by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles an hour-long PBS documentary I’d recorded a
week before, an Independent Lens episode
called “Kumu Hina” after its central character, a 49-year-old native Hawai’ian
Transgender person who two decades earlier completed gender reassignment from
male to female (as a male his first name was “Collin”!) but has continued to
teach boys’ hula classes. One point this documentary — made by a Gay couple,
Hawai’i residents Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson — makes is that where we
mainlanders (haoles, the
Hawai’ians call us) think of the hula as primarily a dance, it’s a lot more
than that: it’s basically a means of spiritual communication and affirming one’s
faith in being Hawai’ian and in Hawai’ian culture generally. The film makes the
point that traditional Hawai’ian culture is a lot more accepting not only of Queer sexuality but
gender ambiguity than mainland Anglo-American culture — indeed, the show overall
reminded me of Two Spirits, the
marvelous Independent Lens entry
from four years ago about the brutal murder of Fred Martinez, a traditional
Diné (Navajo) from Cortez, Colorado who was killed in a manner reminiscent of
Matthew Shepard (only he didn’t become the poster boy for hate-crimes
legislation the way Shepard did because he was a Native Transgender person
whose sexuality and gender identity didn’t fit neatly into categories and
wasn’t as merchandisable as a white cisgender Gay man like Shepard), and I’d
like to think Kumu Hina was the sort of person Fred Martinez would have grown
up to be had he been allowed to live to middle age. Interestingly, the term she
uses for herself is mahu, a
Hawai’ian word that translates to “Transgender” and seems to be the equivalent
of the Navajo nahuatl. (Though
Kumu otherwise presents completely as female, she’s never been able to raise
her voice to a normal woman’s register, and in a degree of understanding and
support almost incomprehensible to us mainlanders (especially given the way
certain busybodies look for pedophiles under every rock and it’s inconceivable
that most mainland schools, even in relatively “enlightened” urban areas, would
allow a MTF Transgender person to teach a boys’ class in anything) she’s been allowed to lead the boys’ hula group —
and she’s admitted into it and made the lead performer a female-to-male
Transgender person named Ho’onani.
The three central characters in this program
are Kumu, Ho’onani and Kumu’s (legally married) husband, a 25-year-old from
Tonga named Hema who had never been off the island of Fiji when Kumu met him
there. Hema rather ruefully acknowledges that before he met Kumu he never had
any use for Queer people, and indeed would punch out his Gay brother when the
brother tried to talk to him about his sexuality — and here he finds himself
not only accepting but genuinely in love with a mahu. Interestingly, the couple are shown at home living
the most banal life imaginable, and even when they get into an argument
(something Hamer and Wilson said they wanted to show to make the portrait of
Kumu’s life more nuanced) it’s a pretty common one among couples: Hema wants
time-out from the relationship to hang out with his Tongan buddies
male-to-male, and Kumu responds by going on a “road trip” with an old friend of
hers, a fellow MTF Transgender person from the island of K’auai. The domestic
life (and strife) between Kumu and Hema is counterpointed with the preparations
at the Hawai’ian-culture school where Kumu teaches and where she’s rehearsing
her grade-school-age hula troupe for their end-of-year public performance, with
some of the boy-born-boys in the class both put out and jealous that their
teacher has made Ho’onani the star, and where she’s also pleading with the boys
to pay attention to their classwork because the preservation of traditional
Hawai’ian language and culture is dependent on them learning it and making it
an integral part of themselves and their identities.
Needless to say, Kumu
Hina is also a story of cultural imperialism;
when Christian missionaries came to Hawai’i they were predictably incensed that
this culture not only accepted people with in-between sexual and gender
identities but actually celebrated them, and they tried to burn it out of them
the way the “Indian School” people on the U.S. mainland did, forbidding the
indigenous people to speak Hawai’ian and forcing their kids into schools where
they were taught the mores, values and prohibitions of white culture. At the
same time it’s ironic in a film that aims to celebrate Hawai’ian culture and
traditions, we see at least two sequences of people singing explicitly
Christian songs and virtually all the Hawai’ian music we hear is accompanied by
guitars and/or ukuleles — not
parts of Hawai’i’s native traditions but brought to the islands by Mexicans who
came to work there in the early 19th century. It’s also amazing that
the kids sing the old Hawai’ian national anthem and salute the Hawai’ian flag —
which has the Union Jack in the upper left corner, reminding us that the first
whites to “discover” Hawai’i were the British and they would likely have
annexed it to the British Empire if we hadn’t grabbed it first. In some ways Kumu
Hina is a pretty straightforward (maybe not
the greatest word I could have picked there) entry in the growing repertoire of
documentaries about Queer-accepting (and particularly Trans-accepting) native
traditions that have been steamrollered by whites with their damned sky-god
religions and attitude of moral superiority (there’s even a grimly funny bit
when Hema comments on life in the U.S. that “all anyone cares about is money”),
though Kumu Hina herself is a fascinating character and comes across as an
inspiring mixture of personal charm and gritty determination — a postscript
says that she ran for a seat on the council that administers the Office of
Hawai’ian Affairs, though it doesn’t say (and I haven’t been able to find out
online) whether or not she won.
