Missed Kauai at pageant
I just saw the Miss Hawaii Scholarship Pageant on TV.
I looked and looked for a Miss Kauai representative. I didn’t recognize any Maui or Kauai names. Out of the 17 contestants, at least three seemed to be from the Big Island. All the rest were Oahu names.
Just checking. We used to be represented. Are none of our local charities willing to be involved? What about our Miss Kauai Filipina? The Miss America organization must be one of the oldest in the nation.
Helena Cooney, Kapaa
Come together as a common tribe
Peering into outer space is well enough. At what point, though, do we spend as much time and energy looking into inner space?
Gov. Ige granting extra police powers to arrest Hawaiian elders at Mauna Kea in defense of their culture is both atrocious and shameful. We often point our fingers at China and Russia for the authoritarian nature of their governments, yet fail to look in a mirror to see our national reality.
A two-minute visit to anyone’s backyard garden should convince anyone of the diversity of nature, let alone a walk in the woods or a short dive beneath the sea. Racism is a spiritual disease, the foundation of genocide, and a crime against creation and the creator. My friend kuma hula Puna Dawson once told me that the meaning of the word “Hawaii” is “those who share in the breath and the water.” This, then, includes all people, as well as the plant and the animal kingdoms as well.
I sincerely hope that Gov. Ige, the scientists and the various nations that wish to build this telescope would all start acting like Hawaiians that we all are and put a moratorium on building it until a proper parley with the kupuna of the land.
I look forward to the time when the nations and cultures of this world start treating each other as ohana and recognize all good-hearted and good-acting people as our common tribe, and above all the lifting of the daily and humiliating oppression of the kanaka people in their homeland, certainly one of the best-loved cultures of this world.
This entire garden planet and every individual life and our time spent here is sacred, and isn’t it about time that we start acting like it?
Kelly Ball, Sebastopol, Calif.
Source: The Garden Island