Aunty Betty

So yesterday I met Uncle Joe, the five-foot-tall kahuna who leads these ridiculous ghost tours around the island. Today I met Aunty Betty, a kupuna. What’s the difference between a kahuna and a kupuna, you ask? Good question. As far as I can tell, a kahuna is someone who thinks he knows everything and a kupuna is someone who actually does (example: George Bush was a kahuna; Barack Obama is a kupuna).

I’m joking. Sort of. Actually, a kahuna is like a Hawaiian priest and a kupuna is an elder, someone who has been around awhile and is wise. Like 81-year-old Aunty Betty who was sitting in a rocking chair in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Waikiki when I went down there this afternoon to ask the concierge where I might find some good poke nearby.

Aunty Betty was showing a girl of about eight or nine, a guest, how to string plumeria for a head wreath while nearby a couple of other aunties were giving hula lessons to some of the other guests.

photos by David Lansing

As I was passing by this mini-Polynesian performance—thinking, frankly, How tacky is this? They’ve got the locals hanging out in the lobby teaching guests how to hula and make leis—Aunty Betty got up out of her rocker to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Seeing the surprised look on my face, she said, “I hope you’re not offended—we hug and kiss a lot in Hawaii.”

Offended, Aunty? Offended? Hell no I’m not offended. Just, you know, not used to person-to-person contact between total strangers.

Anyway, Aunty patted the bench beside her rocker, inviting me to sit, and we had a nice little chat. “I’m a hiapo,” she told me. “The first born of a first born of a first born.”

When Aunty Betty was growing up on the island, back in the 30s, she went to a Kamehameha school—Hawaiians only (there are three Kamehame schools on the islands: one in Kea’au, on the Big Island, one in Pukalani, Maui, and another in Honolulu).

The remarkable Aunty Betty Kawohiokalani

“I was very fortunate to go there,” Aunty Betty told me. “Even so, they still wanted us to be haole. They would say, ‘You’re going to grow up to be industrious Hawaiians.’ Which was their way of saying, ‘You have to be haole and not Hawaiian.’ So we were never allowed to speak Hawaiian or participate in Hawaiian culture. Even at home, only my mother and father spoke Hawaiian. It was forbidden to us kids.”

Nevertheless, Aunty Betty remembered the old Hawaiian ways and when she retired as a schoolteacher some 25 years ago, she began speaking Hawaiian and learning about her lost culture. It all came back.

“We, as a people, are like the coconut tree,” Aunty Betty told me. “We bend in the wind but we never break.”

Something to ponder in the current economy, don’t you think?