Wednesday, October 17, 2007

From a Native Daughter

What really stuck to me about Haunani-Kay Trask’s essay was in her last two pages. She tells of real experiences of her land and her people, which are also stories that have been passed from generation to generation. How the story of her and her people is misunderstood. Trask asks the question of whether people seeking to learn more about the history and ancestry of Hawaii want to learn it from the ancestors or from the haole (whites).

Trask makes a valid point. Who knows the history of Hawaii better than its own people? And if one truly wants to learn the history, that is who they should learn it from, not from someone who knows only part of it. She also mentions that a person studying the French culture will learn all that they possibly can about it, including the language; which the Western historians fail to do when studying the native life of Hawaii.

It makes more sense to learn about a culture from someone who either lives or has lived in that particular culture. I wouldn’t ask one someone from Europe to tell me all about the history of Korea, I would ask someone who is a native Korean, born and raised there.

How is it right for someone to write about a culture that they claim to know a lot about when they cannot truly know the life and experiences that it brings?

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