Last Updated on April 10, 2025
Unfortunately, I grew up surrounded by American popular culture that taught me to be afraid of ghosts. The ghosts on TV and in the movies were not like people I knew. On my favorite cartoon show Scooby-Doo and Shaggy were always running away from the ghoul who was out to get them. The ghosts were named things like Ebenezer Crabbe, Mamba Wamba, or the Headless Horseman. (There were no Ebenezers or Mambas in my second-grade class, nor in my family.) And in the choose-your-own-adventure and horror-stories-for-kids books that I loved to read between classes or on long car rides, the supernatural was always frightening, associated with brutal murders, mysterious kidnappings, or tortured hauntings. Bloody knives. Prom dresses saturated with embalming fluid. Spirits out for revenge. It is no wonder that I was afraid of the dark and what night might bring.
Colonial violence aims to sever relationships. My own paralyzing fearfulness of ghosts and the alienation that caused between me and my ancestors is just one example of the violence that colonialism does to our spirits and, consequently, to our families and nations. Once my grandmother told me a story about her sister being pushed off the couch by a spirit during her nap. I automatically envisioned a harmful, belligerent ghost who was laying in wait until my aunty had fallen asleep. I could not imagine any other possibilities. Like, perhaps it was her deceased great-grandmother kicking her lazy butt off the couch to do the chores, tend to the family graves, or complete some other important task. Perhaps it was her younger sister who died a premature death but still wanted to play. Maybe she was giggling from behind the couch. These possibilities never even entered my mind because of the way my imagination had been saturated by pop cultural images of ghosts as dangerous and strange.
This fear of the supernatural gripped me so tightly as a child that one evening I was sitting with my grandmother and I asked her to promise me that when she died she would not show herself to me in spirit form. I told her it would scare me too much. She hugged me tight and agreed, “of course, my dear.” Today, there is no request that I regret more in my life than this thing I asked of my grandmother. Just six or seven years old, I was too young to recognize the structural violence that was shaping my plea.
My grandmother has always honored my naïve request and has never appeared to me during my waking hours since her death. But, we never made any agreements about my dreams.
* * * *
If Indigenous resurgence is enacted on an individual level, one warrior at a time, then dreaming can be one method of seeking personal healing and inspiration. For years after my grandmother’s death, I had a recurring dream that I was running through the brightly-lit hallways of Kaiser Moanalua hospital, looking frantically for her room but never finding her in time to say goodbye. She had been quietly suffering from diabetes for years, never wanting to see a doctor. When we finally took her in, she needed to have one of her feet amputated. Just as we were making plans for how she would be able to get around our two-story town home, she took a turn for the worst. I was swimming laps at school when my high school PE teacher stopped me and dad rushed us over to the hospital. We didn’t make it in time. And so, I had been searching for her, crying and running in my dreams for years afterward.
Finally she appeared. She was lying on one of the beds in our house, reassuring me that she was fine. My grandfather, the love of her life who died well before my birth, walked into the bedroom. He hugged me, just as she had a few moments earlier. Then he walked over to her, picked her up and carried her over the threshold. They passed through the doorway like a young couple entering their new home for the very first time together.
This dream helped me to heal years of heartache about not getting to say goodbye and not fully expressing how much I loved my grandmother before she passed into the next realm. She was always one to keep a promise. She could not come to me in my waking hours. So, she came to me instead when I was asleep, just like the many times she had massaged my limbs, or stroked my forehead until I drifted off, feeling safe and attended by her. From then on, I began to take my dreams more seriously, to pay attention to them. They gave me a way to begin reconnecting with ancestors from whom I had been estranged by colonial fears.
Schooling does not encourage us to write our dreams down, to take our dreams seriously, to share them with others, to talk about and interpret them. This is a form of colonial violence, a way of dismissing ancestral connection and Indigenous epistemologies. Dreaming is not just an off-loading of unnecessary information, the brain purging that which it does not need. Kanaka Maoli and many other Indigenous people have always known that dreaming is a valid way of knowing and communicating.
American-style English language teaches us to think about dreams in a simplistic and binary way: either good or bad, dreams or nightmares. In the Hawaiian language, the general word for a dream is moeʻuhane. Moe refers to sleeping or lying down, and ‘uhane can be translated as spirit. We also have specific words for all kinds of dreams: erotic, portending, recollected, and many more. Dreams are often sources for naming children. Our kūpuna Hawai‘i taught that dreaming opens portals to different ways of being and perceiving, ways to which we do not have immediate access when we are awake. While the body rests, the spirit can travel. Dreams can be bridges for crossing from one island to another one across the archipelago. They can be ways to speak across generations.
* * * *
If Indigenous resurgence is enacted on collective levels, in families and communities, then certain dreams might be shared and collectively interpreted. For many, many years now my people have been fighting the desecration of our highest mountain and elder sibling, Mauna a Wākea (popularly known as Mauna Kea), by the construction of a massive, industrial astronomy complex, which includes the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This fight escalated in October 2014 when international investors and dignitaries gathered on our sacred summit for a ground-breaking ceremony for the TMT. Several kānaka aloha ‘āina, people who are devoted in love for our land, blocked the roadway and disrupted the ground-breaking ceremony. Several performed their own Native ceremonies to reaffirm the sacredness of our mountain—the place where Papa, our earth mother, and Wākea, our sky father, touch.
