Please stop harming and killing Native Women

I am a Hawaiian woman.

This means that I am a Native Woman.

All over the world and for many generations there has been a no-longer-silent-but-not-a-lot-has-been-done-to-STOP the violence against us global campaign.

It is the women who hail from places that for many generations who seem to not matter, to not be heard, to have to literally and almost daily actually fight to stay alive.

We are the women who the world, for generations, has seen as "exotic," or "Asian," or "Island," or "Native"(American), among lots of others. What we see in the news everyday is not the whole story. What we see in the news and reported about women of color, Native Women, as opposed to an FBI search and much nationwide coverage for women....who are not Native, not brown, or olive toned.

This in no way takes away the thing that happens to women of EVERY race, religion, ethnicity, culture. All I am trying to make clear (again) is that we matter, too, and we have always mattered, no matter what anyone STILL wants to think about us.

The places on this planet deemed as being the very most beautiful and which claim to producing, for a long, long time, some of the very most beautiful women on this planet - are some of the very most dangerous places to be a woman, in ways that no one believes, for all of us, no matter where you have ancestral roots.

Anymore, our own country is showing us that this is the same way here.

We are not as safe as we need to be.

This needs to change immediately.

And, particularly so, women of color for a long long time have had to save ourselves, sometimes even from the government which says it wants to "help stop domestic violence" but then, when we ask for that help, we have to wait...and wait, and wait.

Some of us die waiting.

Lots of Native people typically arenʻt "rich," or for that matter anywhere near prosperous.

And I know that I am speaking for many more than only myself when I state that it was a much older white male from another generation who was very dearly guilty of doing or wanting to do unspeakable things to the young women who he knew and who attended our church back in the mid-80s.

Whenever I think about what had the potential of happening I thank my lucky stars for my mom and my pals because they were who stopped the sickening things that this man said all the time.

There were plenty of us with whom I share the same Hawaiian ethnicity, who dealt with a dirty old pervert and for MANY of us, OUR OWN DAMNED RELATIVES...and yeah, more than we were not, lots of us stayed silent because of the way that we were told people would "see" us differently if we told.

Wasnʻt so much the relatives as much as it was that dirty okole of an old man. I felt afraid to say anything, not because I would get into trouble, but, because I did not think anyone would believe me.

I told my friends.

They believed me.

They told me that I needed to tell my mother.

Thing is, there were times when I would bring things to her that seemed to be not that important.

That, or we were given the impression that if we told on the person who harmed us, that people would hate us, that no one would believe us, and worst of all, because we told, the person might harm themself.

It is the reason why, until last year, I was not able to comfortably ask for or express what my own emotional needs were. I still have that issue but the people to whom I express these things now do what they know that I actually need them to please do in order to balance those needs with their own.

When you are ignored, it seems like who you are, rather than only what you need, is not that important, or, at least not as important as other things or even people are, and namely people who have done or wanted to do ugly things to us and our friends.

As though somehow, as those children, and as those teens, and as those young women, and now ourselves as mothers of those same groups - as though we were lying, or, rather...what we went through was real, but that what were told by the people who should have been listening to us about these certain others is that we were imagining it all.

No.

No we were not.

Not any damned one of us.

I will state this now, so that we can get it out of the way - I know that women of every ethnicity. every culture, are abused everyday, but there is a daily growing number of just how many Native Women there have been, how many of us there are, and sadly, how many of us are too afraid to come forward and let people know that they are being abused or were abused as children by people they were told to "show love and respect to," and some of those dirty old bastards had a completely different idea of the kind of love our parents were talking about.

What we were told without it being said was that if someone who we did NOT know tried anything horrible with us that it would have been fine then BUT, when it was someone who the family loved or at least trusted so much, we might want to be careful what we say because, you know..." you donʻt want to wreck a life, girl..."

Really?

You mean our lives were not that important?

You mean certain people who you were taken by their charming nature and their line of Jesus bullshit and of course, all that money they had...was?

Certain related people, or certain church people, or people who have just been around longer than we were alive?

