Hawaii lost another powerful voice yesterday with the passing of Haunani-Kay Trask.
I met Haunani sometime around 1976 or 1977, not long after she returned to Hawaii. She was finishing a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and had stopped in at the small downtown office of the Hawaiian Coalition of Native Claims, the predecessor of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, where I had come by to see its director, Gail Kawaipuna Prejean. We all spent the next several years heavily involved in efforts to stop the Navy’s bombing of the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe.
When I told my mother of meeting Haunani, she put our meeting in context.
We weren’t related, although sometimes it felt we must have been. My mom, Helen Yonge, and one of Haunani’s aunts, Nina Cooper, were in the same Class of 1931 as boarding students at Kamehameha School for Girls. A small item in the Honolulu Advertiser announcing the graduation of the Kamehameha Class of 1931 reported Cooper was valedictorian, while my mom was senior class president.
They then went through the University of Hawaii together, and were both on the first UH women’s swim team in 1933, when they won the 200 yard relay in the AAU Hawaiian Championship.
lft to right: B. Nicoll, Helen Yonge, G. Cooper, Libana Furtado, and J. Bains-Jordan. “In the AAU Swimming Meet, held this year at the Punahou swimming tank, the women’s relay swimming team…won the 200 yard relay Hawiian Championship race. They received their letters in sthe sport for this win.
Cooper later married Leo Lycurgus, son of “Uncle” George Lycurgus of Volcano House fame. Nina and Leo operated the Hilo Hotel for many years, and it was a regular stop for our family when we traveled to the Big Island back in my small kid days. When my mom died in 2013, I found correspondence she and Nina had exchanged over much of their long lives.
My mother’s Hawaiian ancestors lived in the Hana area, as did Haunani’s maternal family. When Meda and I were first married and returned to Hawaii to enter graduate school, my mother took us on a tour of Maui and Hawaii Island. On Maui, we visited Hana, and made a special visit to the home of another of Haunani’s aunts who, as I recall, lived in the family home with one of her brothers. My main recollection of that visit a half century ago was the sense of awe at the incredible collection of Hawaiiana on display in cabinets around the living room.
So while we weren’t related, we were surrounded by these family ties. Later, when we lived in Kaaawa, Haunani was living in Heeia. Many mornings, we would stop and pick her up, since she and Meda were both heading to the university.
That’s all to say that, at different times and different ways, our lives intersected. I have to admit we clashed at times over silly things. One I can remember vividly was where to have dinner to properly celebrate Meda’s birthday. She thought a “nice” restaurant would be the place, whereas I’m congenitally cheap and literally had trouble imagining spending that much for a single meal. It was, like other similar occasions, a disagreement among friends. That much is for sure.
The oldest trace of Haunani in my records was her article on statewide hearings regarding Kahoolawe, which appeared in Vol. 1, Number 1 of the Aloha Aina Newsletter dated June 1978 (you’ll find it beginning on page 3).
I also found this video excerpt from one of the First Friday public access cable programs she did with David Stannard and her sister, Mililani, this one on the occasion of the publication of her book of essays, “From a Native Daughter.” It can be viewd on the website of ‘Ulu’ulu, The Henry Giugni Moving Image Archive of Hawaii.
