Reconsidering Ka wa ma mua

I am having a difficult time this morning writing about the relationship between Hawaiians and the ”past.” I am looking at Kawena Johnson’s wonderfully complex and beautiful translation of David Malo’s Kanikau for Ka’ahumanu[1], and It occurs to me that the designation, “ka wa kahiko” rather than being a fixed and agreed upon chunk of historical time was something constructed----motivated by different politics of history and power, at different times in the past and, well, let’s face it-------even in the present.

It dawned on me (irritated me?) that when I heard people speak in hushed reverential tones about “ka wa kahiko,” many of them meant the time of Kamehameha I, or sometimes they meant, the mid-nineteenth century. Sometimes a graduate student would use “I ka wa kahiko,” and they would mean, “y’know, when David Malo was alive.” I would redirect and ask them to consider this, “do you mean a decade before the American Civil War?” (Malo died in 1853!) Today in 2013, students probably think “ka wa kahiko” was like the late 60s, like, you know, when I was born? Nonetheless, we should reconsider how we interpret the uses of these terms, “i ka wa kahiko” or “i ka wa ma mua,” and “i ka wa ma hope.”

At the writing of Ka Mooolelo Hawaii at Lahainaluna in 1838, Hawaiians students were asked to go out and find aged people in the community, or knowledgeable ali’i and ask them questions about “ka wa kahiko,” or “ka wa ma mua.” The object of the class was to gather knowledge from those who were eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses to the past.

But this introduction to Christianity began much earlier for people who were retainers and advisers of ali’i like Davida Malo, who was exposed to these teachings from the time the missionaries arrived in 1820. Consider that Malo was placed with the Rev. William Richards by the chiefs to serve as his instructor in Hawaiian language----translating the bible with Richards and a Tahitian missionary named Tau’a introduced Malo to these distinctions in a deep, visceral way. In other words, a straight through the na’au process that began with his own highly sensitively trained ears----that had been prepared through training in kahuna knowledge, genealogy, chant, prayer and dance.

Malo and the other students at Lahainaluna were being introduced to the idea that the aged people who lived among them might have knowledge of “ka wa kahiko,” or the “time before,” but what meanings did that “wa” take on during their lifetime when the new introduced religion, Christianity was teaching them that the distinction between “ka wa ma mua” and their own time, was the “arrival of Christianity?” These time demarcations also carried with them moral weight, since, Christianity also introduced the teaching that ka wa ma mua was a time of ignorance----or na’aupo, when Hawaiian forbearers believed in false gods to whom they sacrificed human beings. The “wa ma mua” which Hawaiians formerly associated with the wise speeches and practices of the ancestors, and which identified darkness as “the source of deep, ancestral knowledge,”(Kumulipo) was being reseeded with meanings and associations of a foreign origin.

Conditioning Hawaiians through sermons, church and prayer meetings, newspaper articles, formal education and via chiefly speeches and decress, to link their ancestral past with “na’aupo,” ignorance, meant also placing a stamp of doubt on all manner of practices: from those that elicited strong foreign reaction: infanticide, sex outside the bonds of marriage, promiscuity, hula, Hawaiian medicinal practice, nakedness----to the seemingly banal: kite flying, eating poi from a common bowl, the playing of Hawaiian games, the wearing of lei.

In locating itself as the mid-way point between ka wa ma mua and ka wa ma hope, Christianity placed itself savior like in the midst of the Hawaiian people----ka wa ma hope became the starting point not only for the American mission, but also “keia wa hou,” the new time of Christianity, of new, correct ways of living in the world, and a new redemption promising new life for the soul after death in God’s kingdom.

Today, when we use “ka wa kahiko,” we might also mean the time before Christianity, but the valences have changed to meet support the politics of identity and the now. The new moral weight of “ka wa kahiko” has shifted to mean an authentic pure time, free from colonialism or imperialism, free from outside “influence,” (All of the terms Hawaiian History has been freighted with by a Euro-American historiography illiterate in ‘olelo Hawai’i.)

Perhaps it is the wa-----the time to reconsider what our kupuna meant when they employed these terms: ka wa ma mua, ka wa ma hope, ka wa kahiko. I’m positive that they did not mean, that knowledge or practice which was “authentically Hawaiian,” I am sure they did not mean to say that the past was a fixed point of purity that never was altered or changed or transformed. I am sure we can find out what they meant, if only we read aloud their words and listen to their voices yet again.

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[1]  He Kanikau no Kaahumanu was reprinted in Hawaiian language newspapers a number of times and was an exemplar of an older genre of kanikau for ali’i. Ka Lama Hawaii, August 8, 1834. Ke Kumu Hawaii, October 28, 1835.; Ka Hae Hawaii, April 27, 1857