permaculture

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

And it's never as simple as we might like - nobody qualified to cast the
first stone afaik.  As in Hawai'i:

> These were very small populations that were doing very
> well, thank you, before whites arrived, with highly evolved social and
> resource-use systems that generated huge surpluses.

Well...on the one hand, the Hawaiian land/water use systems are a splendid
example of 'Permaculture' long before the term existed.

On the other hand, as with other 'ancient' non-Euro cultures, forget the
'noble savage' idealization...

There is gathering evidence that the Hawaiians were heading steadily
towards overpopulation (oh no, not *that* issue again), and might have
gotten there successfully had they not been decimated by the arrival of
foreigners.

And though they apparently had some periods of very egalitarian social
systems, by the time the ha'oles showed up, their social systems had
'evolved' to some pretty pathological extents - corrupt/despotic Ali'i
(royalty, nobility), a class/caste system with some pretty brutal laws to
back it up, ongoing wars for the prestige and expansion of this Ali'i
family/turf or that, that sort of thing...

Hmmm, looks like they were thousands of years ahead of their time in the
above respects... :-p

...until Kamehameha invaded *everyone* and took over the whole show (some
say he "unified" the islands; others say "conquered").

There's the story of how the feather capes for the Ali'i were made from
feathers plucked a few at a time from birds captured and then released. 
There's the story of how wonderfully ecologically correct the pre-contact
Hawaiians were and how much respect they had for their fellow creatures
and so on.

Then there's the archaeological evidence showing that at least a few
species of 'native' birds went extinct during those bucolic pre-contact
times (they found middens and firepits with lots of bones of birds no
longer in existence...).  And as for the rat problem starting with the
ha'ole ships' arrival, well, there's plenty of evidence that the
Polynesian rats were there long before.

Then there's the question of whether the Menehune were real or strictly
mythical, and if real whether the Polynesians overran (and possibly ate)
them or they were already extinct by Polynesian arrival or somewhere in
between.  And so on.

None of which negates this:

> Now that they've
> been colonized, they are too small and weak to survive independently in
> a world geared toward large powerful nations,

> ...But if the Pacific Islands
> were allowed to once again have their own indigenous culture, which is
> I think where John is coming from,

Yeah, pretty much.  Self-determination out from under the
colonial/occupation thumb, and reparations for the damage done by same.

Where Hawai'i is concerned, the USA has formally admitted to the illegal
overthrow of the legitimate Hawaiian government (US Public Law 103-150). 
Unfortunately they've left it as the so-called "apology bill" and no
reparations or restorations are under way (not voluntarily, anyhow, but
there are legal actions going on at various levels).

Meanwhile the occupation government is attempting to legislate Hawaiians
as a people and their nation out of legal existence (again) under the
guise of a "sovereignty bill" - for info and to take action go to
stopakaka.com.

> it would be nice to get them medicine

The Hawaiians had (still have, mostly underground at present) some pretty
sophisticated medicine...herbalism, bodywork, spiritual practices etc. as
in most other long-enduring cultures.  Polynesians in general were pretty
up on this...given the semi-regular warmaking, they probably had decent
trauma care - they repaired skull fractures with coconut shell for example
(though antibiotics and sterilizers might have increased the survival rate
some - then again, what do I know about how strong their immune systems
were, or how effective their antibiotic herbals were?).



John Schinnerer, MA
-------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net