When it came to certain people, my generation of now Hawaiian women were forced to show Aloha to people who we were afraid of, felt weird about, flat out told people we thought they were nasty....all to no avail.

All that did, to a lot of us, was make us feel unheard, make us feel like we had no voice, made us feel confused as to the reason why there were some people who were just NOT allowed to be around us (for the same reason some folks creeped me out), and there were some of those people who, like an old creepy buzzard named George, were slick, not with the people who they were planning to abuse, but, with their parents.

This is how little girls get assaulted by people who may have been getting away with their sick intentions for years.

This is how teen girls end up clamoring for attention and end up getting the wrong kind (because no one tells them what they need to hear, only what others want for them to hear).

This is how young women end up battered, beaten, kidnapped, sexually assaulted, married to abusers - because there are some traditions whose time have come to end, along with all of the ways that people force little kids to honor and respects adults.

The traditions are what open that door, because the traditions honor elders, not kids. The traditions honor men as leaders but what happens when those leaders end up leading themselves and the women in their lives into a place of sexual assault,violence, and sadly, sometimes, more than not, the ending of the lives of Native Women in North America and beyond.

Sometimes, that invites trouble, and it breeds mistrust in the child who will have the possibility of growing into an adult who is abused...and all because no one allowed her to have her voice.

All because people taught her to continue the traditions that no longer need to be, such as greeting our elders with honi - a kiss, and a hug (it is the Hawaiian way) when our children are not comfortable around certain others. I HATED being forced to show Aloha to certain others. I had good enough reasons. I knew and know who I can and cannot greet the proper Hawaiian way.

Traditions are great, but, lots of them need to change.

While all of this SHOW of Aloha, by us, to anyone at all, is all great and lovely and good, sometimes I think the generation, lots of those parents, that birthed mine, were not really paying attention to the things that were happening to us.

They also did not know how to handle these things and these feelings and might not have known what to say, because they were also told - MORE THAN THEY WERE NOT - NOT to tell anyone what was happening to THEM.

We were taught, a lot of us, to hide the abuse, or just never reveal the abuser, or to maybe say that we deserved what we got, by anyone, for any reason. I was reminded all the time that I ʻearnedʻ being grounded, yelled at, told I was lying, because why else would I make up a story about anyone, and then keep repeating it?

I donʻt know either.

Or, at least that is the way that I was taught, namely by the family which I spent a LOT of time with - but, most of them did not listen, because they were too busy trying to impress people with their titles and income and everything to do with making themselves look better, rather than raising us the way that we needed to be.

With the world cracking open lately, and perverts all over the world are DAILY being found out about, one might think that all of these ...traditions...might need to be thought about and recreated so that they are SAFER.

My children are TOPS at that much.

Somehow, tradition was more important than safety in the mind, the body, the soul of a generation of women who are now moms and who have become hyper vigilant with our own daughters - because our daughters are Native Women, too.

For some people, the tradition of showing Aloha to relatives who should be IN JAIL at this point is the reason WHY LOTS OF US END UP ABUSED OR WORSE....become someoneʻs reason for floating leis on the Pacific Ocean whenever one of us dies.

That old buzzard, George

I remember, very vividly, getting creeped out by this guy in our church....they called him "Brother George," and what people suspected but that I knew very well, because I told him to stop even putting his arm on my shoulder (which, when I turned 18, he was adamant that "youʻre gonna be my bride hahahahahaa" and finally my mother LISTENED to my friends about one of their "loving" church members) was the truth.

He was a pervert, and he was allowed to come into our lives and at least where I was concerend, it was when I was not even old enough to drive a car, let alone understand what things this man was referring to. It was years before I actually knew through my therapist who told me that it was nothing that I did and that the only thing that could be done was to make that person leave.

It was a combined effort, but it was effective.

I recall my mom being very shocked at the things that I swore this old f*cker was not only saying to me, but my friends in the neighborhood, as well. My mother was livid, no longer trusted this family friend named George.

He was not a friend for a long set of years.

Just long enough for my parents to trust him because he became a church member.

And how lovely for that greased pig, yes?

