Wayfinding Through the Storm / Wayfinding Through the Storm

Gavan Daws and Na Leo o Kamehameha, Watermark Publishing, 384 pages, $24.95

Ten years ago last week, a Honolulu judge ordered the removal of Bishop Estate trustees Dickie Wong, Henry Peters, Gerard Jervis and Lokelani Lindsey and accepted the resignation of the fifth, Oswald Stender. Probate Judge Kevin Chang’s ruling brought a dramatic close to a long and torturous spectacle that had rocked 114-year-old educational trust, devastating morale at Kamehameha Schools and dominating news coverage and talk-story sessions around the state for years.

For most of us, the impact of Chang’s decision was fundamentally political. Newcomers to the Islands can scarcely imagine the extent of the estate’s influence in Hawaii during the last decades of the 20th century. The world’s largest private charitable foundation was also Hawaii’s biggest private landowner, with trustees selected by a Supreme Court that was deeply in the grip of one of the last true Democratic machines. It was a toxic combination, and the perception of corruption and greed was widespread. When the Bishop Estate trustees went down, most believe they took with them the Democrat’s long control over Washington Place. For Hawaii politics, the “Broken Trust” affair, as it came to be known, was the end of an era.

For the Kamehameha ‘ohana, however–for the school and students the trust exists to support–the events of the Broken Trust years were personal. The battles were found in their classrooms, in their offices, in their homes. Lifelong friendships were shattered and careers ruined as alliances shifted and trustees, particularly lead education trustee Lindsey, consolidated their control over every aspect of life at the school. Students were threatened, and in many cases punished, for daring to speak out about the changes coursing through the school.

It is this part of the story, not the politics or the court hearings or the media battles but the lived experience on the Kapalama campus, that makes up Wayfinding Through the Storm, a new oral history from Watermark press. In the book’s foreword, a collaborative effort by 12 committed members of the ‘ohana known as “The Friends of Na Kumu O Kamehameha,” they write of the book through the metaphor of mele. “Over 150 voices share their experiences…it’s an arrangement with many parts, each voice carrying its own timbre, color and texture.”

It may sound like overwrought hyperbole, but it’s true to the feeling of the text. In short, generally chronological bursts, few of them more than 200 words in length, participants in the drama from custodians to trustees share their memories of events as they unfolded, and as they were experienced. There’s little point in quoting from the histories at length here–to continue the musical metaphor the authors suggest, isolating any one voice fails entirely to capture the overwhelming power of all the elements taken together.

This is, in many ways, a devastating work. With the passage of time it’s become possible for many us to forget the extent to which the situation at Kamehameha deteriorated. Armed guards posted outside employee homes, phones tapped, lives threatened, physical confrontations and untold instances of harassment, including that of students under the Schools’ care. Those who lived through these events, of course, can never forget. Their lives, and their beloved Kamehameha, descended during those years into a kind of madness. Wayfinding Through the Storm, in allowing the voices of Kamehameha to speak for themselves, stands as a testimony to that madness, and in so doing presents itself as an act of healing.

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