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Pidgin as Rhetorical Sovereignty:
Articulating Indigenous and Minority
Rhetorical Practices with the Language
Politics of Place
Georganne Nordstrom
So there it is
THE QUESTION
The Answer to which will tell you
If I was one snob, one slut
one nerd, one geek
one lez
The question I don’t want to answer
The question that sets me apart
A violation of protocol
What kine local you, no like answer
—Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu
his excerpt, taken from Noelle Kahanu’s poem “The Question,”1 is written in
a hybrid of Standard English (SE) and Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE), more
commonly known in Hawai‘i as Pidgin (as it will be referred to throughout
this article). If unfamiliar with Pidgin, one might be inclined to read the
entire passage as being written in only SE (that is, “The Answer to which will tell
you”) and some form of slang or regional dialect; this might lead to a reading of the
poem as a resistance piece (which, as I will argue later in this essay, it is). However,
failing to recognize the Pidgin in the poem—as in the construction of “one nerd,
T
Georganne Nordstrom, NCTE member since 2010, is associate professor of English specializing in
composition and rhetoric at the University of Hawai‘i–Mãnoa, where she serves as director of composition
and rhetoric and directs the Writing Center. Her research interests include Indigenous and minority
rhetorics, composition and place-based pedagogy, writing center pedagogy, and empirical research. Her
work on Indigenous rhetoric has been published in CCC, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE,
and Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature of the Pacific, a multigenre anthology of which she is also coeditor. In 2012, along with coauthor Brandy Nãlani McDougall, she received the Braddock Award for the
article “Ma ka Hana ka ‘Ike (In the Work Is the Knowledge): Kaona as Rhetorical Action.”
College English, Volume 77, Number 4, March 2015
Copyright © 2015 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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one geek” and “what kine local you, no like answer”—or the implications of a Native
Hawaiian writing in Pidgin,2 as Kahanu is, elides a more complex reading in terms
of that resistance, a reading that takes into account rhetorical strategies that embody
particular experiences and ways of knowing. Although both languages used in the
poem are politically charged, this article focuses on Pidgin.
Pidgin is a marginalized language most commonly associated with “Local”3
culture in Hawai‘i—a culture that began taking shape during the plantation era
(beginning circa 1850). While scholarship on HCE or Pidgin has attended to factors
of ethnicity, culture, and language with respect to immigrant groups, the fact that
many Hawaiians adopted Pidgin when their own language, ‘o-lelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian),
was supplanted by SE as the language of instruction, commerce, and eventually most
social interactions has been less discussed, and consideration of Pidgin as an Indigenous linguistic resource remains underexamined. Tracing the language politics in
Hawai‘i illustrates exactly how Pidgin can be considered both a minority language—
the language identified with the settler Local culture—and an Indigenous linguistic
resource adapted as an act of what Ellen Cushman calls “cultural perseverance” (71).
Although there is an impressive body of poetry written in Pidgin by both Hawaiian authors and those who claim Local as an identity marker, often these works are
viewed collectively as falling under a singular umbrella of “works written in Pidgin,”
and there is no clear demarcation of the rhetorical implications of reading such
works as Indigenous versus minority texts. As Brandy Na-lani McDougall and I have
noted elsewhere, in terms of scholarship on Pidgin, this conflation “highlight[s] the
general lack of understanding of the complicated relationship between Hawaiians
and non-Hawaiians who reside in Hawai‘i” (100). I further posit that approaching
this body of work collectively as representing any unified cultural experience denies
opportunities to explore the rich cultural histories that are both connected and
distinct to the Indigenous people of Hawai‘i and the minority settlers who share
the Pidgin language.
Kahanu’s poem provides a perfect vehicle for analysis to articulate these differences. The poem is published in the third volume of ‘Oiwi, a journal dedicated to
“the revival of the rich literary heritage of the Indigenous people of the Hawaiian
archipelago”—all authors and artists featured in the journal, as well as the entire
editorial team, are Hawaiian (Oiwi). Through its mission, content, and production
process, the journal itself represents “rhetorical sovereignty,” a term coined by Scott
Richard Lyons, who articulates that for rhetorical sovereignty to be enacted, Indigenous people must be the determiners of the communicative modes and goals. As
an author who submitted her work to the journal for publication, Kahanu is actively
participating in and building upon the rhetorical sovereignty enacted by the journal.
Thus, her language use—English and Pidgin—when understood within the social
and political mission of the journal, are all clearly Native Hawaiian identity markers.
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Kahanu also employs a form of kaona, a Hawaiian rhetorical practice that “is deeply
cultural [. . .] an aesthetic appeal and, at the same time, part of a rhetorics of survivance that has been and continues to be employed by Hawaiians since Western contact
to assert rhetorical sovereignty” (McDougall and Nordstrom 100). Although she is
writing in Pidgin—which, depending on context, can be a representation of either a
minority or an Indigenous rhetorical practice—the venue of publication combined
with Kahanu’s incorporation of Hawaiian rhetorical strategies such as kaona, as well
as her own assertions of Native identity in the poem, position the text as an ideal site
to examine Indigenous and minority rhetorics as separate projects.
I could employ language politics and theories of Indigenous rhetoric as frames
within which to analyze Kahanu’s poem at a theoretical level to demonstrate this
point, but because a focus of this essay is to articulate rhetorical implications with
Hawaiian ways of knowing and experiences, I instead choose to honor the traditional
pedagogical approach embodied in the ‘o-lelo no‘eau (Hawaiian proverb) Ma ka hana
ka ‘ike (Knowledge is in the work), which represents the concept that praxis is the
key to learning. To move beyond my own interpretative assertions and better capture
some of the real-world implications of reading a poem like Kahanu’s as an example of
Indigenous rather than minority rhetoric, I will discuss how this analysis has played
out as part of place-based pedagogy in my first-year writing classes. In laying the
groundwork for a place-based pedagogy, Nedra Reynolds argues that theories of
writing, communication, and literacy should reflect a deep understanding of the ways
that places “are constructed and reproduced [. . .] by practices, structures of feelings,
and sedimented features of habitus” (2). Reynolds elaborates on the implications of
habitus on literacy practices, saying, “identities take root from particular sociogeographical intersections, reflecting where a person comes from and, to some extent,
directing where she is allowed to go. Geographical locations influence our habits,
speech patterns, style, and values” (11). Because language is a practice represented
and reproduced by place, examinations of language use provide an access point into
the dynamic interaction between place and writing, in that it is through language
that identities are constructed and meaning is made.
