My World: Oahu

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.