Author Archives: Trevor Schmisseur

Kohelepelepe

Background

Informant is college educated and has lived on Oahu, Hawaii for their whole life. Informant was dating the Interviewer’s mother for around a year.

Context

Informant discusses a Hawiian legend about the formation of the Koko head crater on Oahu. Koko head is a long dormant volcano.

Transcript

Informant: “Kohelepelepe?”

Interviewer: “Yes.”

Informant: “Koko head, if you look at it from an aerial shot, it looks like a vagina.”

Interviewer: “Oh, alright, there we go!”

Informant: “And the story is, is that Pele’s sister, Hi’iaka, they were fighting over, uh, Kamapuaa, the pig god. So pele’s sister threw her vagina, landed by koko head, and that’s how that became Kohelepelepe, which means labia lips. If you look at it from the top it looks like-”

Interviewer: “It looks like a vagina.”

Informant: “It looks like a lady.”

Thoughts

    Many Hawaiian legends, like the legends of many other cultures, have a strong emphasis on human reproductive organs. While throwing a vagina may be something completely foreign in modern western culture, stories like this exist not only in Hawaii, but other cultures as well. Off the top of my head, there’s an inuit legend of a woman cutting off her breasts and throwing them at her brother who raped her in her sleep; the sister ran away and the brother went after her, the pair would go on to become the sun and the moon. The sterilization of any talk of human anatomy in not only western legends, but western social norms as well shows how taboos are culture specific, and that actions are only taboo when society says the topic is taboo.

Practical Jokes in the Police Force

Background

Informant is the uncle of the Interviewer from the mother’s side. Informant has lived in Hawaii for all their life and has worked as a police officer for 6 years.

Context

Informant discusses practical jokes played in the police force. When the interviewer asked about hazing they were told that does not happen in the police force. Interview takes place at the Interviewer’s grandmother’s house during a family dinner gathering.

Transcript

Informant: “I dunno, we do stuff like, uh, as if, if you want to go as far as HAZING… sometimes on the printers, we’ll put a note that says: “Printer upgraded to new voice activated more”. So they’ll be there like “print! Print!” like stuff like that.

Interviewer: Aww that’s cute!”

Informant: “Yeah, yeah, but nothing like hazing though. It’s um, Our department has over 2,000 police officers and you don’t know everybody so like people come and go, what we have is called “personal movement” and it usually happens every month, so, we-we meet and, people come and go so often, and you really can’t get close to anyone, cause like, work with so much different people, uh, that’s all.”

Thoughts

I had no idea there were over 2,000 police officers on the island of Oahu, let alone in a single department, so that caught me off guard. I also had no idea about how quickly police officers come and go, and how they’re moved around by the police themselves for “personal movement”. My Uncle didn’t elaborate on that further, but my guess is that maybe the police force wants to keep things pretty strictly business oriented given the nature of the job, so getting close to others may be somewhat frowned upon and practical jokes or hazing totally not tolerated. I is interesting to hear that practical joking does take place in the workspace still takes place, even if on a minor scale. I would imagine that having a practical joke played on you from one person you most likely don’t know with 2,000 coworkers is a much different experience than a practical joke in a tighter-knit workspace.

Whistling at Night In Japanese Culture

Background

Informant is the uncle of the Interviewer from the mother’s side. Informant has lived in Hawaii for all their life and has worked as a police officer for 6 years.

Context

Informant discusses Japanese superstition of whistling at night. Interview takes place at the Interviewer’s grandmother’s house during a family dinner gathering.

Transcript

Informant: “Like um, whistling at night, it’s a superstition. That’s like an old wivestale, folklore, supposed to be, in Japanese culture, summoning the dead, stuff like that, that’s all. 

Interviewer: “I mean that one’s good, yeah. I’m stealing that from you now, so I’m gonna write about the whistling at night. So that’s just, summoning the dead in japanese culture, do you know where that comes from or?”

Informant shakes head

Interviewer: “Yeah I don’t either.”

Informant: “I mean it could be just Hawaii, might not even be in Japan, cuz I mean, uh, the whole Japanese culture in Hawaii dates back to like sugar plantation days, it could derive from then.”

Thoughts

Hawaii is a melting pot of a bunch of different cultures and traditions, but it’s been a melting pot for so long that ethnic groups have developed cultures and traditions that do not exist in the original population. Large amounts of Japanese immigrants came to Hawaii over a hundred years ago to work the sugarcane fields, and in this time have diverged greatly from mainland Japan. While whistling at night is a common trope in a surprising amount of cultures, but the traditional Japanese version holds a slightly different meaning. Whistling was supposedly used as a communication method for folklore monsters or criminals, so whistling would attract unwanted attention. It’s interesting how the same action can have two different outcomes but equally negative connotations in two, on paper, identical racial groups.

