Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution Lessons, Inspiration, and Motivation: Or why we selected it for the 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival

Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution

Lessons, Inspiration, and Motivation: Or why we selected it for the 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival

Morris Te Whiti Love, Te Atiawa, New Zealand and Director, International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management

Mervyn L. Tano, President, International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management

The 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival is now underway. The welcoming letter written for the festival program states in part: “The films selected for the festival demonstrate that it takes much more than flags, proclamations, constitutions, and legislative bodies to achieve Renan’s concept of the nation. It also takes stories, songs, and remembrances to build a nation. And of utmost importance, nation-building requires the storytellers, memory keepers, dancers, songwriters, and singers that are the builders of nations.”

The October 7, 2016 screening of Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution at the Davis Auditorium on the Denver University campus graphically illustrates Renan’s concept of the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle.”  The film is an extraordinary illustration of the power of music to recapture and reimagine identity, rekindle pride, and arouse the people’s nation building fervor.

The Greenlandic pop group Sumé made up of Greenlandic students in Copenhagen, brought out the Greenland Inuit language to the heart of the colonizer, Denmark, to spread both the language and ideas of a people who politically had little identity in the world in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s they had achieved Home Rule and the start of rebuilding a national identity. That a pop group somewhat in the mould of the Rolling Stones could be a force to push a drive to greater political and economic autonomy in a little known nation makes a great story and a great little film. The mantra that to be Greenlandic you need to paddle a kayak became to be Greenlandic you need to speak Greenlandic contains two important notions of identity – language and culture.

From 1973 to 1976 Sumé released three albums and changed the history of Greenland. The group’s political songs were the first to be recorded in the Greenlandic language – a language that prior to Sumé didn’t have words for “revolution” or “oppression.” After 250 years of Danish colonization Sumé set in motion a revival of Greenlandic culture and identity, and paved the way for a Greenlandic home rule government.

Mervyn Tano, president of the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management and Morris Te Whiti Love, member of the Institute’s board of directors led the post-screening discussion.  The discussion opened with an examination of the parallels between the songs of Sumé and the story of Kaulana Nā Pua, a song written by Eleanor Kekoaohiwaikalani Wright Prendergast in 1893 for members of the Royal Hawaiian Band who protested the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Written shortly after Queen Lili’uokalani was deposed on January 17, 1893, “Kaulana Nā Pua” is a statement of rebellion. When the provisional government issued a mandate for government workers to sign a loyalty oath, many persons, including members of the Royal Hawaiian Band, resisted this order. The striking bandsmen persuaded Mrs. Prendergast, a close friend of the Queen, to capture their feelings of dismay, anguish, and rebellion in song. Kaulana Nā Pua was the result.

The songs of Sumé and Mrs. Prendergast’s Kaulana Nā Pua are clarion calls for resistance and that reason alone justifies the selection of Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution and makes the comparison between the two apt. The songs are prescient as well; foreshadowing more modern discourse on the national and global politics of recognition as contemporary tools designed to continue Indigenous dispossession.

However, in these songs can be seen an even more foundational aspect of nationhood and nation building—the connection of the people to, and their love for, their land. Sumé’s Inuit Nunaat describes the strength of the people as a legacy derived from the land. Kaulana Nā Pua makes a similar argument by poetically and metaphorically expressing the Hawaiian preference for the natural pu’u “hill” rather the hill of dollars (I ka puʻu kālā o ke aupuni) offered by the enemy. For Sumé the land is all; the land must remain in our hands. The Hawaiians stand firm in support of the land (Kūpaʻa ma hope o ka ʻāina). And both Inuit and Hawaiian are, Ka poʻe i aloha i ka ʻāina, people who love the land.

For both the Inuit and Hawaiians, the hopes and promises of these songs have yet to be fully realized. When Morrie visited Nuuk in Greenland and the early 2000s Home Rule was well in place, but as the film shows, some Greenlanders were perhaps disappointed that it did not quite live up to what its promise. Independence of small island economies is hard at the best of times. Sumé disbanded after their university years in Denmark and the members returned to their Greenland communities – small and isolated on a large island. Nonetheless Sumé helped pave the way to limited independence for Greenland and its indigenous people. For Hawaiians Kaulana Nā Pua still gives voice to the native Hawaiians protest against loss of land and nation. It remains a powerful symbol of pride of culture and a poignant plea for understanding as they seek to restore the nation of Hawai’i.

Nation-Building: The Theme of the 13th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival

Nation-Building: The Theme of the 13^th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival

International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management

October 5-10, 2016

Denver, Colorado

http://tinyurl.com/jewl6al

On June 23, 2016 the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland voted for a British exit or Brexit from the European Union.

For me, this statement perfectly illustrates the morass that is the post-Westphalian state and why we think Nation-Building is an especially appropriate theme for the 13^th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival. There are actually four countries or nations that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or UK—England, Scotland, and Wales which together make up Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Similarly, within the United States, Canada, and Aotearoa are Indian Tribes, First Nations, and Iwi.

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in Europe and marked the transition from feudal principalities to sovereign nation-states. This Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle of non-interference in another country's domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how large or small) is equal in international law. Today, in the post-Westphalian era, this notion of complete sovereignty is no longer true if it ever was. The degree of penetration in modern nation-state decision-making by non-state actors such as corporations, the World Trade Organization, European Union, and World Intellectual Property Organization is extensive and nearly irrevocable. Call it globalization, liberalization, or post-Westphalian, the nation-state is enmeshed in a bewildering labyrinth of treaties and agreements from which it can exit only at the expense of economic pain and political capital.

