Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents: Kauwila Mahi 1. 1. 2. 1. Kauwila Mahi 1. Pā’ani Wikiō: Ludic Sovereignty (transcript) 1. Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures April 6, 2018 Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) video available at http://abtec.org/iif/outputs/Indigenous-futures-cluster-presents/#mahi info@abtec.org Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents Kauwila Mahi M.A. Student, Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Oahu 5 December 2017 Concordia University, Montreal Produced by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures in collaboration with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) abtec.org/iif. 00:15 Skawennati: Welcome. Especially to Kauwila and Noe, we're so happy to have you here. So, in case you don't already know, this is the territory of my ancestors, the Kanien'kehá:ka and we called it "Tiohtia':ke," that is the name of Montreal in our language. And... Well, we are very happy to have you here. Island people to island people. [laughter] 00:45 S: Just a joke. [laughter] 00:48 S: And really, that's all I have to say. [laughter] [applause] 00:58 Jason Edward Lewis: Okay. Hi, everybody. Thank you to this edition of Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents. Super excited, we have a double bill today. And so, I'm going to introduce out first speaker, Kauwila and then when he's finished with his, then I'll introduce Noe, so it's still fresh in your mind. So, Daniel Kauwila Mahi is Hawaiian from Kamiloiki, Waimanalo, Oʻahu. A father, scholar, hip-hop MC, HaʻI Moʻolelo storyteller, and a video game designer. He's received a BA Under Kamakakuokalani School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Currently, he's pursuing an MA in the same institution with a focus on the ludic experience of video games which depict Hawaii and building protocol to make olelo HawaiʻI, Hawaiian language, software, coding language, and video games. 01:56 JEL: He has worked with street-wear brands, Paradise Soccer Club and FITTED Hawaii, as a researcher and cultural advisor, working to translate archival documents as well as ancestral stories into the clothing garments. In addition, he does yearly teaching panels for the Hawaii Department of Health and the Sexual Violence Prevention unit, connecting practice from ancestral stories to preventative measures, and engagement protocols now in use today. So, a bunch of you here know Kauwila already from the Skins workshop this summer. It was really fantastic meeting him and having him participate as part of the group there, and we're super excited that he's visiting us today and sharing his knowledge. [applause] 02:41 Kauwila Mahi: Aloha. I am Kauwila Mahi. For my presentation I'll actually be rapping a capella and the translation of the raps, from Hawaiian language into English will be each slide. 02:54 S: I am so excited! [laughter] 03:00 KM: Yeah. So... [rapping in Hawaiian] “Kai nō kāmau iki nō kō kākou ea, Hānai ʻia kēia a momona i ka waha hewa, Aia a kau ka peʻa, holo ka waʻa, ʻo ka ʻilau hoe ke ea a ka lāhui kānaka, mai ke kai mai, ʻo ia ihola ka ʻo ia ʻiʻo, a kahiko i liko ka pua aliʻi a kau a kani koʻo, hele mai nō, ʻAuhea ʻoukou! Huli ka lima i lalo ʻo ka loʻi pōʻalima, ʻo ia kō kākou e mahiʻai, ka ʻai maneʻo a nā atua e ʻai ai, ke kumulāʻau mākaukau mai nei kākou i ka hana kaua hoʻolei i ka lei niho palaoa.” [applause] 03:35 S2: And what that means is... [laughter] 03:38 KM: So, what is Paʻani Wikio and what is Paʻani Wikio [03:43] Hawaiʻi? Paʻani Wikio is a terminology made in Kula Kaiapuni Hawaiian immersion schools in the 1990s. I was part of all the kids who were in the schools and part of our process with making up this word, is there's actually a Mamaka Kaiao a Hawaiian language dictionary which came out right around the same time, which had all these very specific terminology for video games or like, Turbo Button and Warp Zone. But they didn't have a term for video games, so it didn't make sense, and we thought it was very interesting because why not ask the kids that grow up playing video games. Because they already have language for it. And what does this have to do with Pokemon Blue? So, Pokemon Blue is actually the first video game I ever played, and when I was basically four years old and I was really interested in just the ability to tell stories and the ability for... Well, the potentiality to explore in a game and exchange with different characters. 04:57 KM: I would play hours and hours on end with friends and we'd fight, and do all these cool things, but what was really difficult about it is we didn't know enough Hawaiian [sic] (should be English) language to save the game. So, we'd do all these really great things in the game and then we would have to start over the next day because we didn't know enough English to save. Yeah. So that's kind of where my investigation of, or my yearning for Hawaiian video game in Hawaiian language began. Somehow, I ended up in the Skins 5.0 workshop [chuckle] and it worked out. [laughter] 05:36 KM: So, SSX Tricky is a video game that was originally made in the 1990s and it was remade in about 2007, and in the game you create, where you're a snowboarder going down the path of an ice slope being carried to Hawaii from Antarctica, and somehow there happens to be a Hawaiian kiʻi in the video game. It was a very bizarre experience to look at this game because there are still people who practice traditional religions. And in the... What was problematic about it was they created a colonial feature day and settler feature day where they imagine and perpetuate this idea where Hawaiian mythology or