Ho‘okele: Seascape Epistemology as an Embodied Voyage

Chapter 4 sails into the specific oceanic literacy of ho‘okele to better articulate how distinct ways of knowing the world construct specific identities as related to our surroundings. How we read the seascape impresses how we move through it, constructing distinct ideologies that affect our realities and relationships with the surrounding world. Historical European ways of traveling on the seascape carried an ideology that distinguished land from sea so that entering the ocean was to enter a mysterious place “out there” that needed to be controlled in order to “get across.” In contrast, interviews with Hawaiian navigators Nainoa Thompson and Bruce Blankenfeld reveals how the knowledge within ho‘okele illuminates a Kanaka epistemology about movement that draws the world together, fostering an ocean-body assemblage which honors our human relationships and responsibilities to each other and to the places we voyage through.