The idea that the church my parents headed was ALWAYS filled with two types of women: Young Latinas (who knew that foolʻs game immediately) and young Hawaiian women like myself. I was the Pastorʻs eldest daughter.

I was creeped out by the guy immediately. I think I was 15.

Dude was well into his 60s. Almost 70, I recall.

All the weird stuff began right around the time that I was midway through my 17th year breathing and in a body. I told my scariest looking friends who rode motorcycles and hung out up off of GMR, up at Follows Camp in the Angeles Crest Forest on the Azusa side, which was where all of us hung out a lot.

They were my friends, were the big, scary older brothers that I never had. Even though I had big scary looking older cousins, my friends lived in the neighborhood, and my friends,even the big scary ones, still, no matter what, even to this day, have my back. At that time, those big scary guys started coming by a lot...you know, just to check on things.

One day he - George- just left and never came back. I never asked what happened to him.

I did not care.

I was just glad that he was gone for good.

Some of the quietness from ethnic cultures comes from the way that we were raised. One of those ways is to honor our elders, always.

Plenty of us do this, and plenty of us never ever ended up having to try to hide from those people because they were creepy, stayed creepy. Due to traditions within the family and the culture, we were forced to show our Aloha to these people who, for many of us, were abusing us that whole time.

George never got the chance.

My friends would not allow it. They all knew what was going on and they were ALWAYS around.

This old bastard showed up and parked his life in front of our house for about three months and for three months my friends were VIGILANT about the creepy old "traveling evangelist" who promoted himself to these people, not realizing that every single one of them were on to him.

I was on to him, and for me, it was all that mattered. My mom could not believe her ears. She felt badly about it. My friends were not lying and she knew it.

I recall that time in my life as being very surreal, as though things were just...happening...all around me, or, at least that is what I was told all the time.

I think about it now, and how many times I was told to "honor my elders," and how much it felt so wrong with some people. It makes sense to me now that there are a lot of women who escape ugly things by getting married - it meant that we could leave and never have to deal with those people who harmed us prior.

Sometimes it works out okay.

Lots of times it doesnʻt.

Yes, I know - not all families are like this, and not all Hawaiians still expect that people, namely little kid people, show ANY KIND OF ATTENTION AT ALL to certain people, regardless of who that person is in terms of relatives - there is no good time in a kidʻs life where showing any affection to people who we do not like will make us a better person. What it did to me was make me very wary of who I could trust. So, I trusted the people who were like me.

It never needs to be your own parents who abuse you when you are young. It never needs to be anyone who is that far away from you. In my case, it could have happened very easily - and luckily, my mother, a Scorpio by birth, trusted NOT ONE PERSON, and chose to believe my friends.

That was one instance where the Aloha was being taken very bad advantage of, and one that could have made it far worse for me than it was.

I felt like no one cared about how I felt, or that I was telling them that this old man was making all of my friends feel really uncomfortable, because he did not care what he said.

He liked remarking about what we looked like and how when he was a kid, what he might do to any one of us.

I was not just creeped out by him, but a mixture of fear, shame at the idea that he was in front of my house, and anger that it seemed like some people simply did not want to see what was happening or what could have happened.

It embarrassed me, a lot, and I learned the value of sleeping with a sheet over my windows, because it would not have been the first time that a human male would have peeped into my window while I slept.

It just was the very first time that I felt unsafe in my own room, and eventually unsafe enough to end up unconsciously allowing another abuser into my life, and one who it would take the child we created together to send him into the hell that he tried to create for us, but, for me and her specifically.

No, really - when you feel like the world and everyone in yours does not listen to you, does not take what you say seriously, you will end up getting very close with someone who will - and a lot of times, that person is just another form of an abuser.

Until the day comes and we figure out that we have some work to do on ourselves, because there is the missing piece of the story that no one wrote.

We do not know another way to gauge things, because all of our lives people who we could not trust were never penalized, and instead - we were made to feel like those traumas were not that: trauma.

We were told we were making too much of it, told that it was only once a year, told that they are family, or a family friend and that we did not give them a chance.

We were told that it is our Tutu, or that it is our Unko or our Aunty, and told that it was okay because some women were told that "this is normal for cousins to do that," and no the hell it is not.