Hawaiian knowledge and mo`olelo (stories) become mythology. And by mythifying our knowledge, those who don't have a cultural basis and practice, start to see and understand themselves as all of these rhetorical images and these rhetorical tropes that exist in the world about them Barbie: Super Model. [laughter] Do any of you guys know who Barbie is? [laughter] 07:07 KM: Yeah. Yeah, in the game Barbie: Super Model you go through different levels in the world and you pretty much ignore everybody around you trying to get to new places. As you can see in this image she's imagining what Hawaii looks like for her and this is again connecting to the... This idea of colonial imaginary and creating a Hawaiʻi where people attempt to do now, creating Hawaii where Hawaii don't exist, where Hawaiians don't exist. And there's this, if you see the mountain in the back of the mountain range in the back, it's called Lēʻahi and it's a very famous mountain for us, but it's also a well-known around the world as being this paradisic image of Hawaiʻi. And for us, though, in Hawaii this image is a sign of protest and solidarity with some of our royal chiefs and genealogies. But another problem with this imaginary is coral bleaching. Or bleaching in general of our stories and our Moʻolelo. As you see there's no brown people. [chuckle] But this kind of perpetuates this idea of not having Hawaiʻi or having Hawaiʻi practices in Hawaiʻi. And this ignores the experience of our more than human relatives. So our fauna, our flora and everything related to us, and what connects us to the ʻāina is not visible, minus the ocean and the mountain range. So do any of you know this game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare? 09:07 KM: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is actually part of one of the biggest game franchises in the world in terms of first person shooters. In the game you are... There is only two, three ways to play the game. So you're either an American soldier fighting to recover Hawaiʻi from a Russian soldier, or a Russian soldier fighting to recover Hawaiʻi from the American or you can be either one of those entities and fight off zombies. [laughter] 09:41 KM: Yeah. So, this is very problematic, in this you're actually on Lēʻahi, the mountain that we see in the last game. What this creates is a... Colonial imaginary would sooner imagine zombies than imagine our own people on our mountains. Why this is extremely problematic is we have a very strong history of military exchange and military gentrification in Hawaiʻi and in the Hawaiian Islands, related to... Well starting actually with the first British vessel from Captain Cook, a military vessel which came and brought death and ethnocide to our people. And next kind of French occupation and after that, the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy in 1893 and the imprisonment of our Queen Liliʻuokalani. 10:47 KM: And it continues today through bombing, war games and shooting of ancestral bones and ancestral people, and as well as the removal of bodies, native bodies who have lived in certain places for thousands of years. And what we see is these people are moved to put military installations. This process of gentrification is something we have to engage with daily very intimately because there is over 40% of our... Of Oahu specifically, that is occupied by military installations. In addition to thinking about what has happened to our communities and our women, there is an experience of women and men who, well women specifically, they are forced to... They can't have fun because there are military men who primarily want to associate native women with... As fetishize. And so, they attempt to do everything that you shouldn't do as a person, and they actually started kind of rape culture in Hawaiʻi, and they also started gang culture in Hawaii, because the native men had to find a way to defend themselves, because there are so much violence occurring around us. 12:23 KM: And what this is, is the potentiality of a colonial vision of an Indigenous future. And here our whole is the potentiality of an Indigenous future with... Through Indigenous imaginary. And it was a part of a Skins 5.0 workshop, which was held in Hawaii and it created a partnership between Tio:take and Hawaii, and we are continuing this unity and creating new spaces and new ideas. 12:58 KM: In the game you're actually the grand... Grandchild of navigators and your sister goes out on a journey to find herself as a navigator, but both of your grandfather started to get sick. So, on your... As part of your experience, you go out in search of your sister and you discover your own navigational skills and your own experience in the world. Very briefly, I'll talk about a lot of Hawaii recoding. We're good. Our friend, or a participant in the Skins 5.0 workshop, Nathan Nahnina came up with the idea to put Hawaiian language into coding, and what I really appreciate about his process is he didn't really think through or over-politicize the act; he just did it and it's kind of an encounter of sovereignty and self-sovereignty, and his own process of debugging Hawaiian language. 14:12 KM: 'Cause he feels that he's still learning, but he's very strong in our language, and that is visible right here, by “HuiOhia” and “naHuiOhia” and what that is, is you can read that. And what this container does is actually... Well with what he said, "You activate a bloom of flowers", an Ohio of flowers every time you've done a correct hula move in the game, and with my own projects I'm actually trying to translate C-sharp into Hawaiian language so that more people have access to... More Hawaiian children have access to coding language without having to go through the barriers of learning English, because that would be their secondary language and then it would be even more problematic to learn C-sharp because they barely know English already. 