Hawaiian Families Research Articles

Pondering Poi Dog: Place and racial identification of multiracial Native Hawaiians

Given the very large proportion of Hawaiians who are multiracial, our research examines Native Hawaiian identification in mixed-race Hawaiian families. We use the 1990 US Census, which affords a unique look at racial identification because multiracial people were required to choose one race over another. The results show support for our argument that place plays a central role in Pacific identity processes, illustrated in this case among Hawaiians. We find that strong ties to Hawai‘i – the spiritual and geographic home of the Hawaiian population – are vital to the intergenerational transmission of Hawaiian identification in both continental and island multiracial families. We compare our results for multiracial Native Hawaiians to prior studies of American Indians and Asian Americans to identify any general patterns in correlates of racial identification choices. In each group, we find that familial and geographic relationships to the cultural and ancestral lands are strongly linked to racial identification.

Adapting Culture in a Colonial and Capitalized World: Role Strain and Acculturation in Hawaiian and Samoan Families

Despite being known for its culture of generosity, tropical beaches, and tourist-friendly atmosphere, Hawai‘i’s colonial history and present-day political economy have extended social stratification along ethnic lines, resulting in a number of unfortunate outcomes. In particular, Hawaiian and Samoan families residing in Hawai'i have been negatively influenced by social stratification, and have had to adapt their cultures to survive in a capitalist society. This paper explores how acculturation into an American capitalist culture contributes to role strain for Hawaiian and Samoan families by analyzing seven focus groups with Hawaiian and Samoan participants (N = 45). Although findings from prior acculturation studies with ethnic minorities provide mixed results, the data in this study demonstrate that forced acculturation into a competitive, individualistic, and capitalistic culture severely deepens role strain for Hawaiian and Samoan families. Policy recommendations are made, suggesting that Western institutions in the Pacific and continental United States acculturate to Pacific Island mores, reversing the colonial trajectory that has caused frustration among Hawaiian and Samoan families.

The Importance of Hawaiian Language Sources for Understanding the Hawaiian Past

I'D LIKE TO INTRODUCE MY WORK BY INTRODUCING MYSELF and my relationship to it. (1) I was born on Oahu halts century ago into a Hawaiian family who, like most other Hawaiian families, longer spoke Hawaiian. My mother grew up knowing some words and some songs in Hawaiian, along with a little hula and a lot of fishing practices. Her mother grew up mostly understanding but not speaking her mother's native tongue. And her mother's (my great-grandmother's) native tongue was olelo Hawai'i, which she supplemented with Chinese and English. Between my great-grandmother's time and my mother's time, knowledge of our language along with its stories, poetry, children s word games, and beautiful figures of speech was almost entirely lost. I was raised in California and when I returned to Hawai'i as an adult, I began to study language. After receiving a degree in olelo Hawaii, I pursued graduate degrees in order to study wisdom of our ancestors further. As I began to contest historiography of Hawaii by reading nineteenth-century material in Hawaiian, I was often frustrated by my inability to understand what I was reading. Not only was our language gone, but so many of commonly shared cultural references were gone--not even recorded in contemporary reference books. One day, while walking along puzzling over some mysterious passage, I finally became enraged. Why couldn't I understand what was written in a newspaper by someone of my great-grandmother's generation? Why didn't I grow up speaking and understanding this? It is my heritage; it should be my birthright. The violence of loss of language became real to me that day, and added to my resolve to keep learning, to teach, and to tell stories of people who wrote them down, knowing language was waning, but having a glimmer of hope that one day, a new generation would be reading their words again. One result of language loss has been perpetuation of certain myths about Hawai'i and its native people. One of most persistent and pernicious myths of Hawaiian history is that Kanaka Oiwi (the Native people of Hawai'i) passively accepted erosion of their culture and loss of their nation. In 1984, in an article in Journal of Pacific History, for example, Caroline Ralston claimed that maka'ainana (ordinary people) made no outspoken protest or resistance against series of events which appear to have been highly detrimental to [their] well-being (Ralston 21). Haunani-Kay Trask relates a story of sharing a panel with a historian from U.S. who, like Ralston, claimed that was real evidence for [resistance by Kanaka Maoli] (Trask 154-55) Popular historian of Hawai'i, Gavan Daws, dismissed Kanaka resistance in a single paragraph, even though, in same book, he continued to document it (291). Ralph Kuykendall interpreted King Kalakauas and Queen Emmas resistance to takeover by U.S. as anti-haole racism (187). But as Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman has observed, Hawaiian-language sources suggest remarkable history of cultural resilience and resistance to assimilation (85) My work seeks to refute myth of passivity through documentation and study of many forms of resistance by Kanaka Mach to political, economic, linguistic, and cultural oppression. The main basis for this study is large archive of Kanaka writing contained in microfilmed copies of over 75 newspapers in Hawaiian language produced between 1834 and 1948. As Nancy Morris carefully detailed, historians have studiously avoided wealth of material written in Hawaiian and, as a result, it has appeared that Kanaka Maoli hardly appeared in history at all (Morris). For this reason, Trask has characterized Hawaiian historiography as the West's view of itself through degradation of my own past (153). It is easier not to see a struggle if one reads accounts written by only one side, and, since arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778, there have always been (at least) two sides of a struggle going on. …

