Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 8, Number 4, 1 April 1991 — 10-year veteran trustee recalls upbringing [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

10-year veteran trustee recalls upbringing

"Pa'a ka waha. Hana me ka lima' — that's what they used to tell me all the time. It means shut your mouth and do the work. Don't ask any questions. Don't question anybody. That's what I was told," says Unele Tommy, Thomas Kaulukukui,

chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the only trustee who has served continuously since the first eleehon in 1980. "They told me all the time to go outside and play. This is when we lived in Kalihi. My mother and father spoke Hawaiian in the house, but never outside. When I grew up, being Hawaiian was not the thing to be, the way I see it. They always told us, 'Don't speak Hawaiian outside.' The Hawaiian language is not supposefl-to be spoken outside. And the hula was "obscene," then, you know? "My mother and father spoke Hawaiian when they were together and with us kids, but never outside." "I knew Hawaiian, but I went to UH and took Hawaiian there. Up there they called Hawaiian a foreign language. But I knew I could get an "A" and I did. "But that's what my parents said, 'Don't ask questions and don't speak Hawaiian outside." "My mother must have been through something . . . why would she tel! me these things? When I was

growing up, she didn't think I knew too mueh Hawaiian. They had a quilting bee and my mother's friends all eame to our parlor and they had this quilt . . . and they were talking Hawaiian and I was listening. They talk about why they're not supposed to speak Hawaiian outside, why the missionaries are telling them not to speak the language. I hearu anger among them. My mother would say "Go outside and play — get out." "Those things they were saying . . . it was underneath but nobody did anything about it then. They couldn't. They talked among themselves, but they didn't want to say anything more outside." Thomas Kaulukukui married a Chinese woman, a woman whose parents didn't want her to marry a Hawaiian, even though he was part Chinese himself . "Because I was a Hawaiian and Hawaiians were 'lazy'," he explains. In 1978, Thomas Kaulukukui retired as a U.S. Marshal and was asked to run for office as trustee of a new organization called the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Kaulukukui was born in 1917 while Lili'uokaiani was still alive. "lt didn't occur to me when I was growing up, but now I remember some of those things my parents said to me, and it registers to me why they were saying those things. They were talking about the situation they were facing. "What the people needed, what my mother needed, and my grandparents and all the people around the quilt . . . what they needed was a voice."

Kaulukukui