The world that I want to represent
is the one I used to live on Oahu. I lived there for most of my elementary
school years so my perspective of the world I lived in there was quite a bit
different from lets say my parents. The 40-mile by 70-mile island seemed like a
huge world, as I was a young child.
Imagine a place where the weather
is the same all of the time. It is 75 degrees with a 15-mile per hour wind all
of the time, from spring to winter. The surroundings are constant. Kind of like
an island stuck in time, except people come and go, build and destroy. The
sunsets and sunrises are beautiful every day, and every one goes out to the
shore to experience them at the same time. There is a lot of peace found in the
environment and nature, but is quite different amongst the people.
The island used to be controlled by
the natives a long time ago, who were at peace for a while and maintained their
beautiful land. But then new comers and conquerors began to arise, and
destroyed the peace among the people. The new comers wanted the beauty of the
island for themselves. Because of that initial conflict between the natives and
colonists, there is still division today within the island. Although there are
many descendants of the natives still living there, much of the new comers are
in the controlling positions of the island. This division greatly affects the
culture of the entire island. There are those that still follow the many old
traditions preserving the island, and then those that revolve theirs around the
profitability of the beauty found on the island. As far as spatially, the
separation between the people isn’t seen on either side of a single line, but
instead within different neighborhoods. The division is most apparent within
the limited schools on the island, especially middle and high school. The
younger people find ways to hurt each other because of unclear disagreements
rather than focusing on how to find peace with one another.
One of the laws of the land is that
descendants of new comers can come and go where and when they please, which
most of the time more and more just come to fill up the small island. The
descendants of the natives on the other hand, are not freely to come and go.
Because it was their original home, they can only travel to and from
neighboring islands, but cannot colonize on to the lands the new comers have
come from. With this law set by the new comers, the tradition and culture of
the natives will cease to exist in not too long.