Localization of a Multiple Synostoses–Syndrome Disease Gene to Chromosome 17q21-22

Multiple synostoses syndrome is an autosomal dominant disorder characterized by premature onset of joint fusions, which initially affect the interphalangeal joints, by characteristic facies, and by deafness. We performed linkage analysis on a large Hawaiian family with multiple synostoses syndrome. Because another autosomal dominant disorder, proximal symphalangism, shares some clinical symptoms with multiple synostoses syndrome and has been linked to markers at loci at chromosome 17q21-22, we tested the hypothesis that multiple synostoses syndrome is linked to the same chromosomal region. Using polymorphic markers from the proximal symphalangism interval, we conducted linkage analysis and showed that the multiple synostoses-syndrome phenotype is linked to the same chromosomal region. A maximum LOD score of 3.98 at recombination fraction of .00 was achieved for the marker at locus D17S787. Further genetic analysis identified individuals with recombinant genotypes, allowing localization of the disease gene within the interval D17S931-D17S792, a 16-cM region. These data provide evidence that multiple synostoses syndrome and proximal symphalangism may be allelic disorders.

The Impact of Preschool on Teaching and Learning in Hawaiian Families

This article discusses what happens to teaching and learning in the homes of low‐income Hawaiian families when children attend preschool. Parents develop two distinct scripts for their preschool children's learning: one for learning skills that are used in the home (chores) and another for skills that parents believe prepare children for success in school. The development of these two scripts in the same setting complicates the management of adult‐child relations within Hawaiian families, as well as inhibits the acquisition of literacy skills at home.

The Identification of Priority Sites for Parent-Child Services

The methodology developed in this study provides an empirical procedure for identifying those geographic locations that have the largest concentration of Hawaiian families with young children with the most intensive education-related needs. Weighted standardized combinations of SES, test scores, and child-population variables are used to define need indexes for 164 elementary school attendance areas in the State of Hawaii.

Further evidence for a gene influencing spatial ability.

Data for six spatial tests from 927 families of European ancestry, 369 families of Japanese ancestry, and 93 families of Chinese ancestry from the Hawaiian Family Study of Cognition were subjected to unified mixed-model segregation analysis. Father, mother, son, and daughter data sets from each ethnic group were separately age-adjusted and standardized and then separately subjected to transformation procedures to reduce skewness and kurtosis. Families were reassociated prior to segregation analysis. Evidence for a major gene contributing to spatial visualizing ability was obtained for Mental Rotations and Progressive Matrices even with a normalizing transformation which reduced skewness and kurtosis to zero. It was concluded that provision for testing deviation from Mendelian transmission in the unified model protected against false inference of a segregating major gene. Minimizing distributional differences in the components of a data set is an important pretreatment.

Thalassemia in a Hawaiian Family of Filipino Extraction

Abstract Hematologic data are presented on thalassemia in a Hawaiian family of Filipino extraction, and support is given the recent trend to broaden the ethnic concept of thalassemia. Because of recent reappraisals of older reported cases by other investigators in the light of newer electrophoretic technics, the need for continued re-evaluation is suggested.