Author D. Molentia Guttman is married and has three children. She came to Hawai'i in 1973 to work at the University of Hawai'i as a grants administrator. Coauthor Ernest Golden came to Hawaii at age 19 in 1943 as a defense worker at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. He is married and has four children, seven grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. The African American Diversity Cultural Center Hawai'i was founded in 1997 to preserve historical documentation about the black community's contributions and impact in Hawai'i's civic life, military, medicine, religion, and politics.
Title: Two New Books
Author: KARIN GALLAGHER
Publisher: HONOLULU MAGAZINE
Date: 3/1/2011 The first in a series of books on race and ethnicity
in Hawaii planned by the University of Hawaii Press, Judy Rohrer's
Haoles in Hawaii engages in a scholarly, if not entirely objective,
dissection of the uniquely Hawaiian concept of haole. Rohrer
recounts two centuries' worth of the term's incarnations both as a
noun (colonizers, missionaries, usurpers, capitalists, oligarchs,
oppressors, conspirators), and an adjective (acting haole--or
someone who's "haolified"--suggests "acting superior," "with
hubris," or "a certain set of attitudes and behaviors that are
distinctly not local"). Rohrer, a self-proclaimed "haole girl,"
raised and educated in Hawaii, emphasizes the need to recognize the
history that accompanies the term. "To understand haole, you really
have to understand the colonization of Hawaii, because haole was
forged in that history," she explains. "[A] well-developed caution
comes from 200 years of disease, dispossession, cultural
appropriation, the banning of language and hula--all of that gets
carried into the present. Haole is the name for that, which comes
from the Hawaiian experience." A celebration of multiculturalism
this book is not; any suggestion that Hawaii is a modern-day model
of racial harmony is summarily rejected and quickly framed against
the backdrop of divestiture and current inequities facing Native
Hawaiians. "The legacies of colonization are much bigger than we
tend to acknowledge," asserts Rohrer, who points to tourism,
militarism and recent legal attacks on Native Hawaiian programs and
entitlements as manifestations of this ongoing legacy. "We think of
colonization as something in the past, but the reality is that it's
very much a part of our lives today in Hawaii. I'm hoping this book
will allow for a conversation about what we can do individually and
collectively to try to build a more just Hawaii." Images of
America: African Americans in Hawaii (Arcadia Publishing), by D.
Molentia Guttman and Ernest Golden, takes a visual approach to
documenting the presence of African Americans in Hawaii, through
the use of photographs with lengthy captions. "Since the 1770s, the
Islands have been home to people of African descent, who have made
tremendous contributions to Hawaii for over two centuries," says
Guttman, who, in 1997, founded the African American Diversity
Cultural Center Hawaii (aadcch.org), a nonprofit museum archiving
200 years of African American history in Hawaii. Guttman and Golden
identify the earliest African Americans in Hawaii as maritime
laborers, arriving on merchant and whaling ships from the Cape
Verde Islands, the Caribbean and the United States' Atlantic
seaboard--many from the latter escaping slavery to build new lives
in the Islands. Today, the authors estimate about 35,000, or
approximately 3 percent, of Hawaii residents claim African
ancestry. "We wanted to uncover this history," says Guttman. "It's
there, it's just not talked about. My job is to make it available
to the public, make it a more visible history."
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