Every time Emma got on the mic to introduce the next speaker, she pointed at the audience. By then, we were trained. “Why art now?” we cried, as Emma read each artist’s response in turn, by way of introduction.
That night, all the cool kids were gathered in a hotel in Wakīkī, watching the sunset, eating cool local and fusion food, listening to Buddy and Kaipo play music, sharing art and messages of resistance and solidarity. Of identity, of innovation, avant garde, of becoming. Kū‘ē. It was a beautiful evening. My collaborator, Sean, had been awarded a grant a couple of years ago for our community engagement project. This project uses maps to help us understand the interplay between people and places, and the intrinsic mutuality that can happen when our relationship with land is not based on commodity and dominance, but listening, following, and finding synergy with that which feeds us. Sean says our project, which includes a dataset of ‘āina organizations and many correlating layers of GIS data, is like an x-ray of ‘āina.
We go into Google Earth, our temporary interface we are using while we build a bespoke platform. We ask someone in the circle to share the ‘āina that they care for, that they are related to, that they intrinsically belong to. As they tell their stories, we look at the layers. Watershed, ahupua‘a, school district. Flood risk, formerly used defense site, fisheries. Soil, landowner, proximity to golf courses, hotels, military bases. Life expectancy. Maps help us understand reality. Maps create reality. What’s on your map?
I remember Aunty Pua used to lead us through deep mapping. Her mapping was also a kind of x-ray, but using a different kind of tech. Functional. Practical. Telling. Insightful. She spoke of an author, William Least-Heat Moon, and recommended a book he wrote: PrairyErth (A Deep Map). The book layers many ways of being in relation to place, including human history, ecology, personal encounters, geology, weather, language, and memory. Of a deep map, he says:
if you look closely enough at one place, you can understand something about all places.
By stacking all the of realities of this county in Kansas in his weighty book, you see how place and identity are interrelated, and then how the dimension of time provides depth—Indigenous, settler, and present day lives (co)existing. Then there’s the elusive prairie, something we seemed to learn a lot about in school when I was a kid. The rolling grasses. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Indeed, these days there’s not much prairie left, just a few pockets, sometimes centered around old settler cemeteries.
(And I flash back in my mind. This book is about Kansas. One side of my family, definitely my dear family, but by marriage so we don’t look alike, my family has deep Mennonite roots in Kansas. Such a flat place, it was a bit disconcerting. We drove across Kansas to visit the place where my family owned one of the last family-run small town newspapers in the US. It had been in the family for three generations. My grandfather grew up setting type on the linotype machine. He was fast. fast.
We came together because my dear Aunty, beloved and whimsical writer and lover of gnomes, Waldorf School enthusiast, a beautiful soul, had passed away from cancer of the eye. We came together to release her ashes on the prairie near the place where she had grown up, the small town where her family raised her and her siblings.)
But I digress. Deep mapping. Aunty Pua loved this concept. She would ask the group: do you remember transparencies? In later years, some of the young folks were puzzled. Transparencies. (Is that what life is made of? A series of transparencies that allow us to be seen?)
For vision mapping with groups, each person would have a clear sheet of acetate. Boundaries would be decided: if this is Wai‘anae, or Chicago, we decide what the four corners of our acetate sheet represent. And then we draw therein. What is important to us in our community?
When you layer all of the sheets of clear film from everyone in the circle, that is the deep map. You shine a light through all the layers, using a projector. You see the overlays, what is important to the folks in the circle. There’s overlap. You know where there are issues are that need to be addressed. You see safe places and not so safe places. The geography holds these stories, and the circle tells them, and begins to see itself in a new way. A consciousness and identity and action can emerge from the collective storytelling of the group.
And how artistic that? Very artistic. In later years we used chart paper, and everyone got to draw their own map. It was nice, but a bit individualistic. However, people really shined when they told the story of their map, their vision for the future. The ability, permission, and direction to share their stories, hopes and dreams for their program and community is always inspiring.
Why art now? We need it. We need to break free from the polarization that is keeping us binary, separate, sterile. We need to remember who we are, and that there are many stories out there, and that we are part pf them and part of each other. Art helps us wonder, dream, dare, become. We need now the courage to be brave, to say what is true out loud and believe it and act on it. Why art now?
Mahalo,
Dawn
Photo taken 3/28/26 at Kaimana Beach