Noelani Arista
 ÒKilohana: Seeking into the Indigenous Future: The Mana of Mo'oleloÓ

(transcript)


Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents
 

hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures December 5, 2017
Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) 
video available at http://abtec.org/iif/outputs/indigenous-futures-cluster-presents/#mcmahon info@abtec.org





















[pause]

00:12 Speaker 1: Okay, so it's my pleasure to introduce the second half of our double bill. So, Noelani Arista participated in Skins 5.0 as an assistant professor of Hawaiian and US History at the University of Hawai'i M?noa. Her writing focuses on best practices in Native language textual archives, work that derives from training under kupuna or elders, research on traditional governance and law, and Hawaiian intellectual history. Currently, she seeks to create pathways in the digital territory, considering questions about how to secure traditional Hawaiian systems of knowledge and further mo'olelo through various digital mediums, including game play. She's the creator of the Facebook group, 365 Days of Aloha, which is awesome. And who supplies followers with a Hawaiian word, translations of songs, and chants, and images that facilitate encounters with deeper Hawaiian currents of knowledge.

01:06 S1: And as well, as she said here in her bio, she participated in Skins 5.0. But I went to Hawai'i a couple of years ago now and I was there a couple of days before Skawennati and the family showed up, and so I was sort of running all around and trying to meet with people, anybody that I could meet with who would talk to me and I had a couple of people like "Oh, you gotta go talk to Noelani Arista". And I went to talk to her and with her co-conspirator, David Goldberg, and so I immediately realized that we had found somebody who was already thinking along the lines of sort of the AbTeC lines, but also the Skins line and really trying to think about how culture could be expressed through digital media. So, it's really been a pleasure getting to know you and having the conversation that we've been having with you.

[chanting]

[applause]

02:33 Noelani Arista: I'm very thankful to be here today to be a part of this circle and this conversation. I think Kauwila and I talk about this a lot, the work that I try to do in whatever project I am doing, is to try to give life to things or to engender good beginnings, so that things go. So just like the generic thematic for anything I assume is to me to be decolonial is to give life.

[chanting from the Skins 5.0 video game]

03:34 NA: So that was the opening cinematic for the game, He Ao Hou. It seemed fitting that the first game that deeply engages with Hawaiian culture developed via our Skins workshop, He Ao Hou, a new world began with one of these, the most well-known Hawaiian chants, called the "Kumulipo". Kumulipo means origin in deep darkness. It's an allusion to the various blue-blacks of the deeps of the Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, what we call Pacific Ocean, and the emergence of life, from the deep ocean into the light. I thought it was really fitting that we began designing the game table. We didn't think of this, all allusions, all the possible meanings of what Kumulipo might mean. So I'm really happy that the beginning of our first interaction with our kumu here in Montreal begins with this good beginning to give life to the relationship that were engendered between ourselves in Hawai'i and our good teachers here in Montreal. My experience in this chant goes back 20 years. As a graduate student in religion and as a professor, I'm always thinking about the chant in its 2D format, words and giving attention to the genre and the structure of the chant.

04:55 NA: The chant is about 2100 lines long, printed. You can imagine that the chanting of it would take a really long time. This is just like the first sort of key paragraphs of it. So then I was really only thinking about genre and structure. But as a chanter, and as a listener, the engagement with the chant is always kinesthetic, physically embodied, auditory, and performative. Here in the game, I feel like we can bring a lot of those elements together. It's sort of intertextual with this work by a Maori artist, Brett Graham, which is called T?matauenga. So if you look that up, you can sort of see that we sort of riffed off with the thing that he was doing with the Maori creation chant also rendering his art work. But this for me, me talking about the different ways that I engage with Kumulipo over the 20 years of my life is what gives rise to the title of the talk. "Mana" in Hawai'I means power, individual power, charismatic sort of power, the ability to attract things to you or to make things live or grow, but also "Mana" means to branch out, to have multiple meanings.

