There's an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about pig hunting on Kaua'i (mentioned at Ian Lind's site) that has me fuming. The first thing I noticed were all the spelling errors: it's not the Nepali Coast, and the forest floor isn't littered with fallen kookui nuts. And I loved this bit (no I didn't -- actually I groaned):
Huh? Since when does a Spam musubi count as a sandwich?
But then, what really got me annoyed were the factual errors. I get the feeling that this writer knows squat about Hawai'i and didn't do any research. If he did, he wouldn't have been writing that Hawaiians have hunted pigs in the forest for thousands of years. Huh? First of all, I think thousands of years is an overstatement; most historians don't place the colonization of Hawai'i further back than 1500 years or so. And second, ancient Hawaiians generally didn't hunt pigs; they raised them in enclosures. And third, they weren't exactly a staple food -- they were often kapu and reserved for the ali'i and for sacrifices.
So the whole premise of this guy's article -- that he's profiling a noble young Hawaiian hunter who's trying to carry on the ancient traditions of his ancestors -- starts to fall apart. At most, the tradition is as old as when monster European pigs were introduced to the islands and interbred with the poi-fed Polynesian pigs that the Hawaiians kept. 200 years of pig hunting is old, but it ain't ancient.
And I get tired of the Sierra Club being painted as bad guys for wanting to get rid of wild pigs in native forestlands. Those critters don't belong there. They root up everything and open up the ground for alien invasive plants to take over from the native plants. But as is done by so many hunting advocates, this is cast as the condescending haole outsiders trying to tell the hapless locals how to run their affairs. Guess what, it's not as simple as haoles vs locals.
Paka nodded and took a bite of a homemade sandwich, a rice/pork mix wrapped in seaweed.
But then, what really got me annoyed were the factual errors. I get the feeling that this writer knows squat about Hawai'i and didn't do any research. If he did, he wouldn't have been writing that Hawaiians have hunted pigs in the forest for thousands of years. Huh? First of all, I think thousands of years is an overstatement; most historians don't place the colonization of Hawai'i further back than 1500 years or so. And second, ancient Hawaiians generally didn't hunt pigs; they raised them in enclosures. And third, they weren't exactly a staple food -- they were often kapu and reserved for the ali'i and for sacrifices.
So the whole premise of this guy's article -- that he's profiling a noble young Hawaiian hunter who's trying to carry on the ancient traditions of his ancestors -- starts to fall apart. At most, the tradition is as old as when monster European pigs were introduced to the islands and interbred with the poi-fed Polynesian pigs that the Hawaiians kept. 200 years of pig hunting is old, but it ain't ancient.
And I get tired of the Sierra Club being painted as bad guys for wanting to get rid of wild pigs in native forestlands. Those critters don't belong there. They root up everything and open up the ground for alien invasive plants to take over from the native plants. But as is done by so many hunting advocates, this is cast as the condescending haole outsiders trying to tell the hapless locals how to run their affairs. Guess what, it's not as simple as haoles vs locals.
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