Native Americans to gather

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Mark Quarrell, left, Steve Wolf Shimanek, Pepe White and Steel Devlin, recently gathered at Manana Military Housing Park to drum and chant, practices that are rooted in the tribes they belong to. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

And almost every weekend, a park in Manana resonates with the drumming of Mark Quarrell.

Native Americans in Hawai'i create such cultural touchstones in their daily life, because encountering another person like themselves is an infrequent occurrence.

"I surround myself with reminders," Hunt said. "Photos I've taken myself, paintings, a blanket someone gave me ... everyone who knows me knows who I am."

Hunt is on Maui, but Tiger and Quarrell have been preparing for one of the larger occasions celebrated in Hawai'i's tiny piece of Indian Country: the semiannual Intertribal Council of Hawaii Pow Wow this weekend.

Tiger, the council president, has been the linchpin for the pow wow for years, and Quarrell, a chief warrant officer at Fort Shafter, heads a drum group known as Red Mountain, the host performers at the weekend event.

Quarrell will one day return home to his Yaqui roots near Tucson, Ariz., so Red Mountain serves as a haven away from home, in much the same way that a hula halau function as a bit of Hawai'i, wherever it forms.

"The drum has a way of bringing people together," he said. "It helps your inner self."

The Census puts the Native American population in Hawai'i at about 5,000, but that is based on self-declaration, and Tiger is convinced the number is really much smaller than that if you count those who are actually enrolled in one of the country's federally recognized native nations.

Wendy Schofield-Ching agrees with that assessment.

"It's very fragmented," said the owner of Native Winds, a Native American crafts store and gallery in Kaimuki.

She speaks strictly as an observer. An attorney before she decided to open her shop eight years ago, Schofield-Ching has no native blood. She became fascinated with native issues and social concerns while in school. Twelve years ago she volunteered legal services toward the organization of the intertribal council, which replaced the defunct American Indian Center that once administered federal programs for Native Americans here.

Since then, she has decided to focus on her shop, which also functions as a kind of community center where book signings by native authors have been held.

This fall features a Waimea pow wow scheduled for the Big Island and a Native American series planned at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, she said.

The community depends on these focal points, and on people like Tiger and Hunt, who are long-term residents. Tiger's wife is half Hawaiian, and his family life shows the crossing of those strains. His granddaughter Cassandra, for instance, will dance at the pow wow but also performs with her hula halau.

Steel Devlin, another member of Quarrell's group, is of Miwok and Yokut ancestry — tribes in the Yosemite area — but he has made Hawai'i his home.

And although he's a long way from Yosemite, there are places where he would have felt far more estranged than in Hawai'i.

"You miss the wildlife of home," he said. "But here you feel a spiritual wonderment in the land, too."

Hunt, a planner for Maui Economic Opportunity Inc., is a member of the Laguna Pueblo nation in western New Mexico and goes back to his tribe annually for ceremonies.

"That's my way of staying connected," he said. "Even though I live here, and I consider this to be my home the village I come from is my ancestral home. That never changes, no matter where I go."

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.