 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. OK, we're back. We're live. Wow, Community Matters. Richard Kennedy. Richard Kennedy is the interim director of the Mission House, Mission Houses, Historical Site and Archives. And he joins us today to talk about what they do. And I have been involved as a patron and an attendee in their program. So I'm very excited to have him here. Good to be here. Thank you for coming down, Richard. Happy to be here. Now, Richard was an archivist at the right term at the Smithsonian Institution. Well, I was at the Smithsonian Institution for about 20 years at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Actually, I was a curator. And I was the director of the office for a while. So the connection here in Hawaii, though, is we did a big festival about Hawaii in 89. At the Smithsonian Station. At Smithsonian. So we brought 120 people from all the communities to the National Mall and the governor and the senators and everyone was there. And we had an extraordinary experience. Is it fair to say the Smithsonian Institution is interested in Hawaii? Absolutely. There is, of course, a Native American museum there. And there is always involvement there with the Native Hawaiian community. And we have featured Hawaii and featured Hawaiian artists since then, since 89. So we're really pleased. And I think the stories of Hawaii are fascinating and important to the story that Smithsonian's trying to tell about the United States and world culture. Yeah, sure. Culture and all the social stuff we have here. We have a remarkable place, don't you think? Remarkable place. And I think one of the stories that we've always tried to tell in the festival in the United States and around the world is about the diversity. And I think because Hawaii has been a minority, majority culture for 100 years, that I think this is a story of the future of the United States. And so I think we looked at that program even 27, eight years ago as where the United States is going. And what has Hawaii done well? And they've done a lot of things very well. And so that's part of the story that we're trying to tell. Yeah, they should pay more attention to us. They could learn from us down here today. I think so. So now you have the opportunity to come over here and be the interim director of the Mission Houses. So why did you take that? I mean, what interests of you about it? Was it something you could refuse but didn't? Was something you could not refuse? Oh, you're good with the question. Well, there were some persuasive board members. There's no doubt. I have been here retired for about seven or eight years and I have loved my retirement. I've been on a lot of boards and been active, but had some time to myself to read books and not report on them. So, but they came to me. And of course I've known the Mission Houses and I've always had an engagement in Hawaiian history. And so I was happy to do it. And so I am happy to be working on these things and learning an awful lot in the process. Learning is so important in what you do. Yeah, absolutely. It has to be lifelong learning for sure. Well, it is that. And I am learning a lot from my colleagues and from the books and things that we produce. Every time I see you at the Mission House programs, I see how engaged you are. Happy, if you will. Yeah. Learning every step of the way. Yeah, yeah, I'm doing that. And I really, I treasure it for sure. Yeah. Any engagement here in Hawaii is important. Well, it is a treasure, I must say. So let's talk about what it does. You have the Mission Houses. Yes. What are they? Okay, there are three houses that are there, 1821, 1831, and 1841. These are the houses of the missionaries that we interpret that story. We particularly interpret a story from 1821 when the missionaries first came to 1863 when those houses were part of the missionary effort. And after that, they became single, individual missionaries. By individual missionaries living there. Living in, yeah. So we have that story. We have tours. It's right next to Kauai Hau Church. Right next to Kauai Hau. Is there some connection there historically? Yes, actually the Missionary Cemetery is part of Kauai Hau, but that is actually our cemetery, that's part of the Mission Children's Society, Hawaiian Mission Children's Society. But we also have an archive and it is a very important Hawaiian archive. It has the largest collection of Hawaiian language books in the world and a lot of Hawaiian materials. And I think anyone working in 19th century Hawaii comes through our archive and library. You mentioned before the show that it was established as such in 1852. The society was started officially in 1852 and gradually the houses were opened. It became a private non-profit. Of course the archive materials have always been there. The collections have always been there, the house furniture and that sort of thing. But I think it's really what I have seen in the last 10 years is this move to do public programs, to work on programs that underscore the story about how the missionaries and the Ili'i, the Hawaiian Ili'i worked together on a lot of different projects and how in some ways they both needed each other and they both saw, you know, what I see and what I hear is I think a really important image is that two very sophisticated groups of people came together at a time to create some very important things in the 1820s and 30s and 40s. So as much as we can tell that story and then try again to make connections between the Hawaiian community and the rest of the state, that's what the public