15:17 KM: And this is what the previous slide does and looks like. You can see the flower there becoming activated. In this slide you are the character, the androgynous character and what we really made a point of, to do is make sure that anybody who plays the game who is Hawaii, imagine themselves in the future and it's not specific to gender. It was very interesting that we made this decision, because we tend to, in Hawaii, think about building a future without other people and disregarding other people, and so it was really invigorating that other people and everybody came to the constituency that yeah you need to be able to imagine yourself in the future no matter who you are. And [16:07] Hiʻiakaikapoliopele is a very important person in our... Or this Goddess, on the left is a very important woman and Goddess, for our... One of our hula genealogies and what's interesting about the game is you're running directly from this [16:25] akua and this Goddess what hula is, where traditionally, we would see and feel it in a different way. You're making this very personal exchange with this Goddess and hearing the voice of our lovely Noelani Arista. [laughter] 16:44 KM: And... But in the process of learning the steps you are kind of empowering this goddess, but you also are learning a lot for yourself by this exchange. In this logo I did some design and whole design, but what we created was this idea of subsistence through the refusal assertion and creation of our own ideas and standing with our more-than-human human relations and rather than thinking about colonialism because... Or sustainability we think about... We can also imagine that colonialism is sustainable because it has been sustainable for a very long time and that's why it's very important to envision our subsistence lifestyle in video game because these are really rehabilitative in comparison to the colonial visions that we saw in previous slides. 18:00 KM: And to close out, I'd like to introduce this system called the Aloha system that actually Jason introduced to me and suggested I kind of look at [chuckle], but in the Aloha Protocol which was actually created in 1968 as a radio communication idea and concept in University of Hawaiʻi between Mānoa, Maui, and Kauaʻi which are separate islands. They created radio communications and it was the first radio communication between multiple computers and not just through like an Ethernet cable. But it was a proposed idea and eventually it became internet. [laughter] 18:47 S?: The thing that you guys made, is it available to download online? 18:52 KM: Yes, it's available on a Skins 5.0 website and it's available for a Mac and PC. 18:58 S?: Good. 18:58 KM: Okay. 19:03 S?: What do you think the next steps are in the programming language kind of projects? 19:11 KM: For myself or in general? 19:13 S?: For yourself. 19:14 KM: Like with the C Sharp specific? 19:16 S?: Yeah. 19:17 KM: Well the whole... Part of the reason I wanted to kind of create this... Where I put C Sharp into Hawaiian language is so that it's easier for people who don't know English or don't know coding that well, but know Hawaiian language to jump in really simply. And then be able to adapt it and create their own worlds. And that's kind of like the whole point of it is to create sovereignty for ourselves. But I want to be able to build my own games as well through Hawaiian language. Mostly... Yeah? 19:49 S?: Would you be able to use this as also a stepping stone for other Indigenous peoples around the world to incorporate their own language to use it as almost like a training mechanism to relate to children? Because I know children have been growing up in modern technology and I'm starting to realize how important language is to an identity and I think this would be an incredible thing to implement into other Indigenous cultures. 20:19 KM: Right. And I like what you said that language is key because language is a carrier of culture, but also of our, not just culture but also of what exists in our culture, in our land and our spaces. Also, once a language dies all the natural environment kind of dies with it. Because all the practices which sustain it come from your language. And the whole point to me of... I just want it out there so that people can improve it. Because people are going to improve it for their own language and a lot of the times, words and terminology may be more appropriate than what exists in C Sharp right now. Yes? 21:07 S?: So there's you know, like the vocabularies of the language but there's also the structures and like the way that you nest things or like, organize things; in coding like hierarchies and stuff are you running into any challenges with that, like, with respect to differences between like English and uh... 21:27 KM: So far what we have done, there hasn't been any problems, but at the same time, I can't say that I'm an expert in my language in comparison to a teacher or an elder, so that is a process as well where I would like to communicate with others who may have more experience in a language and kind of improve what we have now, but there is going to be an improvement no matter what. And I think that's kind of the point. Is what gets out there is going to be improved and it'll keep getting improved until it'll be a sustainable language, not just for Hawaii but there will be other sustainable languages through coding. 22:13 S?: Any other questions? Nope? Okay, thank you. Page of