USC APISA Heritage Month underway, a school faculty member narrates his experiences as a Native Hawaiian.
While you may have heard that a pineapple symbolizes hospitality and friendship, one interesting fact about this fruit is that Hawaii used to supply over 80% of the world’s canned pineapples. While people now link pineapples to Hawaii, Isaac Vigilla, a Native Hawaiian working as an academic advisor at USC Annenberg, shared his conflicted feelings on the popular Hawaiian fruit.
Vigilla: I think it’s it is tough for us. I think some of us recognize that at one point of Hawaii’s history, we did rely on a lot of exports like fruits. It’s a tough and controversial history when it comes to immigration and the exploitation of various immigrants to support the pineapple plantations and then also how all of that was directly related to the illegal overthrow as well. So I think it’s for for Native Hawaiians like myself, I think it’s it’s very difficult to to think about that history that’s related to things like pineapples and tourism in Waikiki, because it just reminds us of the continued exploitation of Native Hawaiians and our land.
As Vigilla said, this fruit lies in a period of brutal history. Besides pineapples, there is something about the Native Hawaiian language that many people don’t know. The Native Hawaiian language was once banned in Hawaii by Western colonizers. The revitalization and recovery of Hawaiian culture is still ongoing today.
Vigilla: Because of the influence of Western religion and missionaries, they to your point, they did outlaw the Hawaiian language. And for a lot of that, you know, you pile on the illegal overthrow, you know, the annexation in the state of Hawaii, and it really suppressed the Hawaiian culture. And it wasn’t really until the 70s or 80s, where there was like a Hawaiian renaissance where a lot of Native Hawaiian educators and leaders were looking back on, how do we revitalize the language.
Vigilla: You look at kind of the fallout and even even so, like Native Hawaiians right now are fighting for, they continue to fight for sovereignty. They’re trying to create a nation within a nation that’s similar to kind of how the Native Americans have been set up. You know, going back to my grandma, not being able to speak it in school, but having to learn all of these things at home and under the table. And you know, they went to Catholic school where it was English only, you know, Hawaiian.
Language is part of identity. Native Hawaiians are a race of people, and even the name “Native Hawaiian” is defined by the U.S. people. Coming to California to study in 2007 and having been working at USC for over eight years, Vigilla self-identifies predominantly as Native Hawaiian, but also associates himself with other ethnic roots as many Hawaiian families, like his, carry a trove of complicated immigration history.
Vigilla: I still primarily identify identify myself as Native Hawaiian, but I’m also Chinese and Filipino as well. You know, if you look at my family tree, I’m literally a descendant of all immigrants, basically, except Japanese. You know, if you go deep into my line, you know, I have someone from Spain and Portugal, you know, my my paternal grandfathers from her Filipino. But the families that I was raised by really were my Hawaiian Chinese family and my Hawaiian Filipino family. So that’s kind of what I primarily identify with in terms of, you know, culture and terms of language. You know, at one point it was fluent in Hawaiian, but you know, like a lot of things, you don’t use it, you lose it, right? So I think that’s one thing I’m looking to maybe pick up again, you know, to to try and build up my skills.