 I'm Marsha Joyner and we are navigating the journey. Navigating the journey is dedicated to exploring the options and choices for the end of life care. And to assist people to talk about their wishes, it's time to transform our culture so we shift from not talking about dying to talking about it. It's time to share the way we want to live our lives at the end of our lives. And it's time to communicate about what kind of care we want and don't want for ourselves. We believe that the place for this to begin is not in the Intensive Care Unit. But together we can explore the various paths to life's ending. Together we can make the difficult conversations easier. Together we can make sure that our own wishes and those of our loved ones are expressed and respected. So if you're ready to join us, we ask, navigate the journey. As you know, we have invited members of various religions and traditions to talk about the end of life customs in their culture. So much of what we think comes from our family narrative, our stories, our history. So much is lost when we do not pass our family stories. Here today when everyone has a smartphone and people talk in 140 characters, today's guest is one of my favorite writers of history. Tom is recipient of the Hawaii Award for Literature, three times recipient for the Hawaii Publishers Award for Best Nonfiction. And he has been recognized for excellence in research, writing, reporting, and filmmaking and continues to make contributions in his field of interest, which is Hawaii and Pacific History issues. Our guest, my dear friend Tom Kauffman, Aloha Tom. I am so glad that you're here. This is a real pleasure. And for our audience, you can see that when Tom becomes real worldwide, my library becomes worth a million dollars because I have everything, I think, I think, I think. This one, well, let's talk about first the first battle. Tell me about that because this is such a part of our history here in Hawaii. In fact, everything here is a part of our history in Hawaii. Tell me about this one. Well, that one-hour PBS documentary film was about the network of people, the relatively small network of people who got together before World War II out of concern for what a war between Japan and the United States would mean to our community. And they gradually formulated the two goals, basically, maximum involvement of Hawaii's people in a war effort as American citizens and minimizing or altogether warding off mass internment. And so the film is about them and about how that played out during the war, the power of having a, the power of relationships, I think, the power of interracial relationships, and the power of having a preconceived plan for what you might do in crisis. And for everybody, is this on YouTube? I don't know that it is. But you can download it from Amazon. And if you do, there's a prize, my own special prize, if you can find me in the film. No, we're not telling who it is, but if you can find me, trust me, there's a prize. This one, this one is the most beautiful film that I have seen. And as you can tell, it's on this old, what is this called? VHS. VHS. The VHS format. VHS. And PBS runs it, or used to run it, every year on Earth Day. And I think you should update it and air it again, because this was done before we were talking about global warming and climate change. And tell us the title, because I love that story. Okay. The title came from a Hawaiian chant, which I can't recite the words of the chant anymore, but it was, may the heavens live, may the waters live. May the heavens continue to live. May the earth continue to live. May the rain continue to dampen the earth. And may the verdant forest grow and continue to grow and flourish. Thank you. It's such a beautiful piece, and it should be done over and over again. We need to be reminded. So much of this, what I remember about it, we can't even find any more, houses everywhere. The, it's trying, it attempted to revive the link with the forest, and particularly revive the link with the native forest, the native Hawaiian forest, which is very different from the introduced forest. And to, in the process I went, you know, island by island by island, many times, I think we had something like 20 inter-island film expeditions, but on the tops of the mountains of each island is a native forest that is entirely different from what we think of as the forest we see when we drive over the poly. And it is, some of them are 10,000 years old, for example. They function much more efficiently in terms of catching and saving water and helping the water seep down into the aquifer, because they have a complex overstory and an understory and all the ferns and lichens that are down there, which help us, in essence, save water. Much in contrast to a lot of the giant overstory type trees we see now as we're driving around, such as Albezia, for example. Oh dear. Yeah. Well, let's keep going here. Ah, Arirang. I have played this, well I used to, but we don't have the machine anymore, over and over and over till I knew the words. Arirang. Arirang. Arirang. Arirang. Arirang. So this is about the Koreans and their immigration into Hawaii. Into Hawaii. Yeah. And then more broadly into the United States, yeah. So there's two hours, and it was occasioned by the collection of Korean American scholars around the Korean study center at UH, and they began working on this back when in the late 1990s, and they invited me in, and I was sort of the privileged, I was very privileged to do it, but I, it was kind of an inside thing in the sense that we all knew one