We were told that the Pastor did not mean it, and that his wife was not being mean to us (because her husband only has eyes for her) and we were told that we were not to talk because we did not have anything of value to say.

The one thing that we were told the very most was that we did not need to tell anyone, and that we better not tell anyone, and then we were threatened with things that no child, no teen, no young woman, no human, at all, should ever have to hear, about the things that we do not talk about, committed onto our person, probably for a long time, whether it was violent or salacious or both.

When we stand up and say so, years later, and still, no one who was not listening then is yet listening.

That much does not matter.

Blood does not make you safe.

Trust, and truth, and actual Love - which sometimes will hurt because most of the time, truth does hurt (but, if you really want that- you really want someone to love you for real, then you have to take their shit sometimes like they do yours - it is called Love, for real - deal with it).

But, once we have the truth of who we are, to anyone else, and we find out that it is actually the truth?

We find out that those people who told us that they cared did not do that as much as they tried telling (rather than actually showing) us they did, and everyone else who they told they did things for us, to help us, to make us safe, "out of the kindness of" their hearts, only for those very people to go on about their world and tell people more lies about you.(you dear, dear woman- no wonder why you trust no one. I got you....I understand, for real).

"But we care and we donate to the cause and we listen without judgment and we ..." do all these things that never reach any of us in the way that it needs to, which is actually directly, and not in the manner that is a national campaign - we do that all on our own, everyday.

By repeating the stories to those who are trying to leave, and by reminding everyone on this planet that if they thought things were rough as it was prior to all of these lock-downs and masks and insanity, imagine what it must be like to be stuck in these conditions with an abuser.

The problem with this world is NOT that it does not SAY it does not care about what happens to us, but that it can say anything it wants to and until and unless it asks us what we think the issue is, nothing is going to change.

Too many of us are waiting to be told that we can talk about it now, now when there are still so so SO many Native Women from every continent on this planet who have had their voices silenced, either by decree of law or religious belief, or by means of violence, all because we are not to be only seen, but also heard, and cared about, placed upon the same pedestal of value and honor as we, ourselves, have always placed ourselves, like our Grandmothers taught us to, as these Native Women, for all of life, and for all of our lives.

Please - kokua us all, and remember this the next time that your olive toned friend with the flower on her ear, who looks like the picture of island girl happiness, but still looks like she wants to cry, or your beautiful friend from the desert who, when the time of year calls, she is out there beneath the sky as the Sun goes to sleep and the moonlight turns the sky a hazy, velvety blue....for those friends, please remember all of these words.

Please remember this the next time that you see a group of Native Women gathered together having a lovely time, that it might be the last time that anyone sees them, because no one seems to care about how many Native Women go missing every year.

Abuse and violence in the lives of Native Women is seen as "typical behavior" that somehow, we think is normal.

It is not normal.

No oneʻs normal everyday lives include violence, and neither do they involve the continual denial of the voices of women trying to break away from the hell they do no create for themselves.

You can blame white folks, but donʻt - because those women also go through this as much as we do, and lots of times with our men just as much as we go through it with theirs.

This is the hardest truth of all - that we come from a place that shouts to the world "ALOOOOHAAAAA!" and here we are, the women, a whole lot of us, trying to stay alive.

No, not me specifically any longer, but that of the Global Ohana of Native Women - I raise my voice for all of them, because I Am One of Them.

I said it.

Deal with it.

We are not perfect just because we are Polynesian.

We are humans, and once it is that people realize that yeah, we might have, at one time, been a Kingdom BUT, right now there are a whole LOT of men on this planet, namely within my culture, who behave like jesters.

Knock your shit off.

She cannot possibly do more harm to you than you can to her.

And please...PLEASE LEAVE THOSE LITTLE GIRLS ALONE! Do NOT pick on them and PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TELLING THEM THAT THEY ARE GOING TO BE HOT WHEN THEY GET OLDER

Go be dirty old f*cks someplace else.

Like in the prison yard where you belong.

Seriously.

#UnSilenceTheViolence #ISurvived