06:10 NA: So I sort of imbue the title with these multiple meanings, to think about the different ways as a writer, as a professor, as a performer, that I can think about using technology as a decolonial tool. Now this game experience that I've engaged in and my various projects, for me to be decolonial is to move deeper into our own knowledge sets, to move deeper into text and tradition. But before I tell you more about the game He Ao Hou, I did wanna talk about my own project, Aloha 365. I wanted to talk about the... Explore the different ways we might engage Aloha. Obviously, the three-day, the reality version of that is much better than actually practicing Aloha. But how might we sort of do that in a digital media context? So, from sexy times to Aloha 365, that's David Goldberg, straight up. In a Facebook social media experiment, I started in 2015, which is comprised of a Hawaiian word a day and the translation of a word touching on Aloha.

07:21 NA: I did it because there was a guy in my life who was a healer, and he could totally work on people's bodies and their spirits, but the minute he stepped out of healing, he was sort of just like a regular Joe and he didn't have really a lot of game with the ladies, and he wasn't having a good experience. One morning I woke up on January 1st, 2015, I thought, "I know, I'll do this social media thing on Facebook and it'll be a word a day and it'll be a translational concept, and you could take it like a vitamin, just read a word a day and you'll learn more about Aloha." But then when I began to engage deeper with it, I started to get ambitious, so I thought, "Oh a word a day, a translation. I know, I'll add pictures." So, I put a picture up there, and then I thought, "No, no, all these words are in songs, I'll put a song up there, and what the heck, I'll translate it." So, I started with all the popular love songs people need. And then, I didn't realize that this was gonna happen. Trying to visualize Aloha through the internet was really difficult. What do you see? What do you think? What's this image speaking to you? 

08:30 S?: Over-sexualized.

08:34 NA: Yeah? And what's the other feeling? You ever try to put in... This might be bad, I put "Aloha Hawaiians" in and I would get images like this. Or I would get a hotel, or I joked in the last talk that I get a lot of this, sunset on the beach. But if you want even worse representation, try typing in "Indi... Or Native American in love". You'll get a lot of... A lot of this but it's people in feathers and lots of oil painting renderings. So, this was a crisis for me. Every time I wanted to populate the chants with images of affection, this is what would happen. So, I found that even though Hawaiians are the Aloha people the world over, whenever I typed "Aloha" this would happen. And as I got deeper into the year, I realized that the chants are really robust, that affectionate Aloha and love was so much more than what the images can communicate, that love and Aloha was really tied up with the land, the wind, the rain, the place names, all of that. So what way could I embody all of that in my Facebook world? So, this is an example of one of the posts sort of come to become after a year and a half. The word they say is Awai?ulu. It means to bind securely in marriage, to be united as one, but it has this other word in it. So, it's that question you asked about organization and layering of concepts. Within the word Awai?ulu, we have this concept ?ulu, which means to grow forth, to come to fruition, spiritual growth.

10:22 NA: So, this binding idea with this idea that within such a pilina or relationship, that growth would come through. So then I should write a little bit, but there's a song called Awai?ulu  Ke Aloha. So, lots of people know it, it's very famous at home, and then I started to translate it. In order to give the image of this world, I started halfway through the year, borrowing Facebook photographs from my friends' pages to give people that mirror view of themselves as Hawaiians as engaging in intimacy, affection and love. And so, almost two years into this project, I'm still finding it challenging to image Hawaiian love. So, my next question is, one of the largest obstacles to knowing about this world in these chants, as Kauwila talked about this, not everybody in our community speaks Hawaiian. About 90% of Hawaiians do not speak Hawaiian. So the project is really an attempt to reach out to a broader community, so that people can have an experience of this and then they can start to see the places and the place names, those winds, those rains, and they can see love reflected back to community in a way that is not that commodified colonial touristic gaze that I say the meme culture and the bumper sticker culture that enables tourism and paradise, that plays fast and facile as our cultural production live Aloha Hawaiian at heart.

12:00 NA: Those kinds of things that we see all the time does not encompass the affective world of emotion and feeling that our kupuna expressed about how we love one another. When I imagine that I would do this, this page for this man and that, I thought it was, "Oh it should be him, me and a bunch of people from hula that will be checking in every day." And then now today, the group is up to 3085 followers. So, I'm starting to try to imagine, well what are the other ways I could take this off the, what David Goldberg likes to call the "Facebook plantation" and what other kind of way would I be able to iterate through these chants, through these songs? Because what we do is we stick a video a YouTube at the bottom, so that people can play the song or hear it. So, what is the next media kind of way of communicating this? That's the next step I'm seeking right now.