A pedagogical approach informed by Reynolds’s work necessarily incorporates
theoretical frames that account for the politics of a specific place—its social, historical, and cultural context. In this case, language politics in particular offers one
frame to understand how Kahanu’s use of Pidgin represents an ongoing practice of
cultural perseverance despite the fact that the colonial context in which she is writing has worked to undermine and silence Hawaiian voices. Cushman explains that
just as the idea of perseverance “acknowledges and accommodates change,” cultural
perseverance describes how Native people “enact part of their sovereignty” through
processes they identify as appropriate to represent themselves and determine “what
technologies allow for adaptation” (70). A discussion articulating Pidgin as a display of
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cultural perseverance will lay the groundwork for positioning a text written in Pidgin
by a Native Hawaiian, such as Kahanu’s poem, as an act of rhetorical sovereignty.
Finally, I will draw from classroom experiences teaching this poem to demonstrate
how locating rhetorical practices historically, socially, and politically can impact
students’ interactions and engagement by providing them with resources that affirm
and validate their identities and, at the same time, promote critical awareness of the
implications of the identities they perform.
Language Politics in Hawai‘i:
Pidgin as a Cultural Perseverance
Language and the ways in which it is used—the rhetorical practices employed by a
group—provide a window through which the meaning of the history and culture of
a people is understood and transmitted. As such, language and its rhetorical formations are always implicated in the politics that inform the social interactions of any
particular place for the simple reason that, as Roland Barthes famously noted in
Writing Degree Zero, “Language is never innocent” (16)—it both reproduces and is
reproduced by ideology. In a place like Hawai‘ i, examining language use in terms
of the ways it informs identity constructions necessitates accounting for several
linguistic groups—those who speak and identify with ‘ o-lelo Hawai‘ i, the Creole
(Pidgin), and, of course, Standard English—and recognizing that the rhetorical
strategies associated with each language, though distinct like its speakers, are often
intertextual. Further complicating this linguistic milieu is that the Native people
of Hawai‘ i were systematically denied access to their language in public domains,
and had to, as Ernest Stromberg has noted that other Native peoples have done in
similar situations, adopt new linguistic resources to make their voices heard (5–6).
In short, one would be remiss to read a text from Hawai‘ i only within a frame of a
Western rhetorical lens, even if that text is in a language that appears to be linguistically related to English. A brief history of the language politics in Hawai‘ i better
illustrates how and why Pidgin in particular is often misrepresented as being solely
a minority language and not an Indigenous linguistic resource.
‘ Olelo Hawai‘ i is the language of the Indigenous people of Hawai‘ i. Prior to
the arrival of the missionaries, Hawaiians enjoyed a complex social and governmental system, of which much is documented.4 Though the first evidence of a pidgin
in Hawai‘i appeared when sailors began frequenting the archipelago and needed to
buy supplies and trade with the Native Hawaiians, the Creole our Pidgin is named
for has its roots in the planation era.5 The common story told of the language’s
evolution goes something like this: when immigrants from a variety of countries
were brought to the islands to work the fields, the need to communicate among
these ethnic groups and with plantation owners resulted in the establishment of a
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pidgin, and when children were born on the plantations whose first language was
this pidgin, it evolved into a Creole. What gets overlooked is that few Hawaiians
worked on the plantations, yet early Pidgin not only incorporated a large number
of Hawaiian words, it also resembled Hawaiian in structure.
After the overthrow of the government in 1893 and the implementation of
the English Only law in the educational system in 1896, Standard English gained
dominance, and Pidgin speakers began to incorporate more English words into
their language use; however, prior to that, Pidgin speakers used many more Hawaiian words, which is still evident in the Pidgin spoken in Hawaiian communities
throughout the islands. Moreover, Pidgin’s syntactic structure deviates from SE in
significant ways and, according to ethnolinguist Larry Kimura, in both structure
and inflection Pidgin more closely resembles Hawaiian (199). Kimura also argues
that, specifically for Hawaiian children, Pidgin filled the language void left when
the English Only law functioned to effectively ban Hawaiian as the language of
instruction in schools; he notes that it became the “perfect tool for local children
to resist the campaign to force them to speak English,” especially when they faced
corporal punishment if caught speaking Hawaiian. Thus, because of its resemblance
to English, speaking Pidgin enabled the children to “comply with the campaign to
make English the language of the territory and still not truly cooperate with what
Hawaiians saw as a persecution of their own language, nor identify linguistically
with the haole group” (199; emphasis added).6 From this perspective, speaking Pidgin
for a Hawaiian embodies a noteworthy linguistic resourcefulness in efforts of both
survival and resistance in the face of the violence, including an agenda of linguicide,
that resulted in loss of nationhood.
Although this particular linguistic adaptation by Hawaiians might be notable in
that Hawaiians adopted a third language, closely related to their own, as a means to
legitimize and affirm identity, it is analogous to strategies other Indigenous peoples
have employed to assert cultural agency. In tracing Sequoyah’s development of the
Cherokee writing system, Cushman notes that his rejection of Western alphabetic
structure and other organizing principles is not indicative of a lack of English literacy, but rather an example of what she terms cultural perseverance, which she sees
as distinct from cultural preservation: “The term perseverance distinguishes ongoing
acts of maintaining peoplehood and is distinct from cultural or linguistic preservation. Perseverance acknowledges and accommodates change, while preservation
withdraws an object from its context to prevent its change” (70–71). Similar to the
way Pidgin has traditionally been represented through a bias of SE and, therefore,
seen as a reduced or broken form of the language, Sequoya’s syllabary “has always
been interpreted through an alphabetic bias,” which, as Cushman goes on to note,
“obscures the instrumental workings of this writing system but also forces its creation and maintenance into Western ideologies of noble, civilized Cherokees who
are brothers and sisters because they use a writing system” (68).
