Sharks in the Time of Saviors

by Kawai Strong Washburn

If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can’t avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and pasts that become gods and

nightmares that do, as well. As I age I learn that there are more gods than I’ll ever know, and yet I have to watch for all of them, or else they can use me or I can lose them without even realizing it. Take money: my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, Kānaka Maoli that she was, had no use for paper printed with the silhouette of some faraway haole man. It gave nothing. What was needed was food from the earth, housing from the earth, medicine from the earth, a sense of one’s place in the system. What was provided and what had to be cultivated. But ships from far ports carried a new god in their bellies, a god who blew a breath of weeping blisters and fevers that torched whole generations, a god whose fingers were shaped like rifles and whose voice sounded like treaties waiting to be broken. And money

was the name of that god, and it was the sort of god that preyed on you, made demands and laid its hands on you with such force as to make the Old Testament piss its pants. We were made, eventually, to pray to it, whether we wanted to or not. Your father and I still pray to it now. Take language. ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was not written, only passed from one mouth to the next, less letters than the English that soon roared over it, and yet it contained more mana of Hawai‘i than anything that foreign tongue could twist itself into. What do you do when pono, a healing word, a power word—a word that is emotion...

(righteousness, morality, prosperity, excellence, assets, carefulness, resources, fortune, necessity, hope, and on and on)—is outlawed? When our language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, was outlawed, so our gods went, so prayers went, so ideas went, so the island went. Take you, my son. You are not a god, but there is something that moves through you that may be one. Does it revive what came before, or build something new? I can’t say. But when you returned from Portland with a broken hope I did my best to help. It’s hard to guide what you can’t feel, and there are so many days in this modern Hawai‘i in which I don’t feel anything. But when you are near, there is something, just ...

And so I encouraged you to visit the valley, it’s true. I trusted in what you were feeling, and that to follow that feeling would hopefully bring forth that which was inside you. See that? Hope can b...