Class News

Sam Low ’64 reflecting on his Hawaiian ancestors’ history

March 29, 2020

Sam Low is writing a book about his grandfather who was a cowboy in Hawaii. Here is his earlier article in the Vineyard Gazette, which explains why.

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Listen to Your Ancestors

by Sam Low

The Vineyard Gazette

November 5, 2009

The family reunion in Hawaii was upcoming — should I go? I had been avoiding the issue for almost a year. It was in July and July is a wonderful time to be on the Vineyard. It was far. The tickets were expensive. And in my dotage, I have become unreasonably fearful of airplanes.

Then I heard Lizzie’s voice — that’s Elizabeth Puuki Napoleon Low — my Hawaiian grandmother, long departed from this world.

“Just go,“ she said.

I made a deal with her. If she would protect me and my wife from midair collisions, engine failure, and swine flu — among other possible disasters — we would go.

“Okay,” she said.

Spirits talk like that — simple, direct, and in the vernacular — at least mine do.

Hawaiians believe their ancestors live on, as aumakua who gather around us and give us their aloha. When we die, we join them to care for our own friends and family. Some aumakua, like Lizzie, talk to me. When they do, I speak to them — out loud — at least when no one is around. Sometimes they arrive in the form of sensations — wind on my face, a sound, a smell. The aroma of kerosene recalls my father. It’s an early fall morning in the Camp Ground house that my parents bought in 1930 and moved to its present location in Harthaven. I wake up in my tiny bedroom to the smell of kerosene and the sound of my father firing up the space heater. I have always associated that smell with gratitude for his warming presence.

“When did you finally separate from your parents?” a psychologist once asked me in a therapy session.

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked him.

It’s a cliché in modern psychiatry that we must leave our parents behind to establish our own identity. The mantras of our civilization are individualism, personal achievement and competition. We compete with everyone it seems, so I guess the theory holds that we must compete with our ancestors. And in this modern age, technology changes so fast that our elders have less and less to teach us about survival.

But there are other survival strategies, of course. The ageless ones of inner wisdom, caring for others, finding our way in an immoral world. These are what my parents left me — and why would I want to leave that behind?

As it turned out, there were about 300 Hawaiian relatives at the reunion, descended from six ancestors. My wife and I were the only two people representing Lizzie. I guess that’s why she was so adamant about showing up. And, yes, she did protect us on the trip. She still does . . .

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Sam Low is a photographer, writer, and regular contributor to the Gazette who lives in Oak Bluffs.