A new documentary illustrates confusion about Native Hawaiian culture. “Kupuna ʻĀina” is produced by Science and Nonduality, a nonprofit that promotes new age spirituality.
The documentary features interviews interspersed with nature b-roll. Picture lava-lit volcanoes, windswept vistas, and the vast ocean. The filmmakers make ample use of the pull-back reveal shot, where a camera zooms out from a person to reveal their context.
The star of the documentary is William Iaukea. Iaukea is billed as a healer and storyteller. His words open and close the documentary, with interview footage threaded throughout.
At the beginning of the film, Iaukea advances a creation myth that does not match Native Hawaiian oral legends. In Iaukea’s telling, the Hawaiian people were gods, co-creators of “a perfect place in the middle of nowhere.” Once the world is formed, they decide to take on flesh and blood to live in the world.
Later in the film, Iaukea advances his own definition of pono. “Pono is as it should be — no right, no wrong, no yes, no is/is not,” says Iaukea. “The old people growing up with that language, using that word, they were able to manipulate the language to make it stronger or not as strong — to make it mean something that will be medicine for others.”
At the end of the film, Iaukea tells viewers to call on their ancestors. “You are so connected to those that came before you. Trust them. If you call, they will come.”
Between Iaukea’s creation myth and his call to summon the ancestors, the documentary takes a few turns.
First, it features Keanu Sai, a Hawaiian sovereignty activist who claims online to serve as “Acting Minister of the Interior and Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs ad interim for the Council of Regency of the Hawaiian Kingdom.” Sai is called to recite the history of the overthrow and annexation.
This sets up the film’s real subject: the trauma of the Hawaiian people, traced to the overthrow and American colonization. Those interviewed claim that the trauma manifests as poverty, addiction, violence, and self-harm.
The film profiles a few organizations seeking to treat that trauma. One is Humanity Hale, a nonprofit that bills itself as offering “trauma-informed support programs for Hawaiʻi Island youth.”
In the documentary, a Humanity Hale staff member, Kim Brown, recounts her childhood discovery that she was gay. “I grew up hating myself because I went to church,” she says, “when in actuality in my culture we were celebrated.” Brown recounts feeling depressed and lonely and says she turned to heavy drinking and “reverted to other things to fill the void of who I was.”
Brown’s interview is dubbed over her sitting on a beach and holding hands with Charis Higginson, the executive director of Humanity Hale. In another scene, Higginson wears an om pendant on her necklace as she leads a group of adolescents in a sharing circle, where they share their trauma. At one point, Higginson breaks out in tears as a participant shares their story.
Another girl, interviewed alone, begins to tell her story of childhood abuse. She breaks down halfway through the interview, “I can’t do this.” Higginson rushes in from off camera to comfort her, telling her that “your story is going to help so many people. I love you. I’m really proud of you.”
“Self-love is at the center of everything that we do,” says Higginson. “If you don’t have a relationship with yourself that’s healthy and that’s strong, you don’t have the capacity for anything else.”
At one point, Ilima-Lei Macfarlane, an MMA fighter, shows up to provide self-defense training for the young women at Humanity Hale. At another point, Iaukea arrives to teach a lesson. He comments on a girl that ran out into the rain to dance: “It was her connecting with the spirit inside of herself that wanted to dance, that wanted to be in the rain. And she danced in the rain. That was so beautiful.”
In Humanity Hale’s latest IRS filing for 2024, Higginson made $120,000 as executive director, against $141,567 in revenue. Last year, the nonprofit announced a three-year, $500,000 grant from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to support “a multi-faceted healing program for Native Hawaiian at-risk and foster youth and those facing complex trauma.” In September this year, the nonprofit said it had raised $500,000 toward land acquisition for a transitional housing village for youth leaving foster care, with 16 tiny homes planned.
Another organization treating trauma is Men of PAʻA, an “ʻāina-based recovery” program for formerly incarcerated men. The program blends spiritual healing with community service and vocational training.
Its participants seem chastened, though their testimonies are filtered through the language of self: “After we heal, after we get right with self, after we get right with family, beautiful things start happening.”
The end of the film features interviews with hula and chant practitioners, who share quotes that owe more to new age spirituality than to the traditional Hawaiian worldview.
- “I learned hula when consciousness came to be.”
- “I don’t dance hula; hula dances me.”
- “Time is completely irrelevant in the moment of the ritual.”
- “All of our stories and all of our chants say everything is my family. I am the cliff. I am the wave crashing.”
- “The thing the chant wants from us is to say it.”
Science and Nonduality is a group that finds parallels between ancient shamanic healing rituals and recent discoveries in quantum physics. In recent years, they’ve taken an interest in indigenous approaches to treating trauma, hence their visit to Hawaiʻi.
The film selects soundbites that fit into a new age, vaguely gnostic view of reality. But it downplays the contradictions between worldviews.
For Iaukea, the Native Hawaiians are co-creators of the cosmos. “We move with the creation energy to create all things above the earth, on the earth, and below.” What it is to be Hawaiian is to “believe in your ancestors’ wisdom and the strength that is handed down generation to generation.”
In a podcast interview a few years ago, Iaukea said that self-worship was the ancient way of his people before Tahitians arrived and imposed their temple system and idol worship. “For them, for the first people, sacredness of things was that which was in you. God inside, so to speak,” he said. “Everything external, everything outside was just the way of the earth.”
Because the documentary is filtered through Iaukea’s gnostic worldview, it has no room to express the actual Native Hawaiian religion, which was a complex polytheistic system involving rigid boundaries between the sexes, cultic worship, and human sacrifice. Native Hawaiian religion is reduced to a few forms of cultural expression: hula and chant.
Because the documentary is generally hostile toward Western culture, it has no room for the mass conversions of Native Hawaiians to Christianity, nor for Hawaiian chiefs like Keōpūolani asking for baptism. It has nowhere to put the 1840 Constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which committed the kingdom to the Christian God.
For the filmmakers, Native Hawaiians are an interchangeable people group. They are yet another colonized people who must reclaim “indigenous knowledge,” insofar as that indigenous knowledge is identical with the new age beliefs found in a Northern California yoga studio.
There is no room for the triune God who created all things and now commands all people everywhere to repent and believe in Jesus Christ.
The people of the Hawaiian Kingdom worshipped Him. The film’s gnostics and pantheists agree on little, except to reject Him.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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