Kealoha Pisciotta - Mauka & Makai

[snorkle]

Maybe the reason the NOAA scientists couldn't confirm the deaths was because......they......weren't.....there.

Oh, mark.....Your link;"List of extinct animals of the Hawaiian Islandsedia" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created.

[bgiles]

What better way to honor...? When a dead gray whale was reported floating in Puget Sound, then washed up on Whidbey Island, the environmental group I belonged to decided that flensing the whale and displaying the skeleton would be a great thing to do. It was a messy, smelly job even in the middle of winter. (In Oregon, a rotting whale on a beach was blown up, throwing blubber everywhere). Today, "Rosie's" skeleton is mounted in the Coupeville, WA wharf, and it is a treat to watch visitors, especially kids, begin what I suspect is a lifelong appreciation for whales. We did a great job, even recovering the vestigial "leg" bones. Different strokes, I guess. I understand sharks recycle whales as well...

[kalakoa]

Should it rot on the beach until the county decides what to do with it?

Studies ... environmental impact reports ... bids for removal ... grievance on bidding process ... more studies ...

[MarkP]

The modern day need is to appear to have special status due to Native Hawaiian ancestry both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the rest of the world. The main reason there is an issue is because they touched it. The world is full of people who would kill that whale for its teeth, or baculum maybe. Practically speaking the only thing the Feds can do is make it illegal to do anything with the animal at all except in certain special circumstances like allowing the Inuit to hunt for subsistence. As such I could get behind traditional Hawaiian burial practices for sea mammals as long as they were just that, traditional. I never heard of this before even though I have heard of whales washing up, obviously dead, on shore with nobody rushing out to perform Native Hawaiian last rites and bury them at sea.

[Chunkster]

The modern day need is to appear to have special status due to Native Hawaiian ancestry both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the rest of the world.

My favorite line from George Orwell's Animal Farm:

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

[MarkD]

"This idea that primitive people were better at environmentalism is bogus.

Native people's material culture was far less than that of modern civilization, hence their environment impacts were much less.

Native peoples were almost universally hunters. They were mostly good at using resources sustainably. For Hawaiians, the Kapu. Sustainable use = conservation.

Today the field of conservation, an ethic with a deep history in hunting, is increasing being pushed towards preservationism, an ethic that seeks all sort of limits on the use of resources, including some for emotional reasons. That's why we don't hunt whales anymore, even if the populations of many species like the humpback are not endangered. This sensitive view increasing dominates environmentalism.

Native peoples had another thing going on: Reverence/veneration for animals, some of which they killed. Like bears.

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=5241&context=etd

Whale burial might be a legitimate veneration practice.

Liberal environmentalists much like the idea of veneration for animals. They leave out the part about killing the animals. That's how we got the fairy tale that Native Hawaiians venerated green sea turtles and sharks and didn't kill either.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

punaweb "experts", who probably can't distinguish humane cultural practices... You truely are a "protector" (in the real sense of the word

It's important not only that we distinguish humane cultural practice, but distinguish authentic cultural practices as well. Kealoha calls herself a native practitioner. Does anyone know the kupuna she studied under, or which cultural practices she studied, and for how long? She has often enough laid claim that her illegal actions were legitimate or ancient Hawaiian practices, for which she was either arrested or charged, and often used her interactions with law enforcement as a gathering point to promote her agenda. However, no one ever asks who taught her those practices, or where it can be cited that other Hawaiians have engaged in similar actions.

She may be a legitimate practitioner, but if she is, one might ask why she seems to run up against the existing laws, far more than other cultural practitioners? How many times do you hear about other practitioners in a law breaking context as often as she is?


Respect the culture. We could very well learn something... you could try approaching a Kanaka and asking him/her.

Yes, I agree. But not every person who portrays themselves as a healer, or practitioner has the legitimate background, knowledge, and especially wisdom to present themselves as a leader or expert from mountaintop to the bottom of the sea. Maybe instead of asking generic questions to a random sample of Kanaka, we should be asking specific questions to people who present themselves as specific experts. For instance:

* Are you presently employed? If not, how do you support yourself? If it is donations from people who believe in your various causes, please describe a breakdown of expenses, perhaps including a pie chart showing who much is used directly and specifically for the movements you lead or participate in, and how much is for personal use such as your rent, your food, and the cable bill.
* Do you have an obsessive vendetta with a particular group of people, perhaps where you were formerly employed? Are your current actions in any way related to your experience there, or perhaps your job performance? Hopefully the answer is no, or it might cast a cloud of subjectivity over your belief system, and your willingness to view the world in an objective manner.
* As already noted above, who did you study with, what areas of study were conveyed, and for what period of time did this take place? Were any specific qualifications or level of expertise on the subject matter conveyed to you by the teacher(s)?

Again, there are many legitimate practitioners, and just as your doctor or dentist has framed certificates of his educational background hanging in his office for you to see, should we expect less from our cultural experts?

Is the jury still deadlocked? The odds that natural climate variability can account for the magnitude of the temperature changes over the course of the satellite record are roughly five in a million, researchers report. - Science, July 19, 2018.

[rainyjim]

* First of all, HOTPE I like your catchy title, your wit is always fun for me to read.

*Second, concerning the quote below:

quote:

---

Originally posted by HereOnThePrimalEdge
She may be a legitimate practitioner, but if she is, one might ask why she seems to run up against the existing laws, far more than other cultural practitioners? How many times do you hear about other practitioners in a law breaking context as often as she is?

---

I think that she is not just a practitioner (legitimate or not) she is an activist, and it is really quite understandable that an activist would be pushing the limits of their rights under the law to appeal towards whatever ideology they are advocating - interestingly she is exercising the very rights she is afforded as a US Citizen, which she would not have had as a kanaka maoli, to advocate against the USA and its oppression of kanaka maoli.

*Lastly, I am not sure she is really guilty of doing anything wrong (my personal moral assessment) other than in the strictest since of breaking the law (our societies ethics), but regardless it does irk me because if I or some other Tom, Dick or Jane decided to do the same thing you can bet we'd be paying the fine. So in that sense, this particular issue or scenario among many others in Hawaii and elsewhere involving 'cultural rights' remind me of the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell and how "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others".

[MarkD]

"Kealoha calls herself a native practitioner. Does anyone know the kupuna she studied under, or which cultural practices she studied, and for how long?... not every person who portrays themselves as a healer, or practitioner has the legitimate background."

One can understand the faults that outsiders, i.e., non-tribal-people (I am one) can find with the seeming inconsistencies and extremism of some so-called indigenous viewpoints. But their sometimes retort, our prerogative, none of your business, has some merit.

Sometimes native people get extreme rights, like the right to kill whales in some instances. Or reservations they control. Part of this stems from history: the dislocation of native cultures by Western culture over some 500 years.

"....just as your doctor or dentist has framed certificates of his educational background....should we expect less from our cultural experts?"

Yes, much less. Doctors and dentists offer expert, sometime dangerous, services to the public at large. Native people do no such thing. Their obligation to justify and explain themselves is much less.

[kalakoa]

Doctors and dentists offer expert, sometime dangerous, services to the public at large. Native people do no such thing. Their obligation to justify and explain themselves is much less.

Then the legal protections afforded to "practitioners" should be correspondingly less.