So this last one is called Tiki Gods.
And a little bit of story about this.
My dad is a evangelical Christian.
So he has some-- and he's not Hawaiian.
He's not Indigenous.
He has some complicated things about this.
So this one was a heavy one.
So I tried to keep it a little bit funny,
but this might not be as funny.
So just letting you know.
Tiki Gods.
Anthropologists hallucinate textbooks on myth,
and my schizophrenic father writes settler fan fiction
about an evil Tiki god.
A hōʻailona birth of wood behind the glass at the Bishop Museum.
The lair of the Hawaiians he believed
to be godless witch doctors sent to corrupt his child.
My grandfather, an ancestor by my mother's 13th birthday,
was named woodworker, birthing forgotten ceremony from decaying
native forest where akua lie in the undergrowth.
Places where the missionaries said wickedness lived.
The Hawaiians practiced witchcraft,
my second grade teacher explains in Bible school.
For the word of God they should be forever grateful.
My grandfather washed wood after wood, timber
fallen from faraway forest.
Neither kiawe nor koa nor kumu at all, until his body, too,
at 35, toppled into the side of a freeway.
A tree.
In 2005, before our last dinner in the Nānākuli house.
I hummed the doxology, idle on our witch doctor ancestors,
sinners that we were taught to banish from our vocabulary
to save us from these Tiki gods.
[SPEAKING IN HAWAIIAN]
Thank you.
Mahalo nui.
[APPLAUSE]
That was great.