BV
Beth Vieira
As a native person, Azorean Portuguese who worked as slaves with the Chinese and later Japanese for sugar cane & other imported goods, natives in every place, my own people from North Africa, Moors or Berbers, we barbarians, who were Numidians, the Guanche, so ancient, so simply on the coasts, nomadic though before sedentary culture. The arts & crafts that we find in our curiosity cabinets are the forms of respect for the hunt, for birth & death, painted, drawn, etched, carved on walls, on the ground, in rocks and stones, all the word of devotion to the cooperation of peoples who have to get along to survive. What better place to find some of the answers but an archipelago, a set of islands, not a continent, not an atoll, not even a chain. Most of the world is an interconnected web of life, a net for us to breathe and connect as all islands do. Islanders know that what is up country goes down, from manoa to makai. That respect we all need now to save ourselves from ourselves. The integrity of the oceans, of the respect without regard to who you are, where you are from, since the plants and fish and seaweed even coral and diatoms do not care who cares. Just we all need to care, as in actions, not just talk story but real hoʻopononono to restore, set right, not justice which is vengeance but true joining in a mutual cause before it is too late for us and for our keiki and kapuna. Before the honu leave to never return.