programs are trying to do. What two groups came together? Well, it would be the New England Missionaries and the Hawaiian Ili'i who were here in Hawaii. And they really came together very quickly as many of you probably know. Within 10 years there were 1,000 schools, there was literacy. Education was such a big thing. And that is one of the stories that we are trying to tell. We have five themes that we are trying to talk about the connections between the Ili'i and those include literacy, of course, because it became one of the most literate places in the world within 15, 20 years, Hawaii did, on the basis of the schools and the education. And we're looking at music, new music systems were created between the two. Medical systems, you know, it was New England medicine but it was New England medicine with wow, la-pa-ow. I mean, they were working together to think these things out. And there is the constitution and that was very much a work, an effort between the Ili'i to figure out constitutional principles from America, but how it's gonna work in Hawaii. So these sort of connections are very important. You mentioned that this has had a blossoming effect in the past, what, 10, 15 years at the mission houses. And I wonder, is that part of the Native Hawaiian resurgence, interest in culture, interest in Native Hawaiian things, or is that some other lodger feature? I think it is, I think it's a perfect, it is a great place to tell the story. And I think the efforts of staff and board members who really see that this is a place that this can be told and maybe not any place else or as well, a very focused story. So we're trying to do public programs. We do melees on the in the back. We are doing actually the next two weekends. We're doing 12th night, which is Shakespeare in Pigeon. And the missionaries had Shakespeare books in their libraries. They taught their kids Shakespeare. So it's that kind of story, but in Pigeon. And as you know from the cemetery theater, stories about historic characters, living history characters who come alive and talk to the public. And that's what we do every June. Why is it important for the public to understand, the public here in Hawaii, why is it important for them to understand what happened in the 19th century, especially actually the first half of the 19th century? Why should they come down? Why should they see the melee? Why should they see the cemetery programs? Well, I think first of all, we're teaching history. So whether it is specifically this story of the elite and the missionaries come together, the cemetery programs, which are in the Oahu Cemetery, are really featuring stories about the environment. So we would have five or six characters in Hawaiian history. This isn't necessary. And some of them Hawaiian, some of them howlies. The one that you attended, and we just had, was called Yesterday's News. And it was all about newspapers. And you know why that, you know, people were asking, well, four out of the five characters were Hawaiian in that, you know, are you featuring Hawaiians here? And what we're really featuring is that in the last 10 years, 15 years as well, there is so much new information coming out about Hawaiian history, coming out of Hawaiian language newspapers. There's a whole generation of great scholars who are reading Hawaiian. And this is changing the whole idea. I mean, to have second hand stories, this is the real stuff. And so it came out of newspapers. So we were trying to feature that story on every side. You know, there were Hawaiians on every side of the story and howlies on every side of the story. But really, I think this opportunity there where you have a living theater, a person coming out of their grave and often turns around, talks to 20 people. And in these evenings, you go to five different places and hear the stories of five different characters. Would you say it's a successful program? I would say so. We were sold out all the time. I mean, we just, we had to turn away people. So I think people, of course, are interested in history. We have some great texts that are talking about it. But I think these kind of timely stories where you can talk about the importance of all this Hawaiian language material that's coming up and our project from last year, which was the Letters of the Aliti. And this was the translation of all these letters that really showed how the missionaries and the Aliti were communicating with each other, talking to each other, working things out together. And then these letters are all in Hawaiian. So it was a translation project by Phuket Noblemeyer and his organization, Oiaulu, that we featured and it's all online. So that's the other thing, of course, we're all doing. We're getting as much of our archive online and the Hawaiian language material. It's available, making such a rich panoply of things. I mean, that's very clear. If I can take a moment to describe my own experience. So I've been down in the past two of them and it is such an interesting experience. You have to go. You really must go. And it's not easy to get seats because sometimes it's sold out. It's at Oahu Cemetery. There's food. There is? It's a Cemetery Pupu Theater. Oh, is that right? It's Pupus. Well, you can make dinner out of it and you can get a glass of wine too. And then you go off, trundle off into the cemetery. Now, most people in today's cultural world, they're not particularly comfortable with trundling off into the cemetery, especially at night, but it's marvelous because the cemetery has a special feeling. And one person explained to us a time or two