Planetary Pono: Walter and the Long Yellow Cloud (#12)
“We don’t construct the world, but the world discloses itself to us based on our angle of vision.” — Jens Zimmermann 10 Things you Should Know about Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is the idea of having a lens through which one makes sense of things: texts, stories, conversations, reality. Climate change, nature, the environment. According to the Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, environmental hermeneutics begins from “the recognition that the interpretations of the places in which we live in turn provide an ongoing and ever-changing narrative context from which we can understand ourselves.” And also, vice versa. Humans and their places are thus in a hermeneutic circle where the part informs the whole and the whole informs the part.
Moʻolelo is a Hawaiian word meaning story, but Manulani Aluli Meyer offers a deeper interpretation, continuity. In Hawai’i, the mo’olelo of a place is the collective knowledge of history, geography, weather, ethics, language, philosophy. It is a foundation of indigenous education.
Mo’olelo is the original interdisciplinarity!
This week as part of the Teaching Climate Change Study, I interviewed Walter (a pseudonym), a recent PhD in Education and sometimes-lecturer at the University of the Pacific (also a pseudonym). Walter is Native Hawaiian (and also Chinese), fluent in several languages including Mandarin, Japanese, and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. I interviewed him via Zoom where he turned off his virtual background after a while, when he said he felt comfortable enough to reveal his outdoor garage office. He dove right in to our conversation with some of his dissertation writing and translations, which were kind of mind-blowing. His passion is Indigenous philosophy, aloha ‘āina, place-based knowledge, and story. He said:
We have carried moʻolelo in our cognitive backpack for generations, not only because they were entertaining but they were also informative, and wise. I like to say that our kupuna carry moʻolelo like a Jedi carries a light saber — you can pull it out and use it to protect yourself and inform yourself and fight for yourself at any given moment. These moʻolelo are that powerful.
Place-based learning (PBE) is a best practice in climate education, but talking with Walter, I came to a new understanding of how a very specific environment informs the ike, or knowledge, and how that wisdom, in turn, maintains the life of the place. “Hawaiʻi requires a different set of rules to thrive,” said Walter. “Even teaching and how you teach and what is even taught requires a different set of rules. it’s different here than somewhere else. Not to say that America’s [continental] system isn’t valuable…perhaps that’s what they need to know in Boston, but here that’s not we need to know. And to be okay with that….Like, over on Molokai they need to know the fish there, but here we don’t need to know that, we need to know the fish here.”
So, how do you view climate change, from this perspective? I asked.
“The term ‘climate change’ is a very kanaka-centric perspective,” Walter began. He explained that, in a Hawaiian way of seeing, there is always a balance between person-centric concerns and considerations of people, at an individual and collective level, as well as the land and the god(s), or the spirit of nature. “Not like an ‘oom-shaka-laka’ god (as Kalei Nuʻuhiwa would say) but as in natural phenomena, the natural patterns which sustain life beyond our control.”)
To understand Indigenous decision-making based on moʻolelo, you need to be in relationship to all three: akua, then the ʻāina which feeds and sustains you, and then kanaka, or people. “What we have now with climate change is a whole bunch of kanaka-centric decisions that have broken the pono. ʻĀina and akua are making up for that pono by raising the ocean, by bringing the hurricanes, by bringing the Covids, to reestablish pono, because kanaka have not been making the right decisions.”
To illustrate this, he used a moʻolelo, The Legend of Keaomelemele, who was called “the golden cloud”. This story, told orally for generations, was first written in Hawaiian by Moses Manu in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, the longest running Hawaiian newspaper. The story was serialized, with 31 weekly installments from September of 1884 to June 1885 (Keaomelemele, trans. Mary Kawena Pukui, p. vii). It’s a story with many characters and places, but primarily focused on how the valley of Nuʻuanu on the island of Oʻahu was formed.
When Keaomelemele and her fellow hula dancers were dancing and chanting for five days in an exhibition, “Oahu began to tremble as if with an earthquake and the sea offshore began to roar. The sky was overcast witih clouds and mist covered the mountains and valleys….After the fifth day, the quaking of the island grew more severe ….. Like the sound of thunder crackling in the air and reverberating to the earth, so was the violent wrenching of the mountain as it was torn in two as we see it today.” While a fuller analysis exceeds both my skill and the scope of this blog, this is the main plot line.
