Summary Of The Watcher Of Waipuna

Imagine waking up one morning to find that you are in a completely unfamiliar place. First, there were a few new neighbors, then more and more foreigners came along and now your whole town seems foreign. All the local shops are bought by corporations and the old ways of life have been altered. This is the well-known matter called colonization, which is the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area. Gary Pak does a fantastic job of displaying this subject within his story, “The Watcher of Waipuna.” The story brings up a concern about whether or not colonization is healthy and or necessary, for natives and for foreigners. Works of literature including: “The Watcher of Waipuna” by Gary Pak,
The colonizers like the historians did not care for the lost culture or the wounded families, instead, they focused on the potential money they could earn and the business available to them. Trask asks, “… why did scholars, presumably well-trained and thoughtful, neglect our language?” The writer goes further to states that language is not only a form of communication but also a passage to learn what the people think and feel. It is a representation of their culture and their identity. The ignorance of the historians to learn the language of the Hawaiians resembles how the Hawaiian International Corporation was trying to get Gilbert to sell the land. However, Gilbert did not even understand what they were saying and thought that they were just people shipping the weekly grocery goods. This failed attempt to convince Gilbert could have been due to the language barrier and indifference to what the locals were
The “Watcher in Waipuna” by Gary Pak, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Notes from a Native Daughter” by Haunani-Kay Trask all come together to explain the story of colonization and the process of Western influence on other cultures. Whether it be the purposefully picturing the haole’s as evil or the intentional negligence of language, all authors display the dislike of western intervention into their traditional cultures. Mostly because it causes assimilation and many values and ways of life are loss. Families are also torn due to the presence of monetary benefits. The “Watcher of Waipuna” explains the culture of Hawaii while showing readers how it feels to be these people who are threatened by colonization, not only in Hawaii, but people all over the entire continent who have faced similar issues or who are currently still facing these issues. While describing weaknesses in humanity, Pak and the other writers vividly show that it is hard to unbiasedly state who is wrong in the unavoidable process of colonization as the natives are protecting their homes while the colonizers are trying to earn money. Ultimately, nine times out of ten, the winners are the ones who write the story and history and the different perspectives will always exist until the end of