Tuesday Sept 29, 2009

This is Funding and Grant Application Season for HBMF. Much of the programming is dictated by the books that are published in Hawaii and about Hawaii between May 2009 and next summer, and I’ll be discussing these as we go along. But right now I’m preoccupied with defining a couple of particular HBMF programs, in a way that will persuade the funding agencies to give us what we need to make them happen.

HBMF has from the outset made a strong commitment to Hawaiian culture and language, and we have been fortunate in having the support of OHA. Hawaiian music dominates our Main Stage music program. In addition to the Hawaiian pavilion that presents a series of panels keyed to books and issues, we’re hoping to add a second venue dedicated to chant, mele, and hula as classic Hawaiian forms of storytelling. However, this time we plan to start giving a more deliberate focus to our over-all presentation of Hawaiian culture.

This turn in our thinking came about because I was looking for a book on the Hawaiian Renaissance, and couldn’t recall any. I Googled, and found that the last coherent major statement on the Hawaiian Renaissance appears to have been by George Kanahele in 1979—a generation ago. In fact it would be difficult for any one person to write about it authoritatively, and I say that with feeling, because I happen to be involved in a meticulous revision and update of George Kanahele’s Hawai‘i Music And Musicians, by John Berger, authorized by George Kanahele himself not long before he died. It’s encyclopedic, and it will be invaluable. It has required extremely careful and very sensitive reviews.

So any one person to take on the whole Hawaiian Renaissance would have to be a saint with a very thick skin. The only way to do it would be in an anthology, or indeed, an encyclopedia.

Then it occurred to me that the program we present at HBMF is a kind of living anthology, and this thought led naturally to conceiving our program as a continual update of the Hawaiian Renaissance. In other words, our program would be dedicated to presenting the best of classic Hawaiian culture along with the best and most thriving Hawaiian culture today. And the point would not be to try and cover all the bases each year, but to focus particularly on developments that seem to promise the most fruitful evolution, even as we respect the historic basis of the culture.

For example, right now, because the immersion schools are now producing young scholars able to read and research in Hawaiian, and because of the opening up of access to Hoʻolaupaʻi, the huge archive of virtually unexplored Hawaiian-language newspapers, exciting new perspectives and a whole new outline of 19^thCentury Hawaiian history is rapidly emerging. This, for instance, has radically reshaped the discussion of the Annexation, is giving rise to new published history, and has given completely new meaning to the whole enterprise of astonishing Hawaiian literacy in the 19^th century. So for the next Festival we’re planning a particularly strong focus on the results of the newspaper project.

Academics, those in formal Hawaiian studies, those groups invested in Hawaiian history, and certain publishers committed to Hawaianna are surely aware of these developments. But I suspect that Hawaiian community, the Hawaii community at large, and those Visitors who come looking for our host culture, would welcome being brought up to speed at our annual festival.

I should say immediately that wherever possible in HBMF programming we try to have the authors and panelists take ownership of their subjects, to define the subjects for themselves. That’s where the authentic energy is. We only ask that they acknowledge that their general audience may know very little about their subject, and that we want to create as much interaction as possible, not only between speakers and audience, but also among the presenters themselves.

For Hawaiian culture I am lucky to have excellent advice from numerous Hawaiian kumu, and I am delighted to follow their lead.

Now, if we could only get it funded…

Tags: Add new tag, Annexation, George Kanahele, Hawaii Book and Music Festival, Hawaii Music and Musicians, Hawaiian culture, Hawaiian literacy, Hawaiian pavilion, Hawaiian Renaissance, HBMF 2010, Hoʻolaupaʻi, John Berger, Main Stage Music, OHA

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