But, what, you may ask, has the Treaty of Westphalia, the European Union, and Brexit, have to do with the Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiians of the United States, the First Nations of Canada, and the Iwi of Aotearoa? And, what do these have to do with film?

I think Ernest Renan, the 19^th century French theorist; in his influential essay, “What is a Nation?” provides an answer to both these questions. He wrote: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.”

The films selected for the 13^th Annual Indigenous Film & Arts Festival tell of culture, tradition, spirituality, and memory but they also show why, like the UK’s difficulty in extricating itself from the European Union, the efforts of indigenous peoples to perpetuate their heritage and to exercise their self-determination are also challenged and aided by a complex web of inter-related corporate, government, and non-state actors. The films demonstrate that it takes much more than flags, proclamations, constitutions, and legislative bodies to achieve Renan’s concept of the nation. It also takes stories, songs, and remembrances to build a nation. And of utmost importance, nation-building requires the storytellers, memory keepers, dancers, songwriters, and singers that are the builders of nations.

Digging Deeper into the Ahupua'a

Recently Jeanne Rubin and I had some interesting back porch conversations with Jonathan Scheuer and Halena Kapuna-Reynolds—about Hawai’i of course, but mainly about the state of agriculture and water in the Islands.

For a number of years now Jonathan has been working with the National Park Service to protect groundwater flow in and through Kaloko-Honokōhau National Historical Park to protect ecological functioning and water dependent traditional and customary practices there. He was in Colorado to meet with his NPS colleagues at Fort Collins and to attend a water conference at the Denver University. We took advantage of his presence in Denver and recruited him (actually, he volunteered) to lead the discussion following our March 9^th screening of Kalo Pa‘a o Waiāhole – Hard Taro of Waiāhole at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

A week or so later we had Halena over for a farewell dinner and some “talk story.” He’s returning to Hawai’i for doctoral studies at the University of Hawai’i Manoa in May which gave us a good excuse to enjoy his company. He’s one of the few guys around who can talk about museology and the role of culture, virtual reality, computers, and artificial intelligence in the future museum.

But as I stated earlier, the conversations were primarily about agriculture and water.  And if you’re talking agriculture and water in Hawai’i then you’re certainly going to be having discussion of ahupua’a—the subject of this particular rant.

Here’s one of the problems I have with so many of the recent films and writings on ahupua’a. Generally they get the fundamental notion right. What we see or hear are variants of the late, great anthropologist Marion Kelly’s description of ahupua’a as wedge-shaped land divisions which radiate from the interior uplands, claim a deep valley, and extend seaward past the shoreline. But the devil is in the details and it’s in the details that film-makers and writers get it wrong. For example, a statement such as: “Each ahupua`a contained the resources the human community needed, from fish and salt, to fertile land for farming taro or sweet potato, to koa and other trees growing in upslope areas” is correct—up to a point. But it’s wrong on several other levels.

For example, although the ahupua'a provided a certain level of general resource self- sufficiency, the system also allowed for the development and regional and interisland commerce in specialized terroir- or natural resource-based products and skills as canoes, adzes, fish lines, salt, timber, and fine mats.

My sense is that the focus on the geographical, geopolitical, and economic aspects of ahupua’a presents an oversimplified and incomplete picture of these systems.  Ahupua’a should not be simply thought of as land divisions but as complex systems—systems that were designed with a long-term vision of soil and water conservation with planting cycles guided by intimate understanding of, among other things, local society, climate, rainfall patterns, and soil characteristics. Planting schedules were guided by attention to seasons and moon phases and specific plants were placed in microenvironments within these complexes most suitable for their growth. These systems also incorporate agricultural technologies such as walls, terraces, ditches, fish ponds, and kuaiwi. Stated this way, it becomes more readily apparent that these complex systems depend on the kind of knowledge systems that incorporate astronomy, hydrology, engineering, plant breeding, and a host of other specialties.

These are major public works which suggest sophisticated administrative, management, and logistical systems as well. I am not suggesting that Hawai’i was a Wittfogelian hydraulic society but it seems obvious to me the design, planning, and construction of these agricultural technologies required substantial and centralized control. As Samuel M. Kamakau points out that “one can see that they were built as government projects by chiefs, for it was a very big task to build one, (and) commoners could not have done it (singly, or without co-ordination.)” Chiefs had the power to command a labor force large enough to transport the tons of rock required and to construct such great walls.

I think we ought to also view ahupua`a as manifestations of the elements of Hawaiian spirituality into the natural landscape. Amidst a belief system that emphasized the interrelationship of elements and beings, the ahupua`a contained those interrelationships in the activities of daily and seasonal life. 

So it’s okay to think of ahupua’a as political or economic land divisions. And it’s not wrong to take lessons from ahupu’a that are generally technocratic and cite design, construction techniques, construction materials, and similar elements. But for me a deeper understanding of the complexities of these systems is much more rewarding. For example:

• How do traditional knowledge systems and institutions integrate knowledge into the values, customary practices, and identity of the Hawaiian people?
• How was knowledge production encouraged? And how was such knowledge assessed and adopted?
• How were specialized knowledge and resources peculiar to a small area shared among other ahupua`a. 
• Similarly, what organizational systems are required to construct, operate, and maintain terraces, fish ponds, and canals?
• How did the kapu system operate through konohiki and kahuna to exercise stewardship over land, water, and natural resources? Over the social interactions? Over community spirituality?
• And finally, how do we contextualize the ahupua’a system for 21^st Century Hawaiian agriculture?