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Understanding Pidgin exclusively as evolving from SE casts its speakers within
the same patronized subject positions that Cushman describes as having been created
for the Cherokee—people who, if only civilized, would write and speak “proper”
English. This perspective supports Western ideology and its dominance, and works
to marginalize people whose culture and linguistic practices differ from those normed
in Western society; one result of this is that the discursive practices are seen as inferior—and definitely not innovative or subversive. In Hawai‘i, though some of the
details might be unique, the effects of privileging one language and its speakers over
another are not: Pidgin is commonly perceived as an inferiority marker both within
the school system and in the larger public, and the assumption that those who speak
Pidgin cannot succeed pervades the media, academia, and other social arenas. Attitudes toward Pidgin largely marginalize non-SE speakers, who have mostly been
people of color in the islands, including Hawaiians; such attitudes also perpetuate
social stratification (Nordstrom; Sato).
Within this political backdrop, and complicated by the many non-Native
settlers in the islands who speak Pidgin, much activism has focused on Pidgin’s
marginalization and on affirmation of it as the language of the Local culture that
evolved in the islands (Nordstrom; Tanouchi; Young, Morris, “Standard English”).
Like interpretations of Sequoya’s writing system, far less attention has been given
to examining the complex relation between Pidgin and the Indigenous language of
Hawai‘ i and the ways the language affirms Native identity. What I am positing here
is that both associations are valid—the Pidgin language can act as both a minority and
an Indigenous linguistic resource. Moreover, articulating the rhetorical implications
of each association is necessary to more fully capture the effects of American colonization in Hawai‘ i in terms of the positionalities of Hawaiians and minority settlers
and the relationships and exchanges between them. Too little scholarship, however,
addresses how the experiences associated with and represented by speaking Pidgin
differ for Native Hawaiians compared to those of other minority groups in Hawai‘ i.
Recasting speaking Pidgin as an act of Hawaiian cultural perseverance frames the
language as an assertion of Indigenous identity that is part of a cultural continuum
predating Western contact and continuing through the present. It creates space to
understand how Hawaiians have developed and adapted rhetorical strategies so as to
both survive and resist colonization—a project that has not lost its relevance. Cushman significantly notes that cultural perseverance embodies “continued traditional
practice and innovation with new tools across generations” (71). In this particular
case, such practices would include Hawaiian linguistic and rhetorical strategies
being adapted to the Pidgin language when the Hawaiian language was silenced.
Broadening the scope of Pidgin as a language associated with both the Native and
settler groups in Hawai‘ i challenges the limitations incumbent with responding to
perceptions of the language as an inferiority marker. Framing Pidgin solely as the
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language of a marginalized minority group can have the valuable result of legitimizing the language, its speakers, and their cultural identity. Reading the use of
Pidgin as a means to resist colonizing efforts that included linguicide, on the other
hand, captures a different picture of Hawaiians and their responses to colonialism.
Moreover, this latter approach facilitates reading texts written in Pidgin by Native
Hawaiians as examples of rhetorical sovereignty.
Pidgin
as
Rhetorical Sovereignty
As noted in the previous section, immigration labor on the plantations played a hand
in the evolution of Pidgin as a language, and plantation workers and their descendants
with strong ties to the islands often claim Local as an identity marker and Pidgin
as the language of that Local culture. When positioned solely as such, Pidgin is a
minority language, and texts written in Pidgin can be read rhetorically as resistance
texts that affirm identity and experiences tied to the islands, particularly in terms of
plantation era discrimination and oppression (Nordstrom). Local is thus often enacted
as an identity that claims a particular set of experiences, culture, and language, all
of which are bound to Hawai‘ i; however, that Local does not necessarily connote
Native (and vice versa) is entirely underdiscussed.
Because Hawaiians in the islands are almost always considered Local, Local
identity can subsume Hawaiian identity in mainstream discourse. This conflation
works conveniently in forwarding a colonial agenda because while it acknowledges
the marginalized minority settlers, it does not acknowledge the Native people who
actually have claims to sovereignty and the land. Not acknowledging the presence
of Indigenous people distinct from other minority groups allows the colonizer’s
continued occupation to go uninterrogated—if there were no legitimate sovereign
people in the land, no wrong would be committed in taking that land. Although there
are unquestionable overlaps between the situations that the Indigenous (Hawaiian)
and minority (settler Local) rhetorical practices respond to and promote, the differences are significant in terms of the counter(his)stories of these practices and the
corresponding effects in the current sociopolitical environment. For Locals, speaking Pidgin and having it validated affirms a culture and connection to the islands
that evolved following contact with colonization away from one’s native land; for
Hawaiians, although some of these same ends are achieved, speaking Pidgin is also
an act of resistance to attempts to annihilate a national culture and language in the
location of that ongoing struggle.
In his essay “Native Claims: Cultural Citizenship, Ethnic Expressions, and the
Rhetorics of ‘Hawaiianness,’” Morris Young discusses these competing positions,
highlighting the overlapping experiences and ramifications in terms of socioeconomic position:
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Both groups have had to deal with a history and legacy of U.S. imperialism and the
effects of economic, political, and social injustice, at times placing them in coalition
with each other to confront racism, and at other times placing them in conflict with
each other as U.S. racial and capitalist ideology reorganizes social relations into a
hierarchy of corporate elites, colonial-settler class, and indigenous subjects. (84)
Young further teases out this complicated relationship between the two positions
employing cultural citizenship and national citizenship as discursive stances with
different endgames: Young writes, “What we see in the case of Hawai‘i are Native
Hawaiians enacting cultural citizenship as a starting point for an imagined national
citizenship and non-Native Locals also seeking cultural citizenship as a way to
maintain a claim on Hawai‘i” (99). Claiming Local is thus problematic because, as
Candace Fujikane explains, it “confuse[s] indigenous struggles for nationhood with
settler struggles for equalities” (xx). For this reason, it is important to contextualize
Pidgin because, although it is a language spoken by both groups, it has different
rhetorical implications depending on who is doing the speaking.