Mauna a Wākea is a place where many Hawaiian families have buried the piko, or umbilical cords, of newly-born babies for countless generations. Similarly, the mountain itself is a piko for us a nation. Scholar of Hawaiian literature and orature, Kīhei de Silva, reminds us that Mauna Kea and the wonderous Lake Waiau near the summit are recognized by our ancestors as “ka piko o Wākea . . . ka hena o nā kuahiwi” (the connecting point to Wākea. . . the mountains’ mons pubis), as “ka wai kapu a Lilinoe” (the sanctified water of goddess-ancestress Lilinoe), and as “ka piko lālāwai o nā mana‘o” (the fertile center of thought and desire).[1] Additionally, the mountain is part of the 1.8 million acres of Hawaiian national lands that were illegally grabbed by the US when it began its ongoing occupation of my homeland and country in 1898.
When trucks ascended the mountain this spring, in the Hawaiian season of Kū (god of politics and war), more kānaka aloha ʻāina engaged in a blockade to stop them from beginning construction of the TMT. On 2 April 2015, 31 protectors of the mauna were arrested by police forces of the settler state—the State of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi county governments. That night, while my body lay in bed on Oʻahu, I had a moeʻuhane that took me to an open plain. Wākea was stretched out in his great expanse. As I slept, I told myself: “I must remember this dream.” I ran through the images over and over for the next few days, until I finally had a quiet moment to write it all down. With my 8-month-old son sleeping on my chest, I tapped a description out with the keys on my phone. What came flooding out was the following poem:
Pō
glistening black
wide night sky
earth beneath my feet
I’m captivated
head cocked back
eyes fixed above.
Silvery clouds rush across a passage
swiftly, silently on winds
high above
swirling and dancing across
from left to right with an urgent speed
at a point immediately overhead
they strike a pose
briefly hold a formation
a design
familiar
old yet new
I stare
trying to figure out
what
who.
A sudden purposeful jolt
s/he pulls back
gathering up form,
mass,
mana
materialized
stylized
sacred
carved lines, shapes
cloud like wood and
pō, the grooved spaces.
There is no mistaking
a dog
two-headed
barking, fearless
protector
Kū
standing, shaking, shaping
air and earth
Kiaʻi
fierce with booming voice
Mauna
larger than life
out of the deep darkness
and ready.
Feeling that this dream was not for me alone, I crowd-sourced interpretations of this moeʻuhane through Facebook and face-to-face conversations with friends and family. The dog’s two-headedness puzzled me most. Dogs appear in many of our cultural stories and a few of our akua (gods) and kupua (demigods or heros) are known to take dog forms. But, to my knowledge, we do not have two-headed animals or beasts in our moʻolelo (histories and stories).
Many possible interpretations of this two-headedness came forward in my exchanges with friends and family. Perhaps it represents the masculine and feminine energies, powerful when joined together as a two-spirited being. Perhaps it represents two mountains. Both Mauna Kea and Haleakalā on the neighboring island of Maui are being threatened by massive telescope construction projects. Perhaps it represents the two-pronged approach of resistance to the desecration of Mauna Kea, one taking a legal route to challenge the project in settler state courts and the other taking a direct action approach by standing on the mountain and physically blocking the vehicles there to do destruction. Perhaps it represents the uprising of our nation as whole. In the past year we have seen two major groundswells of everyday Kānaka speaking up: first against settler state recognition and second against construction on the piko of our archipelago. When the US Department of Interior held hearings on multiple islands about a proposed rule-making process for US federal recognition, the vast majority of Kānaka who testified at every meeting firmly told the DOI panel: go back to Washington, thanks. We don’t need your recognition. We want our independence. And now, as I write, Kānaka across the archipelago are spontaneously organizing expressions of aloha ʻāina and flooding social media with images and commentary using the hastags #TMTshutdown, #KuKiaiMauna, #ProtectMaunaKea and #WeAreMaunaKea.
The truth I have come to realize is that the dog’s two-headedness is all of these things at once. It is also a reminder that we must cultivate two minds to receive the ‘ike (knowledge, sight) of the pō (night) and the ‘ike of the ao (day). We need to exercise and hone both of these heads, both of these minds, if we are to be fierce and effective protectors of our sacred places.
Just like our Mauna, our dreams are piko. Moeʻuhane are convergences, in which ancestors can bring messages or deliver new souls. Colors can be smelled. Skies can bleed. Arms can give us flight. Hawaiian language and education scholar, Maya Saffery, was the first person I heard talk and write about piko as points of convergence. A piko can be the generative connection of distinct elements: the umbilical cord, the genitals, a border, a summit.
As of this writing, I have not yet been able to get up to Mauna a Wākea to join the resurgence of my lāhui at the piko of our ea (life, sovereignty, breath, rising). I have participated in rallies, hearings and ceremonies on Oʻahu in support of the blockade, but I haven’t been able to get on a plane to Hawaiʻi island. Yet, I have dreamt it. My body has not been to the Mauna in three years, but my ʻuhane has made the pilgrimage as the great protector spirit rises.
So, this is a call to dream. To meditate on your moeʻuhane. To write them. To share them when it feels right. To invite your loved ones to do the same. To consider the possibilities for collective interpretation. If, as Jeff Corntassel says, Indigenous resurgence in its everyday-ness is about remembering, restorying, reinterpreting, reconnecting to past and future generations, relating to one another to maintain continuity and wholeness as a people, then dreaming can be an everyday act of resurgence.
[1] https://apps.ksbe.edu/kaiwakiloumoku/kaleinamanu/he-aloha-moku-o-keawe/maunakea_o_kalani. Accessed 16 April 2015.
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