Eric Stinton’s recent Civil Beat column, ”Can Settlers Ever Be Pono?” covered a lot of ground, but a key question remained:

How does the righteousness of pono impact everyday lives in Hawaiʻi?

The column explored sweeping concepts like settlers, history and culture, and addressed controversial questions like, “Can haoles be pono?” “Are they all settlers?” And for that matter, is “settler” a proper term?

The pono teachers in the column sound like college professors. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I was proudly one for a long time.

But we profs have our quirks and bad habits. One of them is talking at such a high level that the discussion confuses rather than clarifies. It wanders away, rather than zeroes in.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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I once was part of a group examining students’ concerns about sexual harassment. The discussion turned into a high-level but low-relevance exposition of the link between colonialism and feminism. 

Did it solve the harassment problem? “What problem? Can’t you see we’re busy expounding concepts?”

The pono discussion is too much like thinking you can learn all the important things about a religion simply by looking at its doctrines and not what folks actually do with them.

Everyday life is different. It blurs boundaries, mixes things up, and can’t be explained through encompassing categories or sweeping generalization. “It depends” replaces “That’s not (or is) pono,” or who is qualified and who is not.

“Who is” and “who can be” gets replaced by “what’s going on?” This is where pono’s role is uncertain and to be discovered.

The In-And-Out Role

To orient yourself to this different approach, here’s a story that you’re going to think comes totally out of the blue. It features haoles, not the usual characters in a Hawaiʻi culture story, except maybe as villains.

Recently I went to the funeral of a former University of Hawaiʻi business professor. I didn’t attend the celebration of life that afternoon.

A few days later I ran into a former UH business school dean who did not go to the funeral but went to that celebration instead.

The dean and I are both in our 80s, haole guys married to mainland haole women. Coincidentally, we were both born in Milwaukee, but he has lived and worked in Hawaiʻi for most of the last 80 years while I have been here for over 50.

When I asked him how the celebration went, he smiled and said, “I haven’t seen that many haoles in one place for a long time.”

We laughed, knowing what he meant without having to say it.

A little sarcastic, a little wary, like the joke is a guilty pleasure. But with many layers. Sharing and understanding the joke is part of understanding Hawaiʻi.

It’s a Hawaiʻi thing. I scan a room automatically without thinking, usually in restaurants and even on the continent.

A local Japanese friend, talking to me over coffee about my future move to Portland, joked, ”You know, there are a lot of white people there.”

The same knowing laugh. I told her I was a room scanner. She said she was also. She counted everywhere she went, looking for the number of Asians in the room.

It’s also a Hawaiʻi thing because that scan is not likely to be about fear or discomfort. It’s a trait that the dean and I have absorbed living all these years here — the in-and-out role that difference plays.

Pono? This anecdote is not about pono, at least in the way the recent column discusses pono. It is not about the absence of pono either.

You can’t really exclaim, “Found it, that’s pono.”

Being A Chameleon

I’m pretty sure that some of the important things I’ve absorbed about Hawaiʻi over the years and cherish involve the sense of balance needed for a proper life here. That rough, delicate balance between being an insider and an outsider is reflected in my room-scanning, and somewhere in that mix are pono’s lessons and values.

At the everyday level, life in Hawaiʻi is not about asking if something is pono, or if someone is a local or a settler.

Identity and difference are important. Hawaiʻi definitely is not a small world after all. But so much of life here is about being a chameleon.

Everyday life is about adjusting while at the same time holding on to values and identities you cherish.

A chameleon constantly changes her color to fit the circumstances. That’s the heart of how people live here, whether you are a kanaka maoli, a local or an old guy taking about death and scanning.

Everyday life is about adjusting while at the same time holding on to values and identities you cherish. Pono is part of this, but not the only part. A possible guide, not a hard and fast rule.

Teaching about pono is OK as long as instructors remember how little people learn from teaching and how much they learn in other ways.

Think about pono’s religious and cultural history. As with religious teaching, there’s a wide range in the ways that individuals interpret or accept these lessons, like “this is what pono is” or “that’s not pono.”

Religious teaching is a very powerful guide for some, meaningless for others, and for the rest, something in between.

That’s why teaching pono is just the beginning of a long journey, not the end. The end, at least the temporary end, is everyday life.

Something To Be Discovered

I don’t have an answer to the question about pono’s impact on everyday life or, for that matter, the effect of everyday life on pono. But here’s how to get a better handle on those answers.

Rather than approaching it from a high muckety-muck level, look at the question from the ground up.

Absorb yourself in the lives of a small number of families over a long period of time.

Don’t focus on looking for pono. Focus on what the family members do, what they believe. Then consider whether pono is part of the way they live.

So many of your ideas about Hawaiʻi come from isolated stories and incidents, not some idealized idea about culture.

Each of these are small pieces of a puzzle. Put the pieces together.

Culture is such an important way of thinking about Hawaii that the term takes on a life of its own.

But culture, including pono, develops and changes in small ways, a little at a time through acts that are isolated but over time develop importance.

Think about your own lives. So many of your ideas about Hawaiʻi come from isolated stories and incidents, not some idealized idea about culture. You want to say something about local culture? You tell a story.

Looking from the top, pono is about sacred beliefs and clear boundaries between good and bad. “That’s not pono!”

From the ground up, pono is, well, something to be discovered rather than mandated.

That’s life.