ago that cemeteries used to be, and maybe in some sense they still are, of a place of conviviality, of a joyful reunion with your decedent family where you brought picnic lunch and sat by the gravestone and enjoyed the company of your decedent family. And... Very good. You listened to me. That's what I was telling in the introduction. Thank you very much. So it's really marvelous to feel that, to feel it all around you. And then what happens is you go out into the cemetery, there's these canopies at five stations and you walk to, there are disparate places around the cemetery, you have to do some walking. Then you walk down to one of these sort of station number five and there's somebody sitting in a chair and he's facing away from the canopies, facing away from the group and he's at a gravestone somewhere. And at the precise moment, he stands up or she and turns around and addresses you in really well-written prose. You have a great writer. Well-acted prose, because he's an actor. They really are actors. And they're dressed in a costume and to tell you who they are and the kinds of life they led and what I really, really enjoyed, I don't know if I've told you this before, but I really enjoyed is the guy over here, okay? Talks about the guy over there at the far end of the cemetery and about they got along or didn't get along. So you have a community, historical community that spans a hundred years in the cemetery and they're all talking to you. Yeah, yeah. Well, two of those characters, one of them was John Papa E. It might have been the first person you saw and then Samuel Kamakau. And they disagreed on quite a few things and the point we were trying to make is that John Papa E, who was a great Hawaiian and one of the embodiment of this greatest of two traditions, was there. He saw these things. Samuel Kamakau for those who sometimes have read some Hawaiian history, he wasn't there, he's reporting on secondhand. So we have, and their stories are different. So we have that kind of story, but we have all this from the Hawaiian newspapers and from the English language. It's very well researched. Yeah, very, very well researched. That's our curatorial staff and that's also drawing on that archive. That archive can provide a basis for these great programs. It brings the archive to life. And when you sit there and you see them, they're real people, they're perspiring, they're animating, they're so involved. These actors are really terrific. You feel you are learning more about that period than you ever knew before. You're learning the flesh and blood of it, the daily grind of it. You're learning how the community worked in those days. Let's take a short break. You can think about that and we'll come back and we'll talk about some of the things that we did learn in the cemetery. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower, and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Okay, we're back. I told you we'd come back. We were lost there in meandering in the cemetery for a little while. So, okay, so you learned. I mean, some of the characters are really unforgettable characters and they're all real. And somebody went to the trouble of researching everything they said and did. And as you mentioned, this one that recently, you're not, you're finished with it now. It's over. Yeah, finished with that one, yeah. But it was about newspapers. It was about literacy. Yesterday's news about literacy. And you get the feeling after a while, talking to or hearing from a lot of these actors who were portraying real people, that the newspaper was such a big deal in Hawaii. It was part of that literacy initiative you talked about. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm thinking now, when I started at Smithsonian, the secretary of Smithsonian looked at, and this was in the 70s, and I didn't start until the 80s, but he looked back in the 70s, and he looked at this huge 20 museums and he said, what's going on? This feels old. This feels stuffy. The one image he said is there was a violin in a case. And he said, take out the violin and let it sing. And so this is what we were committed to and Smithsonian's committed to is all these collections, all these archives, they aren't there just for collecting, collecting dust. They are there for telling stories and bring them out. And you know, if something happens to them, I'm a bad curator here, you know, so be it. But so the archive, that's exactly what we're doing is, you know, bring this stuff out of the archive. And there are such moving things we have in that archive, the stories that some of the materials there, I don't remember his first name, Alan the escaped slave who set up a bar in the 1810s. We have his letter where he wrote back to his owner because he escaped the owner and said, my dear friend, I remember fondly pulling your son around in a, and I'm doing quite well here. I'm sorry to admit I have two wives, but the gentleman across the street from New England has eight, and this is in beautiful script. This is 1820s, I mean, so anyway, the stories go on and on, but it really is how do we make these stories sing, you know, that's what's exciting about this archive. That's beautiful to do that. And we hear so much that is more recent history or history that has been summarized and formula-ized. This is the real deal, when you meet people, and you know, I always stand around after the actor has finished and I ask him questions. I ask him questions about the character that he has studied and he answers me. Oh, I know, yeah, well actually there was one story, it