another, we all had a very high degree of trust, and could ambitiously develop the immense amount of work that went into this. Oh, it shows. Yeah, I mean it was, and here was the thing, Hawaii is the place where Korean America began, and Hawaii has a unique history of involvement with the future of Korean America and also with preserving the nation of Korea during the long period when it was colonized by Imperial Japan. So Hawaii has this very important history, and that was our initial focus. As we worked, we said we cannot ignore the second wave migration in essence, the post-1965 migration to the continental United States, also to Hawaii, but to over two million people in the United States, and all of the achievements and also pain and suffering and what was it? This one, this is, well I think you have to start here before we get to here, so tell us about this one. You want me to go a little faster, I can tell. That's deep history, okay just let's read the subtitle, on Hawaiian, of Hawaii, okay, of Hawaii, from settlement to kingdom. So it begins with the first settlers and takes it all the way up to Kamehameha's kingdom. This one, and somewhere in here, there it is, nation within. Now let's talk about nation within. The next week, July 4, we are going to do a reenactment of the day that the provisional government declares itself the Republic of Hawaii and what it does to the Hawaiian people. Tom has helped immensely with the research, and if it wasn't for Tom I couldn't have written the script, so this book, the amount of research that you have in the book as well as the film, talk about nation within. It was inspired by my research and work with John Dominus Holt, the Hawaiian writer, scholar, and he had basically rediscovered the queen and the overthrow, and he said what we don't know about is what happened between the overthrow of the monarchy and the United States takeover of Hawaii over five years later, and that was sort of a black hole of Hawaii's history. And I believed, I knew enough about it to know that it was enormously important and virtually unknown history, and so it was basically dig and dig and dig. What amazed me about it is the fact that the provisional government in all of their Skull Duggery kept incredible research and papers, they kept everything. All of their dirty work. All their dirty laundry is very carefully organized in the archives of Hawaii. And the fact that they used the state of Mississippi Constitution of 1891 to create their own Constitution. The most notorious document for creating Jim Crow black-white racial segregation was the template for the organization of the so-called Republic of Hawaii. Yeah, where you could, the only people with good votes. And it's all in the archives. They wrote it all. A 22-page memorandum from Lauren Thurston, describing how that adaptation should be made. And where they said that you have to be Anglo-Saxon or of the Teutonic descendants in order to vote. That's it. And then the whole thing is written in English so the Hawaiians can't read it. And I mean, they say that, you know, like, gee, these guys are something. Yeah. But we do invite you to come out on the 4th of July at 9.30 a.m. at the palace where we get to relive that. Now, let's come up today to catch a wave. I want you to see my dog-eared. And you see how old and ragged it is because I use it as a Bible. Everything that we know about the Democratic Party is there, warts and all. And this is what a nice clean cover looks like. But if you don't have, if you haven't read it, you should. Because this brings you up to date from the 50s up to the 70s, I guess, that part of- Instead of the early statehood and the collision of John A. Burns and Tom Gil primarily, but it's Democratic Party and early statehood history and woven around the clash between these two large figures. What I noticed is that you talk about the 1970 election and the issues, that election, are the same as they are today. Have we not progressed? I mean, they talk about the traffic, the lack of housing, people going without. The whole, all of these issues, the only thing different is that we have a rail. But if you read this and didn't know that you were talking about 1970 election, you would think it's the election coming up because these same issues will be there. How much time do we have? We have time. We have time. We have time. And how, let's do this, oh boy, the islands on the edge of America. What a title. It's actually the island edge of America. Oh, the island edge. But it was a self-defeating title. It's complicated. It's a political history. I attempted to make it a political history of most of the 20th century of Hawaii. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, let's talk about the rest of them. Okay. Okay. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, which dreams live on ThinkTechHawaii.com, uploads to YouTube, and broadcasts on cable OC16 and Ollello 54. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Sounds like scuba divers are the poor man's astronaut. At DiveHeart, we believe that to be true. We say forget the moon. DiveHeart can help children, adults, and veterans of all abilities escape gravity right here on Earth. Search DiveHeart.org and imagine the possibilities in your life. So caught up in the confusion, nothing is making sense. I never quite did it. Hi, we're back with my guest, Tom Kaufman. And going through all of this wonderful history of Hawaii. Tom is an award-winner of all of this. Obviously, when you read and you look at all that we have talked about, and Tom's research is incredible. It is like you think you live, talk, and breathe research, do you? I remember one book, I don't remember which one, that you were in D.C. in the archives for months, it seemed. Yeah, it was a long time. It was Nation Within. Nation Within, yeah. Right. And these, how Hawaii changed America, talk about what happened and when. Okay, well, it's a book parallel to the first film we talked about, First Battle. First Battle, yeah. Except that it's a much deeper and more complicated and elongated history. But it covers the subtitle. Finally, I was pretty happy with the subtitle, The Movement for Racial Equality, 1939 to 1942. And then the final version of that book is going to be 1939 to, maybe 1970 even. But with a real emphasis on the crisis of the war and the way that people did work together, at least a good many people did work together to cope with the crisis and prophetically shape a post-war Hawaii based on the principles of maximum participation, inclusion, and equality. Now, a lot of our young people can't imagine a time when Hawaii was discriminatory, when it was racially, everybody was, even the Koreans and the, of course, with the Japanese and the Okinawans and the Chinese and all of these different groups. It's hard to imagine, given today when everybody's married to each other, it's hard to imagine that there was such a time. And it wasn't very long ago, I mean in historic terms it wasn't very long ago, it was maybe 60, 50, 60, 70 years ago, depending on how you count time. The war was 70, you know, 75 years ago or so. So it was maybe three generations. And Hawaii was basically run by a small elite white group and oligarchy. And all of that has changed. I wouldn't say all of that has changed, but I say that is substantially changed into a multi-ethnic society, which is the critical point. Yeah, I remember reading, of course, when we first came here in 1946, we couldn't stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. You know, that was only for white and then they all service people, military, at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. And Fort Shafter was, the 25th infantry was all black. The military was totally segregated and in the book that you gave me, First Strange Place, and that book, they talk about all of the differences and the issues that the Americans had coming to Hawaii, where all of this was new, all of this was different, the people, the language, the look, everything, and how the military insisted on keeping the racial divide. But they had been a part of the overthrow. So the Navy was knee-deep in the overthrow, in the bringing annexation, the whole thing. They were there. The military history, the more I work on it, gets more and more complicated. I think the United States Army played a crucial role in, certainly in the World War II, because there was martial law and because they were instrumental in forming the Japanese-American fighting units, which famously were a transformative. The Navy persisted in being an all-white, racially segregated institution throughout the entire war. So the beginnings of change occurred during the war, and then after the war, it was 1948, there was Truman. Truman issued an executive order integrating the military. Now, even for the July 4 issue of 1894, the Navy played a critical role in making that happen. So they have been a part of this all along. If you think about blue-water navies, if you think about the United States Navy, the Navy is the basis for projection of force into distant places. And so it is inherently a colonial instrument. And that's the way its history played out in Hawaii. Well, we see, what was his name, Mahon? Yeah, Alfred Mahon. Alfred Mahon. And Teddy Roosevelt, together, they had decided that to control the American Empire, they had to control the oceans. Yes. And they did a pretty good job of controlling the oceans. And I think that was one of the key researchers for the nation within. And I really worked hard on their correspondence and the way that through their conversation with one another, they developed a plan, basically, to build the Panama Canal, to build a canal through the Isthmus of the Americas, where it was originally described, because they didn't quite know where they were going to put it. And to be able to then rapidly move the American fleet from one ocean to the other, or distribute it, so that if push came to shove, America could fight a two ocean war. Well, you know, there's, quote, Spanish-American war. They needed Hawaii as a refueling station between the Philippines and Guam, and the mainland. And Hawaii became necessary. That became the catalyst for what was called annexation, was the Spanish-American war. And the reduction of Hawaii to a cooling station between the American West Coast and the distant Pacific. For anybody that doesn't understand, there's this one little caveat. Teddy Roosevelt, the great Teddy Roosevelt, got a peace prize, right? But he's the one that set up the war with Columbia in order to take Panama out of Columbia, create its own country, then he could take the canal through the Panama Canal, through that land. But he gets the peace prize, right? Oh well. Tom, let me tell you, Tom is a jewel, as you can tell. And I absolutely love him. And next week on July 4th, we are doing a reenactment at the palace at 9.30 a.m. on the steps of the palace. And my producer, Scott Foster, Tom Kaufman, and our own Jay Fidel will be part of the cast. So please join us. We look forward to seeing you. Aloha. Thank you, Tom. Aloha. Thank you, Marcia. I'm excited.