Adopting the perspective that a text written in Pidgin by a Hawaiian is a Hawaiian
text has significant implications for the present specifically in terms of legitimating
Indigenous practices and, by extension, rights to sovereignty in public consciousness. Unfortunately, it is more common that when Native peoples communicate in
a non-Native language, their savvy rhetorical innovations and adaptations often go
unnoticed, and their texts are often read within a Western rhetorical frame. However, as Malea Powell has demonstrated in her reexamination of writings by Indian
intellectuals Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman, and as
McDougall and I have shown in our analysis of the writings of Queen Lili‘uokalani
and Hawaiian activist and scholar Haunani-Kay Trask, such readings elide the
complex rhetorical work Native writers are doing to assert agency and reclaim the
right to define themselves.
As this scholarship demonstrates, employing Indigenous rhetorical frames in the
analyses of texts produced by Indigenous people challenges dominant understandings
of the colonial enterprise because such reads often unearth glaring counternarratives
to common (hi)stories and thus bring attention to misrepresentations of people and
events—not just historical, but contemporary as well (Baca; Lyons; McDougall and
Nordstrom; Powell). However, in many places, like Hawai‘ i, dominant/minority
binaries have become part of the fabric of the settler colonial discourse, serving to
reproduce social stratification and, as Fujikane argues, more recently, to challenge
the dominant group in terms of social equality. What Fujikane and other scholars,
such as Jodi Byrd, draw attention to is that the construction of a minority presence
is always embedded within that of the dominant group—there could be no minority
if there were not a discursive majority, and this construction “often coerces struggles
for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with
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settler colonialism” (Byrd xvii). Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, have existed
and continue to exist regardless of, or perhaps more accurately, despite, a colonizing or dominant presence. Such binaries work to silence Indigenous narratives that
counter both the dominant Western discourse and the minority discourse, and “cloud
attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism that made the United
States possible as oppressor in the first place” (Byrd xvii).
Although the scholars mentioned have addressed the ways Indigenous rhetoric
can counter dominant Western narratives, here I am most interested in examining
the ways in which the Indigenous rhetoric project differs from that of minority
rhetoric. To use speaking or writing in Pidgin as an example, conducting a minority
rhetorical analysis potentially reproduces perceptions of Hawaiians solely as victims
of Western colonization and oppression, as a people whose native culture and traditions are confined to an ancient world, and who, when faced with disenfranchisement,
assimilated into the settler culture as exemplified by the adoption of Pidgin. In contrast, understanding Pidgin as a language Hawaiians adopted and adapted when they
were prohibited from using their Native language illustrates Hawaiian innovation
and resourcefulness in finding ways to resist and maintain linguistic and cultural autonomy through language use. The latter representation depicts Hawaiians as active
and politically engaged, despite efforts to silence them, and lays the groundwork for
understanding how, through speaking Pidgin, Hawaiians exert rhetorical sovereignty,
which Lyons explains as, “the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their
own communicative needs and desires in [the pursuit of sovereignty], to decide for
themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse” (449–50).
Returning to Kimura’s claim that many Hawaiian children began speaking
Pidgin to resist English Only mandates, and considering the perceptions of Pidgin
as an inferiority marker pervasive in the community, the persistence of speaking
Pidgin suggests a savvy understanding that doing so would likewise perpetuate
perceptions of speakers of Pidgin as inferior to the dominant group. These early
Hawaiian speakers used language strategically to resist in plain sight the language
forced upon them—they determined their own communicative needs in terms of
the modes, goals, and language of public discourse. Several contemporary Hawaiian
authors, like Noelle Kahanu, can be seen as continuing this resistance by insisting
on Pidgin despite their ability to speak SE.
Essential to acknowledging language use as an act of rhetorical sovereignty is
recognizing how, through that language use, an author is setting the terms of the
debate. In the next section, I examine Kahanu’s poem “The Question” within the
context of rhetorical sovereignty, focusing on language use as an Indigenous rhetorical strategy. I regularly teach this poem in my first-year writing course, and much of
what I discuss here is based on interactions in my classrooms. As mentioned earlier,
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the publication venue of the poem supports the claim of rhetorical sovereignty, but
I have also chosen this poem specifically because, in its relevancy to students’ lived
experiences, it works as a pedagogical partner to an Indigenous rhetorical analysis.
As Cushman, Powell, and Lyons all point to in their respective discussions of cultural
perseverance, rhetorics of survivance, and rhetorical sovereignty, I too suggest that
as teachers, we must actively engage and incorporate Indigenous rhetorics alongside
other rhetorical studies in our classrooms if we are to actualize moving toward more
inclusive representations of all our students in our classrooms and in public discourse.
Lyons calls on those of us at the “C&R Ranch” (458) to explore ways we can “play
a more meaningful role” (462) in this project and, to that end, offers the following
suggestions for incorporating Indigenous rhetoric into the composition classroom:
This work would continually examine one’s relationship to Indian sovereignty, as
well as expand our canons and current knowledge in ways that would hopefully make
them more relevant to and reflective of actual populations on this land. On that note,
I also think this site should be read and taught not in separation from other groups,
but alongside the histories, rhetorics, and struggles of African-Americans and other
“racial” or ethnic groups, women, sexual minorities, the disabled, and still others,
locating history and writing instruction in the powerful context of American rhetorical struggle. (464–65)
Although Lyons is specifically focusing on American Indian rhetoric, there are strong
parallels between Native Hawaiians and Native Americans, in terms of experiences
and representations (McDougall and Nordstrom). If what Lyons presents are received
as guidelines, then they need to be adapted to a specific located context to realize
the full benefit, and that demands an attention to place. Indigenous (and minority)
rhetorics are inherently bound to place, and likewise, a pedagogy incorporating them
should also be place based. In articulating the parameters of a place-based pedagogy,
Reynolds asserts that examining the geographic location where learning takes place
facilitates an understanding of the motivations and influences from both within
and outside the academy that inform students’ interactions in the classroom, which
implies the rhetorical nature of these influences. Moreover, because of the intricate
relationship between place and learning, taking location into account can have a
significant impact on the efficacy of a pedagogical approach. Reynolds points out
how acknowledging location as a significant variable in pedagogical approaches can
promote critical literacy in students: “Understanding the importance of lifeworlds is
one place to begin in understanding difference, otherness, and the politics of exclusion—topics that define the causes of critical literacy, social justice, and liberatory
education” (3). A place-based pedagogy can thus potentially create space for difference, give students the tools to recognize their own and others’ marginalization, and
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facilitate an understanding that marginalization is reproduced differently depending
on where it is happening.
