Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 30, Number 9, 1 September 2013 — REVIEW Book showcases voices of Kalaupapa residents [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

REVIEW Book showcases voices of Kalaupapa residents

ByTreenaShapiro When Anwei Skinsnes Law visited Kalaupapa for the first time at age 16, she couldn't know that the Moloka'i eommunity would heeome so central to her life's work. But Law has spent more than 40 years since researching leprosy in Hawai'i, chronicling its history on film and in writing. She also advocates for those affected by leprosy as the international coordinator for the New York-based nonprofit IDEA - the International Association for Integration, Dignity and Eeonomie Advancement. In 2012, Law published Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory, a lieh volume that pieces together the history of the community through archival records, first-person accounts, photographs and oral history interviews with some of the 8,000 individuals exiled to Moloka'i's Kalauapa Pennisula between 1866 and 1969 because they were believed to have leprosy. Her book earned praise at the 2013 Ka Palapala Po'okela Awards. Besides winning the top prize, the Samuel M. Kamakau Award for Hawai'i Book of the Year, it also tied for excellence in Hawaiian language, culture and history and won honorable mention for nonfiction. The book includes excerpts of letters from Kalaupapa's earliest inhabitants - some translated from Hawaiian - with the words of individuals who might otherwise be lost from history printed alongside the words of more prominent members of the community, such as Saint Damien of Moloka'i and Saint Marianne Cope. Law deftly weaves the source material into a memoir that is

clearly w r i t - ^ ten in the voices of Kalaupapa's residents - a ehoiee she made deliberately because she feels that

until now they had been left out of their own history. "I think the people of Kalaupapa have been defined by others," the author said in a phone interview from New York. "It's important for people to define themselves and who they are in their own words." This is the third book Law has publishedon Kalaupapa. Herearlier work includes FatherDamien: "A Bit ofTaro, a Pieee of Fish, anelA Glass ofWater," published with her husband, Henry Law, the first superintendent of Kalaupapa National Historical Park. Asked why she's dedicated so many years to that remote peninsula, Law says, "I've gone back and forth, too, but the easy answer is the people of Kalaupapa."

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Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory By Anwei Skinsnes Law 600 pages. University of Hawai'i Press. $28.99. Published with suport from the Native Hawaiian Center of Excellence at the John A. Burns School of Medicine.

SEE LAW ON PAGE 23

Anwei Skinsnes Law's "Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory" earned the Hawai'i book of the year award at the 2013 Ka Palapala Po'okela Awards. - Courtesy: ^

CarolAbe

LAW Continued from page 22

During her many visits, Law met many of Kalaupapa's residents and she began recording their oral histories in the 1980s. "People were so aenerous and kind. You

had a feeling like you were going back in time," she describes. "It always struck me that people who had virtually everything taken from them had so mueh kindness for others." "They were always reaching out to others, doing things for other people, even though they were in Kalaupapa," she adds. In fact, some of the chapters in her book demonstrate the Kalaupapa residents' unwillingness to disappear after being exiled to that remote community. For example, after the Bayonet Constitution in 1887, whieh greatly limited the Hawaiian monarch's power and denied voting rights to the majority of previously eligible Hawaiians, Law says: "There becomes a real move toward people wanting self-governance. They always felt they were part of the Hawaiian Kingdom. They didn't lose their identity when they were sent over there." Law also includes some of her own memories, such as a photograph of a letter written on the back of a cannedpeachlabel fromAlice Kamaka, the oldest living resident when Law first visited. The author recalls that she never left Kalaupapa without gifts. Law says she couldn't have a favorite part of the book any more than she could have a favorite person, but she loves how eloquent the residents were in their writing, whieh is reprinted throughout the book. "People have not been described they way they want to be described, or how they thought they should be described," she notes. This book changes that. For example, a ehapter called "Suddenly the Whole World Changed: Twenty Stories of Separation" is filled with firstperson accounts fromresidents unwillingly sent to Kalaupapa in the 1930s and 1940s. The words are wrenching: "Do you want to know how it felt?" asks resident Kay Costales. "I thought the whole world was going to cave in on me. My son would have been one year old. At the time I went in, I was pregnant, expecting my second child." Her aunt adopted her second child, whom Costales would see only three or four times a year when she had doctor's appointments in Honolulu. These stories are especially hard juxtaposed with stories of the kōkua, who relocated to Kalaupapa to be with their loved ones. "There was just this feeling that great love was more important than fear and I think that is a response that we see in some parts of the world ... people wanting to go as kōkua, people not wanting to leave and helping people." ■ Treena Shapiro, a freelance writer, is a former reporterfor the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser.

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