was a woman and it was one of the talk after and she was sitting there and someone asked her, and how many children did you have? And she looked over at the curator and said, hmm, Michael, how many children did I have? So they don't know everything about, you know, they know their script, but anyway we, someone does, yeah. Yeah, and you had a program afterward where everybody could come to the theater there in the cemetery, I guess you don't call it, you call it something else. Chapel, I think. Chapel, and ask any question you wanted about how the actors, you know, managed their roles and got into their subjects, it was very, very, very interesting. And we all sort of followed them into the subject. We all became part of that whole kind of examination. Yeah, no, it's great and it offers that talk back, we call it, and that opportunity to be part of the process. Well that's the thing, to make it come alive and it did come alive and it became alive both times that I went down there and I'm so happy I went and I'll go every time you do it. Good, all right. You're doing it. So let's talk about the Shakespeare now, it's coming up pretty soon. Right, right. What have you been doing in Shakespeare at the Mission House? Well, right now, actually the next weekend and the weekend after we have 12th night or whatever. And 12th night. Did you say whatever? Whatever. He said whatever. That's our, this was actually written by James Benton in the 70s. And it was, most of all the text is from Shakespeare but written in pigeon. And so the whole story, you know, she washes the shore, the whole story of the 12th night is there but in pigeon. And we had the first weekend and the audiences loved it, I have to say. And they, the audience got more of it than I did. I mean, I had to listen closely, you know, I'm a newbie here. But the audiences just loved it. You just told me. Oh, well, you know. Anyway, so that is, again. So the essence of this is you're looking at Shakespeare, you're looking at the 12th night through the lens of Hawaiian pigeon and Hawaiian culture, am I right? Right. And so all the images we actually had a Korean festival going on at the same time so they rift on that because you could kind of hear it there, they came, they come in on a bikey. So, you know, they were updated and I think even as they were doing rehearsals. But the references were all local and it's great, very, very inventive and very, very. A moment in the venue. We went to gentlemen, two gentlemen from Toronto last year. A moment on the venue. This is all in the shadow, the shade of two huge banyan trees there at the back of the Mission House. In the back of the Mission House, this is our stage there, our welcoming place. It's really perfect. Yeah, it is. Because it's the theater in the circle, I guess. Yeah. And the audience is drawn into the action. Right. It's there in the evening, gentle breezes and palm trees and stars, Shakespeare under the stars. If you want to recite any of that, you go ahead. Oh, no, I'm a little mistaken in that in my career. I didn't know the basics of Shakespeare. So why do you do the Shakespeare program? Well, I think certainly it's in part because it was a part of, it sort of rounds out the image of the missionaries. If you have an image of missionaries, they have a big beard and they're gruff and they're rough. And some of that story is there. But they loved Shakespeare. They were also very educated people for their time. And coming from New England, they had gone to college. They took the Bible and translated it into Hawaiian. They didn't take it from English. They took it from the Greek and the Aramaic. They spoke Greek and Aramaic, the people working on the translation. And they were working very closely with the Hawaiians very early on in this translation. Remember, they came from Yale. They were seriously educated. They came from Yale and Williams and Colby and seriously educated and then and over theological seminary. So they were, I think, some of them were farmers' kids but with a good education. And of course, the elite were the cream of the educated in Hawaiian systems people. And this meeting of these two peoples was fortuitous and positive, you know, mostly. And look what happened. I mean, they became very educated. I remember, and this was not limited to Oahu either. This was state-wide, island-wide. I remember one of my partners came from Maui and his father was a teacher in Maui High School. And he was an English teacher. And somehow, and this was consistent with the tradition in that school, he committed enormous verses from Shakespeare to memory. And he could cite and quote Shakespeare all day long if that's what you wanted. I think we have forgotten that. I don't think they do that anymore. But I think it was in the culture to do that. Yes, it was in that culture. And in Hawaiian culture, you imagine the power of people to memorize and repeat. And I did hear in there, maybe the Hawaiians became educated. The Hawaiians were hugely educated in their own system and the Ali'i were hugely educated. And we have to respect that and understand this is two educational systems coming together and learning from each other. But, you know, the power of memory, I lived in India for a long time and I know something about those sort of monotonic traditions in which people memorize entire Veda, which is thousands of books. And Hawaiians had that same skill, many most oral cultures do, but it was extremely important culture and important tradition. And yes, they came together. They probably shared that very much is those memory