Hula

by Jasmin Iolani Hakes

One percent Black, you Black. One percent Hawaiian, nah, you nothing. When the U.S. government is making the rules, there is only one guaranteed winner.

By the year 2044, it’s said, there won’t be a single full-blooded Hawaiian left. That’s a lot of blood lost. Not lost, gone. If we were a seal or a whale, there’d be a worldwide effort to save our species. They wouldn’t be able to touch us. If we swam up to the beach they’d put cones around to protect us.

America to the rescue, it says. Cue the superhero symphony music. Special government-created programs. Not for all Hawaiians, but certainly for full Hawaiians, half Hawaiians, according to the definition in the dictionary they wrote. Pretty soon none of us will qualify to be ourselves. They’ll say there’s none left, and yet we’re all still here.

With knowledge comes the burden of responsibility. We were never revolutionaries. Only accidental activists. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. Once you see the crime, closing your eyes to it makes it yours.

Laka finally realized what we had known always. There’s no running away on an island. Soon enough, you end up where you started.

Everyone was equal on the freeway, everyone the same. Traffic didn’t care how much your car cost or who was driving or where you were going, or if you had anywhere to go at all.

Our veins run deep, our song louder than their noise. Roots too deep to extract. That’s the thing about hula. Burn your books, rewrite your history, build walls, plant flags. Hula is written within the swirls of our feet. It’s our umbilical cord, our pulse. Our battle cry, our death rattle, our moment of conception. The chants are archived in the stars. Hula is the heat rising from within our volcanoes. It is the pull of the tides, the beat of the surf against our cliffs. It is our hair, our teeth, our bones. Our DNA. You can steal a kingdom, but the kingdom will never belong to you.