The tradition of Lei Day started back in the late 1920s because of a guy named Don Blanding. He was a poet who wrote for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin daily newspaper and realized that while everyone else in the world was doing May Day with maypoles and ribbons, Hawaii had something much better to celebrate.

The weather itself has been a poetic illustration of this internal state: an alternating mix of sunshine and rain, both falling simultaneously from a half-blue sky.

It is a simple map of white ethnic ancestry, but it holds a mirror to the broader story of America.

On July 4, 1946, the U.S. officially recognized the independence of the Philippines after nearly 50 years of American rule.

I took in the scene, and suddenly, I saw not just the present but the past.

This endorsement is personal and not in my capacity as an officer of any civic organizations, publisher and writer of any publications, director of a social service provider, elder of a Church.

Being born and raised in Hawaii, I couldn’t escape the fact that I was born in the waning shadows of a very American brand of apartheid.

My ancestors were told that their gods, their rituals, their ways of relating to the land were evil—and they were punished for honoring them.