Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

“ Yeah, well, that's best left to the shrinks.”

“ If it ever comes to that.”

“ Anyway, it was only in the early nineties that the U.S. Government returned Kahoolawe to the Ohana.”

“ The Ohanal Isn't that Kaniola's newspaper?”

“ No, no, the PKO-Protect Kahoolawe Ohana. Ohana means family, but the PKO, which came into existence in '76, has turned Kahoolawe into the principal symbol of native Hawaiian consciousness. Native Hawaiians made it clear they wanted Kahoolawe back.”

“ But you said there's nothing there, no resources or riches.”

“ Still, it's been the most hotly contested piece of real estate in the islands, primarily because land is so limited and scarce in the islands-any land, even land with hundreds of unexploded U.S. Navy shells lying about.”

“ There're live shells all over the island?” she asked. “That's a real comfort, Jim.”

“ Any rate, the PKO's become a powerful political group in the islands. Hell, unless I miss my guess they were behind Ewelo's kidnapping of Oniiwah, and Kaniola's Ohana newspaper makes the perfect mouthpiece for them.”

“ Now I understand better your attitude toward him.”

“ Their big push on is to restore as much island land and sacred temples and burial grounds as possible, and there are some prime archaeological sites on Kahoolawe that they have their eyes on, which fortunately escaped as targets of the U.S. military over the years.”

“ I can see their point of view,” she said, staring out toward the black mound of the island in the distance. “They've been so disenfranchised by us over the years.”

“ If we were to go over the island in Lee's chopper, Jess, you'd see just how desolate the place is, how awful the results of the years of bombings have been, not to mention the goats.”

“ Goats? Yeah, you mentioned something before about goats.”

“ The only thriving creatures on the island since the bombings, save for lizards, insects and maybe some mongoose.”

“ Mongoose in Hawaii?” she asked.

“ Imported but thriving and remarkably prolific, and the goats too have been allowed to roam free and wild, and have overpopu- lated and devastated the topsoil on the slopes over much of the island. There needs to be a serious effort to decrease their numbers, but the PKO and the U.S. Government can't seem to agree on how it should be done; consequently, nothing's been done.”

“ Sounds sadly typical and political.”

“ You got that right. Anyway, from overhead, in the air, Kahoolawe is a uniquely Hawaiian anomaly.”

“ What?” she asked, turning to look into his eyes.

“ An ugly, undesirable piece of property. Not supposed to be any such thing in Hawaii. Seven miles off the coast of East Maui, we come across a barren, windswept island inhabited by goats and cultists.”

“ Maybe you're being harsh to call them cultists, Jim. Maybe they're just what they say they are, native Hawaiians who want to live as their forefathers lived.”

“ Yeah, maybe I've got my prejudices, sure. Some people in the islands just see them as fools. There's barely enough vegetation on the island for shade much less raising livestock, and streams around the island dry up in the summer. Mt. Haleakala on the bigger island just about squeezes all the rain from the clouds before they reach here. The only thing Maui sends over are the dry, cold Makaniloa winds off the slopes of Halekala. Kahool- awe's hot and humid during the day, and cold at night. Much of the red-soil landscape is lunar in nature.”

“ Add to that fifty years of poundings by naval artillery and airforce bombers,” she inteijected. “Maybe it's become such a symbol for native unity because it most represents what Kaniola would call blatant haole disregard for his homeland? I can sympathize with the desire to see the land returned to civilian control.”

“ In an island state, land of any kind is valuable, Jess. All that the PKO knows is that one day Kahoolawe will be worth a fortune, and if they can squat on it… well, squatters' rights, you know. Hell, Jess, as a practice bombing site for the Navy and Airforce, it was perfect.”

“ Perfect, huh?”

“ It's only one hundred ten miles from Pearl, the U.S. headquarters for operations in the Pacific.”

“ And you think that makes it okay?”

“ In the best tradition of might makes right and given the context of the times, I don't know. Since the fifties the natives have been given visitation rights several months of each year to the island and limited fishing rights year round. It was never contested until the PKO came into prominence.”

She thought Jim Parry was sounding political now, perhaps even racist, but then who could live day in and day out here without taking sides? she wondered.

“ In '76 the PKO occupied the island against the orders of the Navy. It got ugly.”

“ There were riots?”

“ More like there were arrests. It was the first of many battles fought in the name of their sacred island, and since then the PKO has scored some impressive victories. They backed their own man for Congress and he's won every year since. In 1990, Congress passed a two-year moratorium on the bombing while a federal and state commission studied the cost of clearing the island of shells and debris, its future use, and who would eventually have jurisdiction over the place.”

“ So what was the outcome?”

“ You're looking at it,” he said, pointing ahead to the dense growth in the fast approaching bay along this stretch of the island. “A return to the past.”

She thought for a moment of all that Jim's phrase implied, the multifaceted levels of connotation in his words. Was going back to the past a personal affront to the white race? Did it imply that Christianity was dealt a blow, that the American way of life, Western civilization, was a poor substitute for a simple agrarian lifestyle? That democracy and the Puritan work ethic of the whites were all a fraud perpetrated on humanity by a rigid mind-set, no less treacherous in its way than that of a conqueror of another kind?

“ A sacred island, they call it?” she asked. “Is it sacred, or is it like the Seven Sacred Pools, a slogan written by an ad man?”

He raised his shoulders. “I guess Kahoolawe is sacred in the native mind.” But Jim wanted to talk of things associated with the island other than its sacredness to the Hawaiians. “The Ohana, with some big guns in Congress now, won their argument to have the island set aside for cultural and educational purposes. Had the island declared a national freaking historic monument. Can you believe that?” He held his voice down, obviously not wishing Awai or the crewmen to hear him on this.

“ Why do they regard the island as sacred? And if it was sacred, how did they ever lose control of it in the first place?”

“ They were herded off the island when the military declared it theirs. They hadn't any choice in the matter, and they weren't exactly prepared to take on the U.S., either through force or through the courts, believe me.”

She repeated her question. “What makes it sacred to them?”

“ Usual crap.”

“ Jim, why're you sounding so… so unlike yourself over this? Why're you sounding like a racist?”

He took a deep breath and blew it out toward the island, which was taking on more formidable size before them. “Because now this sacred place, this native Hawaiian jurisdiction, is a sanctuary, a natural haven for fugitives like Lopaka Kowona. That's why. And it frustrates and infuriates me that they hide behind a wall of sacred cows when in fact this place is no better policed than Indian Territory in the American West of the 1800s. Just pisses me off, and it hasn't got squat to do with race or sacredness.”