To better illustrate this point, I offer the following example: in teaching about
racism and colonial expansion in the United States, learning about the historical
relationship between African Americans (as a non-Indigenous marginalized group)
and Native Americans (the Indigenous peoples) in the southern United States does
not translate to explaining the relationship between Native Hawaiians (the Indigenous
people) in Hawai‘i and the settlers who migrated to work on the plantations. There
are some parallels in that both situations involve Indigenous peoples, displaced and
disenfranchised, and laborers brought in to work the land who were forced to live
in horrific conditions. But there are more stark differences: immigrant settlers in
Hawai‘i, despite experiencing slave-like conditions, were not slaves, and one could
argue that African Americans have not realized the same kind of social and financial
mobility as quickly as some Asian settlers have experienced in Hawai‘i, particularly
those of Japanese descent.7
This example points to how accounting for location-specific interactions can
better capture students’ lived realities. Students in my classrooms seldom have points
of reference to understand the implications of slavery on current socioeconomic
conditions or how slave labor displaced Native peoples; however, most can relate
to plantation labor because many either are descendants of those laborers or know
people who are, and the majority of students, even those not from Hawai‘i, are at least
somewhat familiar with the political issues surrounding the displacement of Native
Hawaiians. Place-based pedagogy thus has a heightened likelihood to be successful
in terms of how it is received by students simply because the content is relevant to
students’ lives. Eric Ball and Alice Lai argue that incorporating “located” texts into
a critical pedagogy “help[s] to reprivilege place(s) in education through dialogical
creation of pedagogical focus that is meaningful enough to pique students’ interest
and to draw them toward increasingly critical considerations of the ‘common good’”
(282). Ball and Lai point out that accounting for location may be one way to counter
what is often perceived as students’ lack of interest, which is more likely an inability
to see the relevance between what they are learning in the classroom and the lives
they lead outside of the academy.
Merely incorporating located texts, however, is not enough—there needs to
be a critical approach to reading and teaching those texts that accentuates the social
dynamics that inform it. In short, bringing in texts or other cultural artifacts for
examination can arguably instigate a discussion of physical and ideological boundaries in the classroom, but such discussions are only fully realized when the specific
artifact is understood as a product of the politics of that place.
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The Poem
The Question
So there it is
THE QUESTION
The Answer to which will tell you
If I was one snob, one slut
one nerd, one geek
one lez
The question I don’t want to answer
The question that sets me apart
A violation of protocol
What kine local you, no like answer
THE QUESTION
The kine that went to “that school on
Diamond Head”
I say delicately, apologetically
Oh, you mean that girls’ school?
Yeah, the pink one
Oh
Oh
I know what that oh means
It means you thinking I was one snob, slut,
Geek, AND lez
What kine local girl even goes to a school like
that?
The kine girl that cried cuz she wanted to go
to Stevenson
The kine girl whose mom said “you are not
going to Kam school—your dad went there
and he only read on book! Black Beauty.”
The kine girl who loved Black Beauty
The kine girl that caught the bus with the only
two other local girls in school
The kine girl that walked up the hill, while her
classmates rode past her in their BMWs
The kine girl who had academic scholarship
The kine girl who got called into the principal’s office cause her mom was late in the
payments
The kine girl who got dropped off in an orange Datsun with holes in the muffler—the
kine car that announced your arrival to the
whole school, especially when you was late
The kine girl who, when she finally got one
car, drove up in her faux-wood panel
orange and brown Vega
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The kine girl who found solace in basketball
The kine girl who applied for mainland
schools even though she knew all along she
was goin’ UH cause never had money
The kine girl that hung out at Crane park, you
know, by Alex Drive-Inn
Went to school with haoles by day, and locals
by night
The kine that watched local boys fish for cats,
body slam them against cars, put fire crackers in bufos and watch them explode
The kine that when contribute her dollar
when they was trying for pool their money
for buy one six pack Bud, but not when
they was trying for buy paint
The kine girl that “went” with Jon, one Hawaiian-Chinese Kaimuki School dropout
And so, what about it?
That Question
That Stupid Question
It doesn’t tell you I almost when skitso
Living a double life
Going one expensive haole school
And buying groceries with food stamps
Pink stucco Italian mansion (Dillingham’s old
house, you know)
And one Nahaku Place duplex, with rats and
peeling paint
The neighbors selling acid, and having sex so
fricken loud you could hear every “oof”
Rolls Royces, and orange Vegas
Gastritis in 10th grade
My social studies teacher saw me 10 years
after high school
And told me I looked better, and younger,
then I ever did back then
So, you don’t know nothing about me
Never have, never will
Asking a stupid question like that
So what if I violate protocol?
That’s what happens when you live life
Suspended
Besides, that was almost twenty fucken years ago
So what if I was whatever you was thinking
I was?
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The first thing that strikes most student readers is that this poem is written in a hybrid
of Pidgin and Standard English—the author flows back and forth between the two. As
just discussed, for a work to be understood as an expression of rhetorical sovereignty,
it has to be read within the colonial context within which it was constructed, and the
native voice has to set “at least some of the terms of the debate” (Lyons 462). Kahanu
does this immediately by interweaving particularly sophisticated sentence constructions in both English and Pidgin. Though it is this language use that initially gets
students’ attention, Kahanu also asserts her Native voice in other, more subtle ways.
If Pidgin is the medium through which the message is conveyed and enriched, it is
her use of kaona (veiled and layered meaning) that shapes the form and content of
the poem. Indeed, the richest exchanges in the classroom occur in response to the
question referred to throughout the poem: “THE QUESTION / The Answer to
which will tell you”—but Kahanu never tells the reader what the question is, or the
answer. She does, however, give reference points—and I argue that it is this use of
these reference points to form a riddle that is an example of kaona.