13:00 NA: But from there, I just wanna go straight to this and talk about my experience with N? 'Anae Mahiki. This smiling group of beautiful people, half of them are, well a bunch of them are here in the room, come from Montreal, worked together on a video game called He Ao Hou. The process involved for me thinking through mo'olelo history or story and coming up with that story, and I learned about... Oh, okay, you have a story, you have to do like storyboarding. You have to do all these things, you have to create characters, you have to think about the code, designing the levels, or environment of the game. Audio, animation, cinematics, we managed to do all of that in three weeks. It was amazing. We prayed, we ate, and drank together and we made relationships through making this game. And I wanted to be part of the Skins project because I was interested in further building digital performances. But this time through gaming in order to proliferate ways to tell history in stories. I'm usually brick and mortar historian, I sit in an archive, I read text, and then I write about it, so I go from text to text, which isn't always... Now I'm seeing the best medium to communicating inter-generationally if I want my history to be taught.

14:22 NA: So I'm interested in the ways what games can do pedagogically, to transform the ways in which we learn oral and written tradition, how we authenticate the knowledge as truth-bearing as part of the code that Kauwila was talking about, moral and ethical, and more recently, I'm interested in how we might build games that engage players to iterate or perform processes that support and inculcate Hawaiian values and behaviors that actually carry over into life behavior. Decolonial movement to me is less about challenging the sham, normativity of a paradisiacal, it does sound like parasitical to me, Hawaiian commodified culture than producing our own cultural knowledges in the world to reconnect with ancestral knowledge. And I mean that in the electric sorta way, not just that sort of... And spiritual sort of way, not just that sort of geneological flats or the way people are thinking as a way to enliven our own people and to share with others. Can games or digital mediums help us familiarize ourselves with our own Native subjectivities, like with the project I'm doing about Aloha, emotional and intimate? Can these worlds become a safe space of practice, repetition, of visioning, [15:50] ____. I had an image earlier of [15:55] ____ is a high point from which you can see far, from which we may then see ourselves be and feel ourselves and see far.

16:04 NA: I'm not gonna joke with you, for me the work was seriously challenging. The story of He Ao Hou because I don't have this programming or computer background. I came away with way more mo'olelo than game. The story of He Ao Hou, people, you can play it, now you know where it lives, kind of began for me here in this slide, the decolonial process. Here's Kauwila talking. We had Jeanine give us a great explanation that day, Vance, Skawennati, where someone came up and questioned, "Well okay, we're going to go into space, what are we gonna do... Why are we going to space?" And somebody said, "Well, we've run out of resources on earth, and we're gonna have to go someplace to get those resources." And a bunch of us went, "Well, that sounds like the colonial narrative. Maybe that's not why we go into space, maybe we have to actually discuss that." And that's the day that we had that great multi-sided discussion about how would Hawaiians go into space? Why would we do that? And we had that for support and discussion about indigenizing the game, about making it sort of our own game, about coming out from Hawaiian mo'olelo. And how space exploration might move us beyond the authenticating practices that dictate that nativity is rooted to one place.

17:26 NA: Sort of playing with this idea of, for us, [17:28] ____ that the land is with us when we go, wherever we go. The tension, however, for me, as a historian writer is how do I take the raw material of the oral or written text, this is the stuff I look at in the archives, that's what it looks like, and translate, embed, or evoke the important elements that would make the story identifiably and true to those codes that are Hawaiian. I had to figure out and I'm still attempting to do this, how much of the prescriptions are coupled or prohibitions of how we were taught, were tied up to be auditory method of the way knowledge is imparted. In other words, does the digital medium give us new ways to like sort of go around the rules we were trained to observe as learners in an auditory environment? Also, as, if Jason says, programming is a writerly practice and I said, listen I know he's getting tired of it, well how much programming do I have to learn? 'Cause I'm still scared. Julian is like... Yeah, people are like, "Talk to Julian." And I was like, "I don't know enough to figure out what Julian likes 'cause he's gonna get a lot of it from me 'cause I'm slow." And so this is my student, one of my grad students, [18:39] ____. So many of my grad students are imagining nativity into the future.