systems. Well, that's one of the things I got out of the trip to the cemetery most recently. Namely that in the first half of the 19th century, it was transformational. They had come from a time where there were no hallies around, no Yale, none of that. No Yale, no. And all of a sudden, they were all thrust into this synthesis of cultures. And it was remarkable in the sense that it was changing so fast. And I don't think we realize how Hawai'i became essentially globalized all within a few decades. Very, very quickly. And it was sailors and seamen who were coming through. And that, in a lot of cases, was disastrous, was particularly disastrous. And by the time the missionaries were coming and in the 1810s, they saw the disaster happening. I mean, the deaths of so many Hawaiians and the fragility of the environment. And I think they did look at the missionaries as an elite of a sort that maybe could help and they could maybe help in this process. They realized Hawai'i was gonna be open to the world and maybe this group of people could help in that transition. And it was helping. Certainly in terms of literacy and these things, there was a lot of help. A constitution already. And a constitution by 1840. Yeah, that's one of the books where we're gonna be translating that and look at that whole process of how did William Richards and his Hawaiian colleagues take this sort of American document of constitutional law and make it a Hawaiian document. And that process is fascinating because they really made it a Hawaiian document, relevant here. So that'll be pretty interesting. We think those were sleepy times, but they weren't sleeping. Everything was being transformed. 1848 to Great Mahaley. This was huge, huge social change like that. Huge, huge, yeah. So I wanted to get in the last minute or so of our time. I wanted to get into the depth of your archives there. Where did you get the collections from? What do they include? How can I access them? Well, you can, you should call first, but we have open archive, which is open four days a week. Most of the day, 10 to five. A lot of other archives are harder to get into, but we do have an open archive calling John Barker, who is our archivist. We don't wanna flood of people because he's a busy man as well, but those materials, a lot of them are from the missionary families and from documents that they had. Many of them, as I said, in Hawaiian. And of course, all the Hawaiian books because they were all printed right here or in Lahainaluna. And so these books are critical and there they are. So that's why we have the largest collection of Hawaiian books, Hawaiian language. When they were printing Hawaiian books up through the 19th century, that sort of stopped. And it's fortunately happening again. So you're a private non-profit 508c3, but a parallel kind of collection would be with the state, the state archives. What about as your collection compared with the state's collection? Well, I'm sure we have a lot more Hawaiian materials, a lot more Hawaiian books, certainly. And our scope does not go into the 20th century. Our materials are really from the 19th century and we weren't collecting at that point. We are not collecting at this point unless things come to us. But collections of the missionary families that are in the back of some storage bin and someone finds it and brings it our way and there are surprises galore. So there's still a lot of surprises out there, I think. And those materials are coming to us and we're going through them as we can. Wonderful. Well, it's alive and well, isn't it? It is. Breathing vitality into it every day, every weekend. Yeah. When's the next Oahu cemetery program? That won't be till June. So we do that once a year in June and we do the sacred once a year in August and then throughout the year there's the melee. So there'll be a melee in October and that was a joyous event just last month. We had, you know, nice big crowd and two of our employees now are actually performers. So we're, you know. They really took it serious. Well, we took them seriously too because they're great employees as well as being great singers. So how do I learn more? What's your website and can I sign up for things on it? Yes, well, we're Hawaii Mission Houses and that's where you get tickets for sure. That's where you get tickets for all of the programs. We would welcome anyone to come and be a member. We have a pretty large membership. We would welcome donations of all sorts. You're supported by public donations and to some extent by grants and aid. Yes, exactly. That's where all of our support comes from. We don't have any regular support coming in but we get different grants from the state and from foundations here and then from individuals. And so we welcome your support, please. Well, it's important that we keep you supported and that, you know, we allow you to prosper in terms of your bringing these archives alive and giving us a new look at Hawaiian history. It's an important moment in Hawaiian history and if we can carry that moment into the future where people are at a certain working together, that's part of the story of what we're trying to tell now. Maybe we should call this show, the Mission Houses are alive and well in the cemetery. The cemetery is alive and well. And you are absolutely right. People went up there to picnic and sort of reflect on their history but they have a good time. That was a 19th century thing. So it's not a creepy place necessarily. That's a good time. Yeah. Thank you, Richard. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Aloha.