John Oliver Last Week Tonight - Hawaii

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

You'll remember I suggested reading the works of Gary Snyder on the subject.

Yes, he’s an excellent, insightful writer.
Have you read about the sandalwood trade in Hawaii?

[ironyak]

HereOnThePrimalEdge - an assumption based … on the maxim “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Almost all mining was grueling servitude for the workers.  There may have been exceptions, a zebra or two, maybe.

Something about this conversation was tickling the old grey matter, but I must have been Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. Was finally able to hunt down what's been framing some of my thoughts on the adze quarry in particular.

Tracing the Movement of Ancient Hawaiian Adzes Through the Islands - 2017 video from the Mauna Kea Speaker Series.

While the whole presentation is worth a (re)watch, for the purposes of this discussion, I would highlight the presence of numerous shrines & cultural protocols and why this area is not "just a quarry", nature of the craft specialists involved with the work, and the role of sacred experiences in the human condition, and what the archeological record on Mauna Kea tells us of these things.

Does performing craftsmanship of deep cultural value done communally in a sacred location have to be an experience of "grueling servitude"? While it's likely physical work to be sure, there is plenty of hard work that can provide joy, purpose, and fulfillment, even in my limited and largely secular experience.

Does this mean all such laborious tasks, such as gathering sandalwood, are of a similar type and experience? Of course not, but that's the point - one can't take one mode of labor at a point in time and assume all modes are of the same nature across centuries and locations. There's lots of complexity and nuance in the "chaos of the world" as the Synder article highlights.

With that said, when on an island in the middle of the ocean, far separated from the prevalent historical trends, within a culture with a vastly different origin and evolution from one's own, there may be more metaphorical zebras present than one might initially think. :)

[Punatang]

 suggested reading the works of Gary Snyder 


A wordsmith's wordsmith no doubt and excellent support for your point which I support MyManao.  The human mind is absolutely subject to programming which can render it incapable of considering, much less grasping, conflicting evidence.  Your scientists are a classic example of this.  Relatively intelligent people who are basically hypnotized to the extent that they can not consider what is right in front of them.  Look around.  Start here.  You will see it everywhere.  IYKYK.  If you don't, you are easily exploited by those who do.  

[ironyak]

Punatang - that they can not consider what is right in front of them.
lol - says the person who blocks individuals so they literally cannot even see and consider that they'd probably agree with this scientist on this topic right in front of them. Too much irony, ak!

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

metaphorical zebra

Do we know why there are shrines near the adze quarry?  Whether they were built concurrently, or as part of the process?  Or was the road to the quarry the best road up Mauna Kea due to the amount of traffic and transportation of food up and adze down, so cultural practitioners found it the best route if they wanted to climb the mauna, either as mining community or as a separate shrine in the heavens?


Does performing craftsmanship of deep cultural value done communally in a sacred location have to be an experience of "grueling servitude"?

Much of this sandalwood was stained with blood, and many Hawaiians died from the corroding effects of exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, and exposure to chilly, wet mountain winds without adequate clothing. They would cut sandalwood by day and, with the aid of sandalwood torches, at night.

All the people—chiefs and commoners—worked at cutting and carrying sandalwood. Consequently, the crops were neglected and famine fell like a dark cloud over the sandalwood mountains.
https://keolamagazine.com/land/the-story-of-iliahi/

Would it be a construct of the “haole mind” to think the job description for chiefs was different than that of commoners?  Management and labor?

Would this activity meet the definition of “community mining” if over time certain details were omitted, adjusted, massaged to place it in a more positive light?

[Punatang]

Here it is from a fresh angle:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/...l-success/

Department of Data

Are Native Hawaiians finally getting ahead professionally?


Column by Andrew Van Dam

August 30, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The quiet rainforest village of Volcano, Hawaii, presumably takes its name from Mauna Loa, which looms over the once artsy Big Island enclave as if it were the largest active volcano on Earth. Perhaps because it is.
You might know Volcano because of its proximity to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, but to us, it will always be the home of Susan Lehua Fernandez, a DoD reader who sent in a long and lyrical question we’ll boil down to a single query...

 … Over the past decade, from 2012 to 2022, the share of Hawaiians in management or professional roles has skyrocketed, increasing faster than any of 20-plus other groups for which we have comparable data….

What’s behind the boom? It’s not any single job. Or industry. Or age group. Or gender. Or marital status. It’s not remote work. Having eliminated all else, we were only too happy to zoom back out and consider geography. …

today, most Hawaiians (about 53 percent) live outside their ancestral archipelago….

Clark County, Nev., has more Hawaiians — both overall and as a share of the population — than any county outside Hawaii. Heck, it has more Hawaiians than Kauai. But Hawaiians there aren’t succeeding at much higher rates than the friends they left behind at home.

But in mapping their populations, we noticed Hawaiians spread far more widely across the mainland than other Pacific Islanders. And when we accounted for that breadth by comparing Hawaii to all other states combined, everything snapped into focus. We found that the rise in Hawaiians in management came entirely outside of Hawaii….

Furthermore, it wasn’t all Hawaiians outside of Hawaii who were climbing corporate ladders. The climbers were, specifically, Hawaiians born outside the state.

the trend… is starting to look to us like a classic immigrant story….

Folks who grow up in (Hawaii’s) system might have a limited view of where their lives can take them, Fernandez said. But to their kids raised on the mainland, almost any promotion seems possible….

read … Census data shows rise in Native Hawaiians' professional success

ETA:  post scrubbed to prevent facilitate cognitive dissonance (if possible)

[MyManao]

https://www.hawaiifreepress.com...

Give us a break. Maybe you're more suited for some other forum where they traffic in hate filled lies?

For those who don't know.. Chad Blair at CD wrote a piece titled Who Is Andrew Walden? who in essence is Hawaii Free Press.

[Punatang]

Oh the irony....

It's from a Washington Post article which is essentially Jeff Bezos.

[MyManao]

Oh the irony....

It's from a Washington Post article which is essentially Jeff Bezos.

Pretty cool, pull an old bait and switch. Well any creditably you thought you had vaporized.. good luck with that.

[Punatang]

Thank you for that nonsensical critique.  Nothing changed in the body of the post.  I just added proper crediting to the author since it was too much for you to click on the link at the bottom.  It's the same article.  It's just that the important part of it is behind a WaPo paywall which Hawaii Free Press (the horrors!) allows us to penetrate.  SO I removed the reference to HFP in hopes you could overcome the mental constipation that clearly afflicts you at this time.

Perhaps you should block me.  You are not ready for any truth.  I'm not going anywhere.

ETA:  I recall so recently you referring to TomK as behaving as if this were his "fiefdom".  Project much?

ETA2:  Pretty cool MM.  The old bait and switch.  You removed the paragraph in your post where you (paraphrasing) basically told me to go away to another forum, for liars, because I do not belong here in your little bubble.  "Creditably" [sic] indeed.