18:49 NA: They embody it, so how do I bring these worlds together? And I'm willing to lose all of my piety about this being a historian. That's fine, I can deal with that. But really gaming does for me... It takes me back to my home, right? This is an image painted by [19:06] ____ Romero called Mo'olelo. Mo'o means succession and lelo means speech. Here we have [19:24] ____ on one side. [19:26] ____ chanting her words going to the printing press. And then they move there from wax into wax cylinders into typewriters, into the computer, digital, and then we have here Larry [19:31] ____ who started in the 1970s to interview elders and audio record them.

19:38 NA: So for me, the performative, the real interactive, for me it's auditory, and I started to ask questions about the genre, about how the archive is limited to print and to me, and it doesn't allow me to engage that auditory mode that really connects me to ancestral knowledge because I'm auditory. But how the digital medium that often privileges image over sound also how would I use that for work us back to more balance of sound and performance. So that's why I really love that image.

20:14 NA: And then in the game, we did fun things like we have artists and animators who are amazing at what they do, these 20 [20:23] ____, he made these H?puu ferns and this kukui grove and here, Forest and I were doing the level design on this world, we had to like assemble them like, frond by frond. But these are embodiments of the god that was instantiated on this world. This pig god here, Kamapua'a, who has eight eyes, these kukui nuts, symbols of enlightenment from the tree that are connected to his godly person, and one of the things pigs do is that they root things up and they dig in the Earth and this is Kamapua'a forgetting to be a man and he turns into a pig. And in the gameplay the player has to take the kukui and chuck it at him, so his eyes open and he comes to enlightenment about the fact that, "Wait, I'm not a pig, I'm really a man", 'cause he wakes up and says, "Who's messing with my taro patch?" It's him.

21:22 NA: So we were able to imbue the scenes with this [21:25] ____ or multi-level medium in the gameplay that Hawaiians would recognize. They would be "Oh, the god in the [21:32] ____ Kinuha or the instantiation of the god in the environment," and then there's that mo'olelo of him being a pig and a man." So indigenizing the game, moving things from sort of knowledge that we keep here to knowledge that we can make [21:49] ____, like visual. That was a new one for me too. Which is all to say, also we were able to... Here we go with the mouse... Here's the name chant for that god.

[music]

22:30 NA: So we brought one of my friends who is a chanter to come and do that chant, and have it part of the game play. So for me, indigenizing the game was really putting in these elements and seeing them come alive on that screen and that is the end. Thank you. Mahalo.

[applause]

22:53 S1: So, questions? 

22:57 S?: I noticed in that last animation, it almost felt like the rhythm of the chant somehow matched to the animation, like really well and I wonder, did that happen... Was that like a happy accident or was that something that you thought through? Like how the rhythm of the chanting like sort of matches up with the animation? 

23:26 NA: I think they chose to do it on purpose, but certainly with the He Ao Hou clip, the chanting, the [23:36] ____ comes up and the beats that they play on the drum have to sync with the actual movements that the goddess is doing. So absolutely, so Kauwila and I are always talking about like, "Oh what game can we create where we're teaching them the beats or we're teaching them the hula steps, or we're teaching them how to chant the chant in its proper way?" sort of like, it's the Guitar Hero like Hawaiian chanter, I don't know. [chuckle]

24:01 S?: Go ahead.

24:05 S?: Oh, I guess so I'm trying like... I heard this talk twice, but I think what I'm trying to... You're a historian. You're a historian and then you've got this practice on Facebook, it's kind of an art practice. And now you're into making games. And then you do hula...

24:20 NA: No, not really.

24:23 S?: Not really? 

24:23 NA: They just made me do that in there. That girl dances way better than me.

[laughter]

24:29 S?: What's it like? I guess to me and my familiarity with my culture is like art is kind of you can't... itÕs so entangled in Indigenous life, in Lakota life, that you can't really disentangle them. Do you find that it's like easy to combine these practices or do you think of it as art even? 