Kaona is both a poetic and rhetorical device implying hidden meaning: “it
provides a vehicle through which Hawaiians complexify the aesthetic so as to make
rhetorical appeals” (McDougall and Nordstrom 101); and its use in poetic genres, such
as mele (songs) or poems, draws attention to the relationship between the aesthetic
and the rhetorical for Hawaiians. Kaona is a particularly appropriate device through
which to exploit this connection because, by its very nature, it demands creativity in
the construction of meaning. Hawaiian scholars have described kaona as multilayered,
employing a combination of metaphor, allusion, and pun (Kame‘eleihiwa; Kanahele;
Pukui). Kaona may also elicit different layers of meaning for different audience
members. For example, some audience members might recognize the most common
references and construct meaning through those, but there may also be audience
members who recognize more subtle references, and though the meaning constructed
doesn’t necessarily contradict the more obvious meaning, it can.8 Audience is thus
an essential component in the success of kaona in terms of meaning-making: the
rhetor, or poet in this case, must know and identify her audience, and the audience
must be willing to participate in the deciphering necessary to reveal the meaning(s)
(McDougall and Nordstrom 101).
In this sense, the unstated and unanswered question in Kahanu’s poem is an
example of kaona at work. Kahanu identifies her audience through language use and
references, which incite a kind of game, and students actively engage by positing
what they think the question is. Students from Hawai‘i, both Hawaiian and settler
Locals, have an advantage because the question is so pervasive here that they have
likely been asked it. In fact, the question is so common that in the 1998 anthology
Growing Up Local, editor Darryl Lum titled the introduction with this question, calling
it “Local Genealogy: What School You Went?” My purpose here is not to discuss
Lum’s essay, but rather to point out that many of us from ‘Hawai‘i are all too familiar
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with this question and how your answer to it establishes certain identity markers and
associations, whether accurate or not. And this is exactly Kahanu’s argument in the
poem. By alluding to “The Question,” but never actually writing what it is, she gives
students a riddle, and they play the game—and although Kahanu provides hints to
the school she attended (the answer), she never names it.
My students enjoy this guessing game and playfully participate in the intellectual
gymnastics while they try to determine which school it is. Frequently the exchange
plays out with one student making a random guess, which others dismiss by pointing
to lines in the poem that invalidate it, such as the color of the school or its location
on a hill. These discussions facilitate engagement with poetry—specifically close
readings of poetry—that my students find “fun,” a new experience for many of them
that pushes them to reassess the discomfort many of them express about working
with poetry. These exchanges also create space for discussion about stereotypes and
racial or social stratification in the islands—two subjects often glossed over in the
dominant discourse that presents Hawai‘i as an ethnic melting pot where everyone
gets along. While students from Hawai‘i bring knowledge to the table about how
identity constructions are formed and enacted in this place, these discussions help
students from the continent share analogous experiences informed by similar placebased practices.
Moreover, reading this poem as an example of Kahanu’s rhetorical sovereignty
facilitates particular focus on the impact of colonialism on Hawaiians, and how
that impact differs from its effect on other marginalized groups in the islands. In
addition, these interactions frequently expose the extent to which certain practices,
particularly linguistic ones, are privileged and devalued as well as tied to locations.
They provide opportunity to explore how and, perhaps more tentatively, why our
own identity performances change across locations. Such discussions emphasize the
complex relationship between place (and the history it represents), language use,
and identity construction; and although the discussions are not always comfortable,
they potentially facilitate students’ taking agency over their own knowledge as they
negotiate its import in making sense of the ways they interact both in and out of
the classroom.
Kahanu’s language use embodies and complexifies these connections between
language, place, and identity. As she switches back and forth between the two
languages, Kahanu performs what scholars such as Vershawn Ashanti Young have
identified as code-meshing. Code-meshing differs from code-switching in that codeswitching is usually situational: the speaker switches between languages depending
on the situation and context. For example, one might speak one language at home
and another at school. Code-meshing, on the other hand, is “metaphorical codeswitching [and] refers to using two languages in the same context to exploit the
context-meaning associated with each language” (Barrett 29). Suresh Canagarajah
offers the following to explain how the interaction between languages can be used
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by the speaker or writer to facilitate meaning: “code-meshing accommodates the
possibility that English and local languages may be combined in idiosyncratic ways
to benefit the speaker, context, and purpose. Speakers negotiate these contextual and
situational uses of English in order to co-construct meaning and intelligibility” (275).
Emphasizing the relationship between language and identity construction,
and the implication of using multiple languages, Meredith Love writes that codemeshing “elucidates the instability of Standard Written English and new possibilities
for identity construction,” and she goes on to say that “musicians, students, artists,
and writers use code-meshing to perform multiple identities” (186). In the case of
Kahanu’s poem, the use of Pidgin embodies very specific experiences, while the
SE represents others—the languages are thus juxtaposed to capture the extreme
disconnect between the situations they represent. Through code-meshing these two
languages, Kahanu engenders an identity she arguably could not if she were to rely
on only one language.
For example, in the first stanza, Kahanu juxtaposes “The question I don’t want
to answer,” a phrase syntactically aligned with SE, with “What kine local you, no like
answer,” a phrase that incorporates two common markers of Pidgin, the word kine and
the phrase “no like.” Looking at Kahanu’s use of Pidgin as well as SE, and reading that
use within the brief history and overview of scholarship discussed earlier, Pidgin can
be understood as a tool used to reaffirm Kahanu’s identity as a Hawaiian woman, and,
at the same time, to complicate that identity construction. She is refusing to position
herself solely in any predetermined identification scheme—Local (which too often is
translated as ignorant or educated) or American. As Rusty Barrett notes, “[W]e not
only use language to tell people things, but also to tell people who we are” (25). Using
only Pidgin would work to construct an identity that both privileges the speaker in
terms of the language’s connection to Hawai‘i’s Local community, but at the same
time, marks her as marginalized within the dominant Euro-American culture. On
the other hand, speaking only SE might suggest she believes that assimilating into
the Euro-American culture is the only way to achieve success, a message no doubt
reinforced at the school she attended. The speaker’s command over SE is evident in
several rather sophisticated syntactic structures such as “The Answer to which will
tell you,” and is unquestionably more associated with her private school education;
for many, this would be an indicator of success within the context of societal values
in Hawai‘i, where approximately 17 percent of school-aged children attend private
school because it is believed to be the sure way to move up the socioeconomic ladder.9 Through her use of Pidgin as well as SE, Kahanu is constructing an individual
identity—one that is much more complex than an either/or binary—she is setting
the terms of the debate by not conforming solely to one language.
