Hawaiian poet, environmentalist publishes activist’s scrapbook

Maui poet and environmental advocate Dana Naone Hall has won a 2018 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for “Life of the Land: Articulations of a Native Writer.” Beautifully realized by Barbara Pope Book Design as a sort of activist’s scrapbook, it collects poems and photographs plus more than 30 years of statements filed to oppose the granting of permits for development or commercial uses of significant natural, cultural and historic sites.

Hall’s activist career took off in 1984 with the successful fight to save Old Makena Road, which contains an ancient path and provides public shoreline access that a proposed hotel expansion would have blocked. She also helped protect iwi kupuna in the sand dunes of Honokahua, a battle that led to the relocation of The Ritz-Carlton hotel on Maui and better preservation of burial sites statewide.

Testimonies, however, are heavy reading without a narrative weaving together these strands. Stories and connection are what engage readers, and happily, Hall’s poems and personal reminiscences resonate with the deep love for the islands’ natural resources, people and heritage that placed her on this path.

Speaking to the Kiwanis Club, she interweaves her Kaneohe childhood and loving ohana with her shock at the destruction of rural places. In the poem “Crossing the Pali” she recalls “where it rained rivers of red dirt in the winter/ from all the new-cut hillsides./ There’s still the suggestion/ of old streams and lo‘i/ under the sunken lawns.”

What remains brings hope. While she laments poverty and homelessness among Native Hawaiians, Hall rejoices that “we’re still here/ like the fragrant white koki‘o/ blooming on the long branch … like the moon high over Ha‘iku/ lighting the way home.” Healthy coral reefs are “a symbol of the po‘e, the people of Hawai‘i, who, like the coral, thrive when they are not overrun.”

Hall invokes the metaphor of an old road to convey the importance of tradition to Hawaiian culture: “Sometimes the past is made visible, as in the presence of the old road, and our use of the road is a way of preserving a link to an older part of ourselves and keeping open a way of being in the future.” Yet elsewhere, in a jarring misstep, she writes of “Little Black Sambo” as one of her childhood favorites while failing to note its cultural insult to African-Americans. A classic memoir narrative, informed by a contemporary perspective, could have transformed this uneven, sometimes stirring, collection into a transcendently inspiring work.

“LIFE OF THE LAND: ARTICULATIONS OF A NATIVE WRITER”

Dana Naone Hall (‘Ai Pohaku Press, $26)