to his point.
If you ask what he thinks about Jean-Claude Tjibaou’s statement that we
indigenous peoples can’t afford to be chained to tradition, ‘Anakala
Eddie will begin by explaining that he has no diplomas or advanced schooling,
that his teachers were his grandparents and his school was the ocean,
and he will end by telling you -- quite a bit later -- that we must remember
the now almost-lost distinction between hele and naue. Both
mean "go," but the second carries no connotations of "going" to one’s
death. The message, if you can attend to his kaona, his hidden meaning,
is that without the "chains of tradition," we’d all be sending each other
to our graves. ‘Anakala, I have learned, requires patience and attention
of a kind that we Westernized, mouse-clicking, channel-surfing Hawaiians
are poorly prepared to offer. What he offers, I have learned, is well
worth the effort. He offers an education in being more Hawaiian that can
only be accessed by . . . being more Hawaiian.
October 17, 2000 -- Honolulu and Sydney
‘Anakala Eddie describes the contents of his little red cooler
as his pono lawai‘a -- his fishing necessities. He is worried about
passing through Customs at Sydney because of the ‘ala‘ala
o ka he‘e preparation. This process begins with drying (kaula‘i)
the squid’s ink sack, cooking it over a fire, adding something else to
it (nanahu?), then wrapping it in lā‘ī and freezing it
for later use. He uses this as maunu for baiting small hooks (also of
his own making) to catch the small-mouthed fish like manini, maiko, and
kole that aren’t normally taken by pole-fishers.
‘Anakala says that most modern fishermen scoff at his concoction:
"Those fish will bite when the elephants grow feathers and fly away."
But he learned this technique from his kūpuna, and it definitely
works. The maunu, he says, is important on the Miloli‘i coast where
the traditional fishermen of those villages maintained ‘opelu schools
in the open ocean. They would make vegetable-food chum (pala‘ai;
‘ai, not ‘i‘o -- vegetables, not meat) for the fish and feed
them regularly so that they’d stay in the area and be easy to locate and
catch. Meat or blood bait was forbidden because it attracted the predator
fish -- including sharks, ulua, barracuda, and marlin -- that could wipe-out
or scare off the ‘opelu schools. This bloodless vegetable-bait custom
was also practiced near shore with reef fish; hence ‘Anakala Eddie’s recipe
for ‘ala‘ala o ka he‘e.
‘Anakala Eddie says that Paige Barber wanted him to give his maunu
demonstration at Windward Mall during our Pacific Festival of Arts hō‘ike,
but ‘Anakala said that he felt very uncomfortable teaching about the sea
in a shopping-center environment. He’d much rather teach it at the kahakai
where he learned it and where he practices it. So he didn’t teach at the
mall, but when Paige Barber called the next morning, they arranged a teaching
and video session with the kids and teachers of Ānuenue School. They
didn’t all go to the beach, but they did go outside where he felt right.
I notice that ‘Anakala Eddie is very practical and organized: he
packed his pono lawai‘a in a single cooler, called the airlines
to see if they’d accept it (they said okay in Honolulu, but they couldn’t
guarantee approval when we stopped in Sydney), and brought a young man,
Kawika, to the airport to take the maunu back home if the Honolulu desk
of Air New Zealand changed its mind.
‘Anakala Eddie is now sitting comfortably in the lobby of our Sydney
hotel. Dad joins him and asks, "Pehea ‘Anakala, ua āpono ‘ia
ka ‘ala‘ala o ka he‘e?" He gives Dad a big smile and
nods. "Since I couldn’t bring the lei ‘awapuhi (that Uncle Kaha‘i
Topolinski gave him in Honolulu) into Australia, I gave it to the customs
officer before I checked through. After that, it was smooth sailing. I
explained that my pahu kula (cooler) contained my pono lawai‘a:
my net, my hooks, my line, my tools, and my other supplies. ‘A‘ole
au i ha‘i, ‘o kēia ka ink sack of the octupus. He ha‘i
wale nō. I just told them in general, and they let me through me
ka wehe ‘ole i ka pahu kula. Without opening the cooler."
October 19, 2000 -- Brighton Beach and Darling Harbor, Sydney
We gather in the hotel lobby to review our part in the greeting ceremony
that will take place when we arrive in Noumea, New Caledonia. Uncle Kalani
Akana (the head of our delegation) describes the greeting sequence and
exchange of gifts. He explains that we have been asked to refrain from
giving tobacco as part of our ho‘okupu -- although it has long been
an important item in Kanak welcoming ceremonies, the Festival committee
requests that visiting delegations refrain from promoting the evils of
nicotine. This makes sense . . . until ‘Anakala Eddie offers his thoughts
at the end of our meeting.
First ‘Anakala Eddie asks the other kūpuna in the group, particularly
Kupuna Kauahipaula, if he may speak for them. He explains that he is always
thinking of asking the kūpuna first -- not only the kūpuna who
are "visible," but those he carries with him, especially the grandparents
who raised him. He explains, too, that he doesn’t try to figure everything
out in advance. He waits until the time comes, and then these kūpuna
help him to know what to do or say. When he is asked to travel with cultural
exchange groups like ours, he always thinks, "Why come?" If it is just
to look around and niele here and there, then there is no reason for coming.
He must have a good reason. He agreed to come on this trip because of
the importance of representing his kūpuna and sharing what they taught
him. This is one of those times.
Now ‘Anakala moves to his tobacco point. He explains that the hā,
or breath, is the first thing we do in this world: we hā mua. His
mother’s mother grew paka, tobacco, and she would tell him the story of
a lady -- sometimes pretty, sometimes old -- who would come and ask for
paka. His grandmother told him, "When she comes again, you must share.
It is Tūtū Pele." For his grandparents who raised him, "‘O
ka paka ka mea nui." Tobacco was the important thing. It was not smoked
all the time; rather, it was carefully grown, dried over a cooking fire,
prepared, and smoked at special times -- when you needed to think quietly,
to relax and reflect on important matters. It is a way to focus on our
hā. Even Tūtū Pele found value in paka.
His recommendation, very subtly made, is that we give tobacco at the
welcoming ceremony. Who were we to deny this gift to our hosts, especially
if they have the same feelings about paka and hā? "I am not an educated
man. All I know I learned from the small fishing village of Miloli‘i.
I had an opportunity to go to Kamehameha School, but my kūpuna asked
me, ‘Na wai e mālama iā māua?’ Who will take care of us?"
So he stayed home to care for them. And as a result, he sees and understands
with eyes that even Kamehameha could not have given him.
I notice that ‘Anakala Eddie is always alert, on time, attentive,
and ready to share thoughts and jokes with those who are willing to listen.
On afternoon break, we wander through the Victoria Station area of Sydney
where he and Dad try their hand at ordering Australian coffee. He gets
a "short black" -- because it sounds interesting. Dad, for the same reason,
orders a "flat white." Dad’s turns out to be "palatable," but ‘Anakala
is served some thick, syrupy stuff in a tiny cup. ‘Anakala jokes
that it looks like it belongs in a child’s tea set. We get a big laugh
out of this, and "short black" becomes part of ‘Anakala’s growing
story of our trip to Nū Kaletoni.
Dad asks ‘Anakala Eddie if he’s been to Australia before, in his
wā kelamoku (sailor days). He says that when he was in the Navy,
he sailed all over the Pacific, from Alaska to Australia (but he never
came ashore here); he was even on the Yangtze River in China. Later, as
a crewman on a US government research vessel, he again sailed all over
the Pacific -- but still without setting foot in Australia.
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