Kahanu is not, however, creating some hybrid Local American identity through
this language use; rather, she is establishing her identity as a Hawaiian and asserting her right to use all the languages associated with Hawai‘i. In the second stanza,
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Kahanu adds several lines that indicate she is Hawaiian through a kaona reference
that might be recognizable only to those familiar with the politics and schooling in
the islands. She writes, “The kine girl whose mom said ‘you are not / going to Kam
school—your dad went there / and he only read one book! Black Beauty.’” “Kam
school” in this line refers to the Kamehameha Schools, funded by a charitable trust
established by one of the last monarchs of Hawai‘i, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop,
whose “endowment supports an educational system that serves thousands of Hawaiian learners in Hawai‘i and across the nation” (“About Kamehameha Schools”).
Kamehameha Schools has traditionally accepted almost entirely students of Hawaiian descent, so Kahanu’s mention that her father attended the prestigious school
establishes her own ethnic heritage. And in the following sentence, “The kine girl
who loved Black Beauty,” through her expression of fondness for the book her father
read while at the school for Hawaiian children, she asserts her desire to be part of
that community. Kahanu’s expressed affinity for Black Beauty here could also be
read as the author drawing a connection to the rich and revered Paniolo (Hawaiian
cowboy) tradition that began in the early 1800s on the island of Hawai‘i and still
thrives today. I posit there is a subtle and important message at play here as well: in
these two rather brief lines, Kahanu implies life would have been easier if she could
have attended Kamehameha School, where she could be herself, instead of “living a
double life” that comes with attending the school where she was actually enrolled.
In addition to establishing and problematizing complex identity associations,
Kahanu’s savvy use of Pidgin and SE also works to build a relationship with her
audience, in this case my students, which in turn works to push them to find places
and moments in the poem that resonate with them. She describes moving between
two worlds, a concept reinforced by juxtaposing the respective languages of each
community—the one her parents are sacrificing so much for her to be a part of, in
the hope of giving her great opportunity; and the one she finds comforting, her home
life. In general, this is a scenario that many students, not just students from Hawai‘i,
can understand. But some of the more specific references allow a particular group of
students to relate to her and the poem even more. Many Local students are familiar
with the geographic locations Kahanu weaves in, such as Crane Park and Nahaku
Place duplex, and know that these mark an economically depressed area.
Although students not from Hawai‘i might get the point that the poem’s speaker
moves between two socioeconomic realities, they might not recognize all that the
references capture. In Hawai‘i, for example, certain ethnic groups are associated
with specific locations on the islands, and specific ethnicities are often tied to socioeconomic class. When Kahanu calls the school “one haole school,” she draws
attention to these different class structures, which, as noted earlier, Morris Young
categorizes as a “hierarchy of corporate elites, colonial-settler class, and Indigenous
subjects” (“Native Claims” 84)—and associates ethnicities with each category.10 In
the classroom, students more familiar with the locations and social dynamics Kahanu
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mentions in the poem become cultural informants for those unfamiliar—they find
themselves in the unique situation of knowing more about a text and its references
than is often the case when reading literature produced elsewhere.
Possessing such knowledge and being in the position to share it empowers students and not only affects the way they approach other learning activities, but also
increases their engagement when other students share their knowledge. This also
creates opportunity to discuss the role we—my students and I—play in reproducing
the ideology tied to place(s). Language use alone invites students to express ideas
they have (or feel they are supposed to have) as well as connections to the language.
Students not from here frequently comment that they can’t understand anything
written in Pidgin—as if it were a foreign language. All these perspectives inform
the culture we share at that unique moment as co-learners. They also capture how
language and place inform the connections we make with each other in complicated
ways, and how sometimes those interactions can manifest negatively because of different ideological assumptions and positioning in our community.
Kahanu further complicates these linguistic and ethnic associations when she
refers to the particular implications for a Hawaiian student of attending the school.
She notes that the school, a “Pink stucco Italian mansion,” was once “Dillingham’s
old house.” By mentioning Dillingham’s name, a very common reference in the islands, she draws a connection between the school and the overthrow of the Hawaiian
Kingdom. Benjamin F. Dillingham, the Dillingham to whom Kahanu refers, came
to Hawai‘i from Cape Cod and built a fortune through his railway business, Oahu
Railway and Land Company. Dillingham was also one of the thirteen members of
the Committee of Safety, a group of white businessmen from the Missionary Party
in Hawai‘i, who in 1893 orchestrated the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Kahanu is not only an ethnically marginalized student attending a school with a
structural foundation (literally) built on a colonial agenda, but she is also a Hawaiian student in a location where fewer than 125 years ago, her ancestors thrived; the
poem’s speaker is attending a predominantly white school that was once the home
of a member of the group responsible for the hostile takeover of her country and of
her people’s sovereignty.
This example thus highlights another reference for which the rhetorical implication for the minority student in Hawai‘i differs from the implication for the Indigenous student. Reading this reference in the context of minority rhetoric casts the
poem as an illustration of the fragmentation that occurs when the dominant culture
marginalizes the minority culture, and the ways that process works to encourage
assimilation. Articulating this reference in an Indigenous rhetorical frame, however,
further complicates this read in that Kahanu is attending a school where not only do
the color of her skin, her Pidgin language use, and her socioeconomic status mark her
as inferior, but whose very halls housed a man who actively instigated the conditions
that marginalize her in her own homeland. These subtleties do not go unnoticed
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by my students, and I will often hear several of them mumbling things like “That’s
messed up,” or, even more tellingly, “I know what that’s like!”
