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From Kaho‘olawe to the Silk Road

History is too often told as the triumphs of individual great white men: the generals, presidents, scholars and inventors. History as a collaborative, interactive enterprise, where cultures and peoples of all kinds interact and shape each other, is much harder to teach, understand and commercially packaged. Real life struggles rarely get resolved in the time allotted to a 30-minute television sitcom, and the participants in real life struggles are rarely one-dimensional “good guys” and “bad guys.” As the dynamic liberation movements of the last three decades have shown us, while there have been many great men of European ancestry who have done many great deeds, women and people of color have also played an integral role in the development of this country and the world.

The Smithsonian Institution, our nation’s official museum and research center in Washington, D.C., has done a marvelous job presenting the Asian Pacific American experience and the rest of American history as a multi-faceted, collaborative experience. With permanent exhibits like “A More Perfect Union,” which describes the Japanese American wartime incarceration and redress experience, and recent temporary exhibits on the experiences of other Asian Pacific American communities, tourists, scholars and officials have reminded us that APAs are an important part of the American social fabric.

Over the next two weeks, the Smithsonian will be outdoing its own terrific standard by putting on a Folklife Festival that takes over a million visitors down the fabled Silk Road. This Road, which was really a series of trade routes across central Asia, went from Japan to ancient Rome from the first millennium B.C.E. through the middle of the second millennium C.E. This civilization-connecting precursor to the Internet led to a mixing of cultures, religions, artistic traditions and culinary traditions. While it is important to keep the political, legal and military issues in mind as well when addressing the inter-mixing of any cultures, this Silk Road project will go a long way toward increasing understanding of some of the world’s least understood cultures and regions, and thereby help to de-escalate inter-group tensions in a tense part of the world.

Ironically, the so-called “War on Terror” has created an atmosphere where people who hail from the part of the world that used to be on the Silk Road are demonized and labeled as “terrorists.” Indeed, the artistic director of the Silk Road festival this year is an Asian Indian named Rajeev Sethi, who was detained for 2 and 1/2 hours by guards at the Pentagon when he displayed a Smithsonian identity card but his name was not in the Smithsonian database.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, one of the organizers of the Festival, and his Silk Road Ensemble have brought together instruments, melodies, lyrics and other artistic traditions from the countries and cultures along the old Silk Road. They will be performing at the Folklife Festival, along with 400 other musicians, artisans, cooks, sculptors and culture specialists. They will perform for two weeks in the shadows of replicas of famous monuments along the Silk Road, including the Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan, the Samarkand Square in Uzbekistan and the Piazza San Marco in Venice.

According to the Washington Post, festival organizers had to accommodate “Syrian glass blowers, Indian tentmakers, Mongolian bureaucrats, Pakistani truck painters, the Uighur language, conflict in the Middle East, war in Afghanistan, border clashes in Kashmir, a shortage of two-hump camels and a yurt”

Meanwhile, from now until September, the Smithsonian, in cooperation with the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana and Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, features a moving exhibit on an important contemporary Hawaiian issue. “Kaho‘olawe: Rebirth of A Sacred Hawaiian Island” is a beautifully interwoven tale of how one of Hawaii’s islands became degraded and then rescued and revitalized through a spiritual, cultural and political awakening of the Native Hawaiian people and their allies.

The curated Kaho‘olawe exhibit allows visitors to hear the voices of those who participated in the saving of the island. You also can take a computer-simulated tour of the island, read news clipping from the island’s history and see the faces of island residents going back several generations. When I visited the exhibit on a recent Sunday afternoon, children, college students and adults all were fascinated by this tropical tale with a happy ending and a powerful message. Professor Davianna McGregor of the University of Hawai‘i and other scholars who curated this exhibit created a feast that should be sampled by visitors in as many cities as possible.

When walking into the exhibit, you are greeted by a song that is both familiar and unknown. It turns out to be “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the song sung by Judy Garland in the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” but this version is sung by a Native Hawaiian man accompanied by a ukulele. This mixing of the familiar and unfamiliar is cleverly repeated throughout the exhibit, with what we know about Hawaii through the mainstream press challenged by the facts as presented by the Native Hawaiian people themselves.

One inspiring aspect of the movement to reclaim Kaho‘olawe from the American military officers who used the island for live ammunition target practice is how a simple concept, Aloha Aina (love of the Land), galvanized a spiritual, cultural and artistic revival, along with a Gandhiesque movement for justice. The simple goal of managing the island as a “Hawaiian culture reserve for eventual transfer to a sovereign Hawaiian nation” (http://www.kahoolawe.org/) reminds non-Native Hawaiians how far we mainland Americans have strayed from spirituality, interconnectedness and rootedness in one location.

While the Silk Road reinforces the importance of getting out to see the world and interacting with other peoples, Kaho‘olawe reminds us — in the immortal words of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz — that there’s no place like home.

For more information on the Silk Road project, including activities for children and teaching materials, go to http://www.folklife.si.edu/CFCH/festival2002.htm and http://www.silkroadproject.org

Kaho‘olawe information can be found at http://www.kahoolawe.org.