24:50 NA: It is absolutely art for me. I was a music major, but I failed poorly at that. I was a filmmaker in high school, and my parents wouldn't let me leave home. So, I didn't even go to film school, so the default was I'll just write about things and maybe the words will make the world. But because I was a musician, I used to memorize all these lyrics and do all that stuff, so music was always a part of my practice. So, I feel like coming together with this group made me go back to what I really love which is sound and performance and bringing those things alive. Because chanting is seen as so traditional. And it is traditional. It's demarcated by all these prohibitions. You have to act a certain way, you have to chant in a certain way, you have to... There are all these rules, and... I love the rules. I'm rule girl, but where's the flex? That's what I'm asking right now. Are there rules because everything was auditory? Does the new genre or medium demand a new process? These are the questions I'm curious about engaging in. And we might piss off people. I piss off myself all the time.

[laughter]

26:05 NA: I get angry about it, but I'm really interested in getting to the answers of those questions, but we have the largest Indigenous language archive in the United States. I'm not gonna play. It's huge. So it's trying to take the water from a fire hydrant that's exploded and put it through... Here drink this. Right? So, that's my difficulty. How much, how, in what bits and what are we doing? Am I trying to make you feel something? Am I trying to make you memorize? Am I trying to make you know the history? There are all these things rushing through my head now, and I hope in Montreal to become my safe space where I can just slow down and think about those things. Yeah.

26:50 S?: My question was, because I'm a student and Indigenous person, someone majoring in First Peoples Studies, my question for you is, how can we go about gathering information from our elders that are sacred? Who is entitled to those and how do we go about it in a respectful way, that we're not intruding or giving out information about ourselves that we still need to revitalize, because like as you said, I'm working on trying to decolonize myself and the first thing I've realized is I don't fit into the colonizer's or a settler's society. I have to first acknowledge my own Indigenousness, take back what is mine, and then be able to grow. And then teach indigenous children to be prideful of themselves because we're all human, but we're not all the same. So my question for you is, how can I keep those teachings not only sacred but also collect them in a way that they can be revived and implemented into a learning environment, but also remaining completely respectful? 

28:05 NA: So, it's like being on an airplane, right? If the airplane drops 10,000 feet, the oxygen masks drop from the ceiling and you're supposed to put it on yourself first. Right? So, all the questions that you have that you need to sort through about yourself, give yourself the time to do that. I know you wanna worry about the nth degree which is that seventh generation, but really you gotta prepare yourself to go that distance. I see this at home, people will rush into that and then they get all tangled up. We have particular ways that we're taught how to deal with knowledge in our community. So, we know what is... Sometimes some of us were taught what is right and wrong.

[laughter]

28:52 NA: Some of us learned the hard way. You know how many times I was in that hula class going, "Hey, hey, I got a question!" and the teacher would go, "Anybody have a question?" And I'd already asked the question and the teacher would go, "No? Nobody? Great, let's start again." So that was the learning, right? So, when you go on and you interview elders, they will teach you. Watch them, listen to them. People don't listen. So, you have to start to un-entangle the question, you don't have to be all at once. Give yourself that attitude to grow into the questions and then the answers come. But for us, there are particular ways of being that we learn. So, follow your elders. For us, it's easy. Tons of stuff in the newspapers. Probably not sacred. Because it's out there, it's already out there. But when somebody says to you, "This is for you. I'm training with you," then you gotta be careful.

29:58 S?: Yeah...

29:58 NA: Right? 

30:00 S?: I just wanted to write an essay about what I just saidÉ and I was like, "Maybe she knows the answer."

[laughter]

30:08 NA: I fell right into it [?].

[laughter]

30:11 NA: You know process is what I... Process is what I... Process is my boyfriend, like...

[laughter]

30:17 NA: It's not... I'm in love with that guy, process. I'm not sure I care about... Jeez, much about... I care about him. But I love process.

[laughter]

30:32 S?: You're so quotable.

30:34 NA: It's that oral thing.

[laughter]

30:40 S1: Other questions? No? Okay. So, I think that was fantastic, Noe. It's great to see it again. Thank you very much.

[applause]

[pause]


	Indigenous Futures Cluster: Noelani Arista	

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