What was interesting to me is the way that Walter, conversationally, referred to Keaomelemele’s “drop the mic speech that she leaves at the end.” He screenshot the Nupepa from which he was reading for me, and then translated on the fly:
“… she tells them okay you guys live here in aloha and in olu olu,happily and, so, happily and with aloha, take care of each other, attend to each other, if one person is talking listen to them and look at our kupuna akua… She’s saying, “look and watch those natural phenomena and take care of them, recognize your relationship to them for as long as you live on these islands. and if you don’t, I will reappear….”
Here is the formal translation by Mary Kawena Pukui:
“You shall always see me at night and day as a cloud up in this sky, in my form of a yellow cloud. Therefore, remain here in love and contentment, watching out for each other. When one speaks, let the other heed, mind our godly ancestors, for you are all dwelling on these islands….If anything should cause discontent among you, come yourself to tell me…If the guilt be found, I shall impose the punishment on the person who did not heed my words. Therefore, do not forget your gods and our parents. Farewell.” p. 175
That is the story of how Keaomelemele became a goddess for readers of signs and omens. Walter described her appearance as the “long yellow cloud — and that long yellow cloud is what happens before a storm hits. She’s all, hey I’m going back in the heavens now but you’ll see me on the horizon and if you don’t do these things, if you don’t pay attention to our kupuna akua then I’m going to come back and hoʻopaʻi you, to lick you.”
The yellow cloud of Keaomelemele appears in the way the sky shifts, and the light becomes yellow, as before a hurricane. “What she does is flush the system, she does the storms to redirect streams, clean up the hewa and to put it back out into the ocean.”
So when I say to Walter, the sea level is rising, what are the people going to do? The way he sees the situation is, if people made the problem, then the ʻāina and akua have to find the pono.
“It’s not planetary destruction, it’s planetary pono,” he said.
To restore that balance, or pono, humans need to pay attention to the signs in a specific place. One set of federal rules, even an ambitious global plan like the Sustainable Development Goals, is not going to work without specific attention to localized conditions.
“What I’m also going to do [about climate change] is try and find the pono within this place and try and find ways that have the least negative impact on ʻāina, and least negatively impact akua, becauase ʻāina and akua do things that least negatively impact me.”
It’s up to all of us to be cognizant of each other to find the pono between us.
I can hear some of my higher ed colleagues thinking, “come on now, that is superstitious and fatalistic, bordering on nihilism.” But this is a place-informed worldview, a hermeneutic circle in which the person who is understanding the moʻolelo becomes part of the place, even influencing the conditions of the place though the reality they are holding. There is no contradiction with Western science whatsoever — this story is about observation of the climate, and ways human behavior can impact the climate. And if we look at a more scientifically oriented climate lesson, say, Earth’s Energy Balance, that is also a story, and it is also about pono.
There is value in having multiple lenses through which to view this planetary disruption. Yet, according to the National Education Statics Center, 75% of college faculty in the U.S. are Caucasian, and likely possessed of a Western worldview. At University of the Pacific (a pseudonym), the faculty is more diverse, about 50% nonwhite, but that nonwhite category includes “everything else”, and less than 5% of tenured faculty are ethnically Hawaiian. In Hawaiʻi.
The system of higher education reproduces itself through Ph.D. programs. But there is a clash of practices here. As anyone whose gone on the market with a Ph.D. will attest, most universities do not hire their own Ph.D.s into faculty positions. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which are good, like avoiding “inbreeding” of ideas. But, it seems like these policies conflict with what I will believe is a genuine desire to diversify the faculty.
Shortly after my interview with Walter, his summer class, which would have focused on Indigenous history of education, was cancelled. Walter jokingly, yet painfully, refers to himself as “Dr. Drive Thru” for the jobs he feels his doctoral degree qualifies him for. Even though his degree and expertise could cover many subjects, it feels to him like “the Indigenous boy can only teach the Indigenous class.” To really shift the hermenutics of higher education, and widen our approaches to teaching climate change, we need Hawaiian faculty (and other BIPOC scholars, as appropriate to different places) teaching things like math, or biology, or communications, education, chemistry, botany, history, art…and climate change.
“When one speaks, let the other heed,” advised Keaomelemele…