Many of the references Kahanu makes can really only be understood by a certain
population of students, which again is an example of the multiple layers that kaona
works on. Of course, several of the descriptions incite laughter, which actually provides an avenue for students to talk about their own home lives because the poem has
created the possibility that not coming from a middle-class home is okay. Seeing a
description of a life that many of them can relate to—in all of its absurdities as well
as comforts—validates their own experiences and suggests that such experiences are
appropriate subjects for compositions. Students are often drawn to the line in the
poem that references bufo toads, and they will begin recanting their own various
encounters with bufo toads. Notably, in accord with the language used to talk about
the toads, these stories will mostly be told in Pidgin, and true to the scholarship that
speaks to students more adeptly formulating ideas and constructing arguments when
allowed to do so using their own languages (Graff; Tanouchi), these stories, and the
lessons they are meant to impart, are often cogent and rich in detail.
Through the rhetorical decisions discussed here, Kahanu is indeed setting the
terms of the debate—she has, to return to Lyons’s definition of rhetorical sovereignty, determined her own communicative needs and desires and articulated the
goals, modes, styles, and languages of this particular text to tell a very specific story,
her own way. Her voice (in all of its diversity) is indeed present, and it is the dominating force that constructs her identity. Using Kahanu’s poem in class helps my
students negotiate their own identities through the stories they tell while discussing
the poem. She is telling a story they recognize, which gives their stories validation.
In writing exercises following this assignment, which in my classes typically involve
using personal experience to illustrate a current news issue, I find the students seem
to take more chances with their writing, including poetry (sometimes they will call it
a rap) or their own versions of riddles. Most significantly, however, I see an increased
ability (or perhaps willingness) to represent abstract issues—such as low-income
housing, private-public education, or Genetically Modified Organisms—in concrete
ways that reflect their realities.
Conclusion
As pedagogues, most—if not all—of us seek to create ways to empower all our students
in our classrooms and our communities. We may already recognize the different
languages our students use and value them as part of students’ identity constructions. Despite the best of intentions, however, falling into a binary trap of dominant/
minority ideas about language use can lead to overly reductive representations of
students. Pidgin becomes a perfect site to explore the problematics of this kind of
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binary because the same language is used by two different marginalized identity
groups in Hawai‘i—the Indigenous peoples, or Native Hawaiians, and the minority
group, the settler Local community.
Tracing the evolution of Pidgin and uncovering how and why the language was
adopted by Hawaiians and the settler Locals offers an example of how a language
can be wielded rhetorically for different purposes, yet sound the same. For Pidgin
speakers in the settler Local community, claiming Pidgin often corresponds to
claiming an identity and corresponding experiences tied to the islands, a relationship
beginning with the plantation era. For Hawaiians, however, speaking Pidgin does
not represent a culture that evolved postcontact, but is better understood as a display
of cultural perseverance—a site of linguistic adaptation when their Native language
was silenced. Unfortunately, marginalized languages, such as Pidgin, are often perceived as representing a relatively homogenous minority group, with the speakers
collectively marked as inferior compared to members of the dominant group who
speak SE. The reductive binary groupings of minority/dominant work to obscure
how experiences differ for an Indigenous people compared to the minority group,
and assertions for social justice and equality by minorities too often overpower or
silence claims to sovereignty and land. The frequently applied binary of minority/
dominant does not capture the ways Indigenous people have and continue to respond
to colonialism, nor does it create space for students to explore the full complexity of
the identities they perform both in the classroom and in the community as members
of these different groups.
In terms of the work I discuss here, reading Kahanu’s poem as an example of Indigenous rhetoric showcases Kahanu’s rhetorical sovereignty through her ability to set
the parameters of the debate—she invokes an audience through her language choices
and located references. Moreover, in doing so, she counters Western representations
of Pidgin and its corresponding culture as being solely an inferiority marker, and as
such her poem is an example of the role language politics plays in meaning-making.
A text like Kahanu’s can be taught simply as a text written in Pidgin, with no special
attention paid to the fact that Kahanu is Hawaiian. Although such an approach will
likely evoke provocative discussions and heightened student engagement, it does
not accomplish the goal of valuing the unique struggles and histories our students
bring. Articulating Indigenous rhetoric with and against minority rhetoric, on the
other hand, can create space where students’ varied linguistic practices are recognized and provide a platform to explore what different subject positioning means in
terms of social and political issues that affect their lives outside of school. Teaching
Indigenous rhetoric as part of the stories we tell in our classrooms creates space for
all students to understand how our language represents who we are, and, in the case
of Pidgin, for Hawaiians, that means a rich heritage of linguistics traditions that has
adapted—and persevered.
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Acknowledgment
Mahalo nui to Noelle Kahanu, Brandy Na-lani McDougall, and Jolivette Mecenas for their invaluable
feedback as I worked on this project.
Notes
1. The poem is reprinted here with permission of author Noelle Kahanu.
2. I use “Hawaiian” and “Native Hawaiian” interchangeably throughout to refer to the Indigenous
people of Hawai‘i.
3. Many scholars, Fujikane being one, have argued for using the word Settler instead of Local to
better capture the complex and sometimes contentious relationship between immigrant settlers and the
Indigenous people. I agree with this argument; however, I have decided to use the term Local (and settler
Local) in this essay because it is the term Kahanu uses in the poem, and I believe the discussion works to
problematize the term in ways that align with the argument.
4. For detailed accounts of Hawaiian government and social structure and the implications of
the missionaries’ arrival, see Jonathon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio’s Dismembering La-hui and Lilikala
Kama‘eleihiwa’s Native Lands and Foreign Desires.
5. The Creole in Hawai‘i is commonly called Pidgin (with an uppercase “P”); a pidgin (lowercase
“p”) is usually the reduced form of one or more languages that evolves when two or more linguistic
groups interact.
6. Haole is commonly used to refer to Caucasian settlers in Hawai‘i, and it is often, but not always,
perceived derogatorily.
7. The majority of laborers brought in to work the plantations in Hawai‘i came from China, Japan,
Korea, and the Philippines (in that chronological order). Among these four groups, the Japanese have
realized the most upward mobility in terms of socioeconomic status.
8. See McDougall and Nordstrom’s discussion of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s use of kaona for an example
of this.
9. According to Pacific Business News (2010), 17 percent of primary- and secondary-age students
attend private school in Hawai‘i, among the highest percentage in the nation; the national average, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics (2009), is 11.3 percent.
10. Although, arguably, the corporate elite class has changed in terms of its ethnic diversity over
the years, Caucasians are still largely seen as part of that class.
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