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jason momoa drove an old pickup on a winding country road AirportA tattooed hand is hanging out the window and METALLICA Blasting.
“Poo’-ah-lee’,” he said.
His passenger corrects him again, placing subtle emphasis on the “u” sound: “Straw.”
Momoa was preparing for his role in “Chiefs of War,” the first major TV series to feature the language and culture of Hawaii’s indigenous people. His traveler, Kahookahi Kanuha, had joined Momoa years earlier when the two of them were protesting a giant telescope on a mountain peak considered sacred by some Native Hawaiians. He ended up living with the Hawaiian Hollywood superstar for almost a year as his personal language instructor.
The word, which they worked on during the campaign, could mean “warrior” or “army.” This was one of many that went right.
Like many Native Hawaiians in Hawaii and elsewhere, Momoa did not grow up speaking Hawaiian. Most of the other actors in the series are also not fluent. He worked with coaches like Kanuha to learn how to pronounce vowel sounds. Kahuna was with Momoa 24/7, with a binder of the actor’s lines at hand so he could practice at any given moment — while driving, eating, working out.
Kanuha said, “My objective was to be able to get them to say their lines, to deliver their lines in a way that would not distract the audience.”
final product of Apple Kanuha and other Hawaiian language experts say the TV+ series, which premiered in August, isn’t perfect, but it is a successful global contribution to revitalizing and normalizing a language that has endured attempts to eradicate it amid colonization. He says it’s too early to quantify, but it can only help spark interest, especially among young Hawaiians who now have mainstream representation of their language and culture.
While the first two episodes are mostly in Hawaiian, the language is less spoken as the series moves from 18th-century Hawaiian society to Momoa’s character traveling beyond Hawaii before contact with Europeans.
punishment for speaking hawaiian
“This is a moment where we are showcasing our people, our language on a scale that says, we are here…we are amazing and our language is beautiful and rich,” said Moses Goods, an actor on the series, who said he “grew up largely without the language.” Hawaiian was his mother’s first language, he said, but his parents prohibited him from speaking it during his childhood.
An 1896 law ordered this, a few years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by American business owners English As a medium of instruction, said Kai’uokalani Damas, assistant professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
This, Damas said, resulted in a systemic devaluation of Hawaiian and children were forbidden from speaking it.
“We have a lot of stories of students being beaten or forced to carry stones from one side of the school to the other,” he said. “Writing ‘I will not speak Hawaiian’ 500 times on the blackboard.”
By the 1940s, native speakers were rare. Revival efforts to restore Hawaiian as the medium of instruction in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the desegregation of the schools. It’s difficult to count how many people are fluent today, Damas said, with recent census data showing more than 30,000 speakers covering a wide range of proficiency.
hawaiian bubble
Momoa began learning Hawaiian as a second language in 1994 at an immersion preschool.
“It’s not the language that my parents or my family spoke,” Kanuha said. “And so I learned as a kid that going through these programs… can be a very lonely journey sometimes.”
Now 36, Hawaiian is his primary language and the first language of his two young sons.
As a family, she said, it can feel like they live in an air bubble until they leave the house and everything is mostly in English. With the show, their kids can enjoy Hawaiian entertainment – when they’re not closing their eyes during violent battle scenes.
“How ironic it is that being Hawaiian – in Hawaii – speaking Hawaiian makes you feel lonely,” Kanuha said. “I think this helps start to turn it around a little bit.”
Other artists shared their experiences
Before starring in the show, New Zealand-born actress Lucien Buchanan said she barely heard the Hawaiian language. His mother is from the Polynesian country Tonga and his father is of Scottish origin.
“I’m not going to lie, it made me nervous because I wanted to do it, but I only speak English,” she said. “I’m Tongan, but don’t speak Tongan, so I understand the trauma of that kind of language, so I can empathize with those (Hawaiians) who have this separation.”
She recalled that she also had to learn other characters’ lines with her coaches so that she could give appropriate reactions – “so it’s not like we’re giving blank faces.”
Actor Cliff Curtis drew on his identity as a New Zealand Māori to draw a connection with the Hawaiian language, but said there were also challenging differences.
“There’s a fluidity to the way it flows in Hawaiian,” he said. “There’s a different rhythm.”
apprehension about the result
Puakea Nogelmeier, former professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, helped translate the script. He said he was nervous about the outcome of the show because he knew how many of the cast members were fluent in Hawaiian.
Nogelmeyer is not Hawaiian, and learned the language after moving to Hawaii from Minnesota in 1972. He said the show helps prove that it is a “functional, viable world language.”
He said of the actors’ performances, “I was pleasantly surprised.” “I’m afraid even Apple doesn’t know how well they did.”
When Momoa first shared the idea of the show with Kanuha, he was skeptical that it would ever happen. Before “Chiefs of War,” it was common for Hawaiians to not have any mainstream entertainment, Kanuha said.
Now he cannot even imagine a world without it.
“Not only to hear their language, but also to see our world,” he said. “To be able to see the world that we talk about, to be able to see visually and hear what we’re trying to preserve.”
He and others are anxiously awaiting news on whether there will be a second season.
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AP journalist Leslie Embrys in Los Angeles contributed to this report.