Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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Of course, and they had their own mountain too.
Yes.
It’s interesting. Now, in those early years, and you know we’ve heard at times and we
don’t know if it’s fact or rumor or something else, that some sites or perhaps even burials
had been impacted when the road was cut. Did you ever
[shakes head , no]
You never heard of it
I never heard. At one point after I got out of office, I was involved in the League of
Women Voters. And I was disturbed because I didn’t like the fact that Sierra Club was
talking about the debris. I didn’t want debris either. At that point, I had organized a group,
the Mayor was Herbert Matayoshi. Because of my interest in Kuiper and Astronomy, and
I thought it was a clean industry, it was something good for Hawai‘i. I didn’t realize the
significance of the cultural thing at that time. To me, it was always, “We’re looking, we’re
voyaging up into space, finding out the beginning of our own beginnings and what not.”
So to me, that was always the emphasis of Astronomy. I can sympathize with the fact
that now we revived the Hawaiian language, we’ve discovered a lot of other things about
Hawaiian Culture that were not very well known in those days, and were kind of frowned
upon.
Yes.
Even Hawaiians didn’t…they didn’t have the same pride I think, that they have now. If
they were part-Hawaiian, they were also part-Portuguese and part-Japanese and that
was what had appealed to us, that everybody was all these mixtures which we were a
mixture. We didn’t know what our mixtures were, but we always felt that if people were
mixed up, they can learn to get along better. Now, it’s been interesting to me, to see how
this has evolved, because if anybody has the least bit of Hawaiian blood, now they’re
Hawaiian. They may have forgotten some of the other things.
Pride. You see that’s a very interesting point that you bring up too, because when you
came here in ’47 , it was still strongly under the Republican, and strongly being part-
Hawaiian was almost, they usually wouldn’t say, they were part-Hawaiian, if they could
get away with it.
That’s right. I can remember a local Bank Manager who had a wife who was part-
Hawaiian and it was well known that he was not at that time making progress, because
he was married to a part-Hawaiian. My daughter went to Ala‘ë School, a two teacher
school, and I know when I taught at Kona Waena, anybody who came from Ala‘ë, which
was… it was “they were dumb.”
Yes, kua‘äina.
I know, it was ridiculous.
So a very different time, you know. And one of the interesting things I guess is that we
know that things were still being practiced because there were people like the elder,
Aunty Edith Kanaka‘ole or George Na‘ope’s mother. Old Hawaiian people.
Yes, but they did it…
Privately
Among themselves.
That’s right, yes.
They weren’t, in fact, they had to because if it had been known that they were doing this,
it would have been frowned upon.
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:608