Hawaiian diaspora in Aotearoa: Andrea Low on Ahilapalapa Rand's exhibition at Pātaka
9 May 2024, Dr Andrea Low
This article first appeared in The Post, 8 May 2024
This article first appeared in The Post, 8 May 2024
Across the Sea explores connections to artist Ahilapalapa Rand's ancestral home of Hawai‘i. The title of the show is from a song by her great-grandfather, Earnest Ka‘ai, virtuoso musician and composer. Dr Andrea Low, Associate Curator, Contemporary World at Auckland Museum and Ahilapalapa’s whanau, backgrounds the show in this edited excerpt from her essay.
Arriving as sailors on whaling ships in the 1850s, Hawaiians in Aotearoa were referred to as Oahu or Wahu and settled at Papakōwhai. The reference comes from Elsdon Best’s articles, Porirua and They Who Settled it. The Taming of a Wild Land (1914). According to Best, some of the sailors married Ngāti Toa women and gave the place one of its former names, Oahu. Wahu is a colloquial connection to a past in Aotearoa but also conveys a sense of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi in diaspora, giving a name to our experience.
In 1919, the sheet music for Across the Sea was published by our kupuna Ernest Kaleihoku Kaai, but subsequent versions added Kaai protégés Johnny Noble and Ray Kinney as co-writers. The tune became a theme song for Kinney, who with his Aloha Serenaders was resident at the Lexington Ballroom in New York.
Kaona, a concealed or veiled meaning and a feature of Hawaiian poetics, appears in Across the Sea: “a million pearls let loose to roam” references Kaai’s recognition of the Hawaiian diaspora and out-migration to America. The seemingly sentimental lyrics mask his own disillusionment and despair with colonial forces and their impact on Hawai‘i nei.
When Kaai first visited Aotearoa in 1911, he led a promotional tour with a double quintette of singers and musicians, the Royal Hawaiians. One article, published in both the Hawaiian Gazette and Ke Aloha Aina, reported that when he and his troupe visited marae, they were able to converse easily in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i with ‘Lahui Maori’.
In the 1970s, Ahilapalapa’s Papa and Gam, the Lows, lived in Kawerau. There were a few Pacific families there, mostly related, who like the Low family had come from ‘the big smoke’, Auckland. Immigrants first to Aotearoa and then migrants to the mill town of Kawerau, we brought our plants with us. Down the back behind the garage there was a taro patch and banana plants. More important than fruit or tubers was their particular green, their leafy visibility, and the stories they conjured of remembered landscapes.
Pageantry banners, a feature of Ahilapalapa’s show, have a long history in Hawaiʻi. They are potent reminders of a monarchical government that stood for the independence and sovereignty of the Hawaiian kingdom – symbolic of a time before the coup d’état that overthrew the monarchy of Mō‘ī Wahine Lili‘uokalani in 1893. Settler colonisers “come to stay” and stay they did, eventually annexing the island in 1897 against political, peaceful, and coordinated opposition from the Hawaiian people. In 1959, America declared Hawaiʻi the 50th state, a status that is illegal and non-binding according to the United Nations (1999) and recognised in the apology by President Bill Clinton in 1993, the 100th anniversary of the overthrow. To put it bluntly: Hawaiʻi is illegally occupied by a foreign military power.
Activism and art have always gone together and in the turmoil of our contemporary world, with the aid of digital and social media distribution networks, popular forms of protest are multiplying and providing important means of resistance and assertions of Indigeneity. Ahilapalapa’s enunciation of our ancestor plants and their genealogies radically re-imagines our present/future/pasts. Indigenous knowledges are here to stay. Embedded in velvet, framed in gold, or sparkling blue on a mountain summit sky where you can see forever.
Dr Andrea Low
