Defiant Indigeneity by Stephanie Nohelani Teves

Author:Stephanie Nohelani Teves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

CHAPTER FOUR

The Afterlife of Princess Ka‘iulani

You’ve looked into those eyes, what did you see reflected? Beauty? Youth? Joy? Sorrow? Hidden promise? Is she a mirror for your mind? A looking glass of all your romantic feelings and fantasies about these islands in a time gone by? Well, she was real, and she was more than that to me. My grandmother remembers her funeral. She remembers the long, slow process. She remembers the hundreds of faces. She remembers the horses’ hooves that pulled her casket all wrapped up so that they made no sound. She remembers the silence, the silence of the dying hope. I see my people in her death. Cut off by things that came across the sea. In 42 years, half of our race was gone. Someone wrote in 1822 in a journal, “there is hardly a day goes by we do not hear the wails of death from the village of Honolulu.” Death from introduced disease, death from ships, death from sailors, death from white men. Now we are a minority in our own homeland. There is talk today of reparations to the Hawaiian people. Reparations for our stolen land, our stolen kingdom. But you can’t ever really repay us. Imagine all those people dying, hear the wails of death every day for thousands of my people. Stamp it in your mind like it’s stamped in mine. And every time you see her picture, remember it. They may give us money, they may give us land, they may give us “educational opportunities,” but they will never be able to replace what was killed: our people, our race, our Ka‘iulani.

—Excerpt from the play Ka‘iulani (1987) by DENNIS CARROLL, VICTORIA KNEUBUHL, ROBERT NELSON, RYAN PAGE

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