Hawaiian Rhetoric

          In Brandy Nalani McDougall and Georganne Nordstrom’s article, Ma Ka Hana ‘ Ike (In the Work is the Knowledge): Kaona as a Rhetorical Action, I found many of their points interesting. Honestly, I have no background knowledge of Hawaiian writing so this article gave me a completely new range of texts and vocabulary words (i.e. Kaona) to think about. The piece that I found interesting and wanted to look into more was the colonization of the islands and the influence of the missionaries. I went to this website http://www.hawaiihistory.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ig.page&PageID=277

to determine the religion of and where the missionaries came from. I discovered that the large majority of the missionaries were Protestant led by Reverend Hiram Bingham. The groups of missionaries came from New England in the early 1800s and were funded by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. I think that the settlers/missionary role is important because they are considered “the other” to the Native Hawaiians and, therefore the rhetoric is altered because of their presence.

            McDougall and Nordstrom have interesting assertions about how there are “complicated relationship between Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians who reside in Hawai‘I” (100) and this complication started a long time ago. The rhetorical device Kaona was incorporated in order to keep this separation and the Natives were privy to many allusions, metaphors and puns that were involved in writing or speaking because of their cultural and traditional background. Lilikala- K. Kame‘eleihiwa writes that “there are always several layers of kaona in any good example of Hawaiian prose: there is the literal meaning; references to the ancient through myths, events, gods, and chiefs; the intertextual use of chants and proverbs; and finally, another possible layer known only to the raconteur and one or two special members of the audience . . . while everyone else remains oblivious to the message”(101). This use of  “everyone else” demonstrates how kaona was a rhetorical device used by many Hawaiian Natives and how they purposefully wanted to exclude some audience members (non-natives) from the actual message/s.

            The example of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography re-enforced the idea of multiple messages and purposeful targeting when she was determined to write to the United States in order to free her from house arrest and to leave the monarchy of Hawaii alone. However, Mcdougall and Nordstrom suggest “it is more than likely that the queen used her autobiography as a means to deliver messages to her people, specifically by employing kaona” (105) through the reference to Pele that assumed traditional knowledge from Native Hawaiians but seemed to be admiring Christian beliefs on the surface. The use of multiple meanings and intricate rhetorical devices asserts how intellectually advanced many of the Native Hawaiian people were in their writings, proving stereotypes “of Hawaiians as lazy, illiterate, criminal, and incapable of self-governance” (113) completely wrong.