Aloha Is Endangered

Aloha is Endangered (Bamboo Ridge Issue #130) by Kōloa, Kaua'i born and bred poet Tamara Wong-Morrison is the culmination of a writing life that began more than fifty years ago. Wong-Morrison's early poems express a youthful activist's alarm and anger at bearing witness to the changes in her beloved community as the economic priorities of the islands shifted from the sunsetting sugar plantations to the booming tourism industry. Tempered with wisdom and maturity, her later poems continue to document and celebrate a way of life that is fragile and endangered and yet at the same time, guided by the sensibility of a true teacher's years of experience. These poems affirm that what can be identified can also be saved.

Deeply tied to Kaua'i, Aloha Is Endangered is a poetic record of activism, family memory, and a way of life under pressure. It asks what happens when land, language, community, and livelihood are treated as expendable, and what might still be protected when people refuse to forget their value.

Tamara Wong-Morrison was born and raised on the island of Kaua'i in the 1950s when the economy was changing from the sugar plantations to the tourism industry. Many local people supported this change which happened first on the sunny south side of Kaua'i in Po'ipū-Kōloa where Tamara grew up.

One of her first jobs was babysitting at the Prince Kuhio Hotel, a small concrete-block building right next to the birthplace of Kaua'i's Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana'ole. Her brothers worked across the street at the Tahiti Nui restaurant where they ran around the yard lighting the tiki torches at dusk wearing only malo (loincloth). Tourism development was relatively small and low-rise compared to the high-rise hotels being built in Waikīkī then.

With the rapid increase of more resorts on the four major islands, the impacts, both positive and negative, began to emerge. The community started questioning, "What about a diversified economy, keeping some land in agriculture, better jobs for our children?" Today, these questions and more are still being asked.

Tamara started writing poetry about the changes in her community in the early 1970s. One of her first poems, "Strange Scent 1778," forebodes the impact of Captain James Cook and hints at the destabilizing effects of rapid change.

"Watch out compadre, the changing times as the tides can drown you in its undertow," she wrote in her poem "Māhā'ulepū" in 1974. She started teaching poetry in Hawai'i's public schools in 1987 and is still teaching full-time at Volcano School of Arts & Sciences.