WEBVTT

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So this last one is
called Tiki Gods.

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And a little bit of
story about this.

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My dad is a
evangelical Christian.

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So he has some-- and
he's not Hawaiian.

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He's not Indigenous.

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He has some complicated
things about this.

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So this one was a heavy one.

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So I tried to keep it
a little bit funny,

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but this might not be as funny.

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So just letting you know.

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Tiki Gods.

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Anthropologists hallucinate
textbooks on myth,

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and my schizophrenic father
writes settler fan fiction

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about an evil Tiki god.

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A hōʻailona birth of wood behind
the glass at the Bishop Museum.

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The lair of the
Hawaiians he believed

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to be godless witch doctors
sent to corrupt his child.

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My grandfather, an ancestor
by my mother's 13th birthday,

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was named woodworker, birthing
forgotten ceremony from decaying

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native forest where akua
lie in the undergrowth.

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Places where the missionaries
said wickedness lived.

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The Hawaiians
practiced witchcraft,

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my second grade teacher
explains in Bible school.

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For the word of God they
should be forever grateful.

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My grandfather washed
wood after wood, timber

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fallen from faraway forest.

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Neither kiawe nor koa nor kumu
at all, until his body, too,

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at 35, toppled into
the side of a freeway.

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A tree.

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In 2005, before our last
dinner in the Nānākuli house.

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I hummed the doxology, idle
on our witch doctor ancestors,

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sinners that we were taught
to banish from our vocabulary

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to save us from these Tiki gods.

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[SPEAKING IN HAWAIIAN]

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Thank you.

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Mahalo nui.

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[APPLAUSE]

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That was great.