Bubonic Plague In Hawaii

Background

Informant is college educated and has lived on Oahu, Hawaii for their whole life. Informant was dating the Interviewer’s mother for around a year. 

Context

Informant discusses a friend who could see the spirits of those who died from the bubonic plague in Hawaii under restaurant row. Informant then goes into how the plague was brought to Hawaii and what the afflicted did.

Transcript

Informant: “You know what, they had the bubonic plague, right? In Chinatown, they had a lot of people die, and what they did was they buried them into a mass grave in Chinatown, underneath restaurant row, so a friend’s attorney, a friend’s secretary, could see, could see everything. She could see all these massive graves and just bodies piled on top of each other.

Interviewer: “Oh, damn… so what, what like-”

Informant: “And it is scary though, like at the parking lot.”

Interviewer: “So it was like decaying bodies of the bubonic plague? Just bodies on bodies on bodies of people with the bubonic plague?”

Informant: “Yeah it was just, just like one mass burial in the black plague times. In chinatown, it was bad. Whaling ships came in and brought it, and people where we live, where you guys used to live, they said that people in the neighborhood, the families wanted to die together, so they hiked all the way up into Aiea, where we live, and that’s where they all died. They wanted to die together so they died together with the plague.”

Thoughts

Restaurant row used to be the party place of Oahu, it was the happening spot where everyone would go to get plastered and party. While restaurant row stands virtually abandoned now and was in its prime before I was alive, I had no idea about this side of history until the informant told me about it. The bubonic plague outbreak in Hawaii was never formally taught to us in school, so I had no idea the ground below restaurant row, which is next to a major roadway, is inundated with corpses. Also, I found the part about families going into the mountains to die together was morbidly sweet, like a final gesture of love while they all slowly and painfully died.

Beads of Courage

Background

Informant is the auntie of the Interviewer from the mother’s side. Informant has been working as a medical nurse for 16 years.

Context

Informant discusses recurring interactions between patients and nurses at the hospital they work at. This event takes place over the course of a child’s stay at a hospital, especially if they are undergoing extensive treatment like chemotherapy. The conversation happened over FaceTime, as the informant was on their lunch break at work when the conversation took place.

Transcript

Interviewer: “How about like if um, like if a small kid like comes into a hospital like how do you guys make them comfortable?”

Informant: “Oh like bribery?”

Interviewer: “Yeah! Yeah! Like how do you bribe them?”

Informant: “Like toys? We give them toys or, like, like when they’re getting a procedure or… Oh! How about like the beads? Like the beads of courage? That’s pretty consistent. Ok so for you know chemotherapy patients?”

Interviewer: “Mmm hmm.”

Informant: “Uh when they get procedures done like, they’ll have like uhh like specific beads and they’ll make a necklace out of it. So like if they get a shot or like chemotherapy or a medication, they’ll get beads for each specific thing, and I can actually grab you the sheet thing, well, it’s actually like a foundation that provides the beads, you can look it up online, called beads of courage. 

Interviewer: “Cool alright, and the beads represent..?”

Informant: “One bead will represent like a medication, one bead a needle stick, or like a point access. Like each procedure, they get one bead for each thing, and then at the end of their treatment, like they have this long necklace, and it’s like a remembrance of what they’ve been through, yeah.”

Interviewer: “Aww that’s super sweet, yeah.”

Thoughts

I had not heard of beads of courage until this interview, and after listening to my auntie talk about them and learning about their organization, it seems like a sweet memento for a period of extreme anguish. According to the beads of courage website, they “are a non-profit that is dedicated to improving the quality of life for children and teens coping with serious illness, their families, and the clinicians who care for them through our Arts-in-Medicine Programs” (Beads of Courage, 2021). The organization has been around since 2005 and works with hundreds of hospitals internationally. Beads of courage are not specific to the hospital my auntie works at, but this shared tradition shared internationally across hospitals and their workers shows how international traditions can be. The sentiment of beads of courage exists beyond cultures, the sentiment of receiving a physical item that signifies everything a patient has gone through is recognizable cross-culturally. I enjoy the statement and mission of beads of courage, and think it brings families and patients a source of joy and strength during objectively terrible times.

For more information about beads of courage, visit their website:

Beads of Courage

Beads of Courage, Beads of Courage Inc., 2021, www.beadsofcourage.org/.