Unfamiliar Fishes
Reading about Hawaii and teaching about Polynesian wayfinding
A book to read: UNFAMILIAR FISHES, by Sarah Vowell
I’ve been a Sarah Vowell fangirl since the early 2000s, and have read her last six books in order, from THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT to LAFAYETTE IN THE SOMEWHAT UNITED STATES. Actually, I listened to them. I used to buy her audiobooks on actual CDs before the days of Libby and Audible. Sarah Vowell has a distinctive voice (she was Violet Parr in The Incredibles), and her humor/snark is essential to enjoying her books.
Sarah’s books are part-travelogue, part-history, part-personal reporting. She visits out-of-the-way gravesites of dead presidential assassins, she interviews curators of strange museums. She drags friends and family members to long-forgotten battle sites to look at plaques on rocks.
Obviously, she’s my hero.
Side note: The cool thing about being a fan of an author for multiple decades is that you get to see them improve. Sarah’s book gets better and better.
Usually what happens is I pick up a new hot book, love it, and then go back and read the author’s backlist. The problem with this is that as you go back in time, the books decline in quality as the author improves.
Everyone keeps telling me I’ll like Kristin Hannah’s books, so I’m starting at the beginning-ish of her career and then reading in order. I just finished up one of her earlier books. ON MYSTIC LAKE (1999) It wasn’t that great…but that’s the point! I’m here to witness improvement. I’m skipping a few, so next up is COMFORT AND JOY (2005), which I’ll read at Christmas time. Hopefully I’ll get to THE WOMEN by the end of next year.
UNFAMILIAR FISHES is about how the United States colonized Hawaii. In the 1820s, missionaries moved to the island chain. By the end of the century, the US had annexed the Hawaiian kingdom, along with Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines. This gives a bit of context to the scenes in the book that detail Hawaiians marching in protest with signs that read “I am not an American.”
Sarah Vowell writes beautifully about all of this, along with modern-day musing about then-president Barack Obama’s Hawaiian upbringing and how quintessentially American plate lunches are.
Some of the best parts of the book are about Queen Liliʻuokalani. After being overthrown and imprisoned, the Polynesian queen spent her time under house arrest writing her autobiography, singing Aloha ‘Oe, and sewing a quilt.
Every year in January, there is an annual Onipaa Peace March that commemorates Queen Liliuokalani’s forced removal from the throne.
A lesson to teach: Which Empire gained the most power during its Exploration Era?
Although not a US history teacher, I touch on this US imperialism after teaching students about European imperialism in Africa. However, that comes later. Right now, in October, my students are still learning about exploration.
In the past, I’ve taught exploration by having my students analyze their World History textbook wherein they discover that only Europeans are included. We learned the words “ethnocentric” and then studied Zheng He, Ibn Battuta, Mansa Musa, and Polynesian explorers like Tupaia. All the resources for those lessons can be downloaded from this article here.
This year, my district purchased TCI curriculum for World History, replacing our 12-year-old book with a slightly less Eurocentric one. I’ve adjusted my unit a bit, centering the Exploration unit on the question: Which Empire gained the most power during its exploration era?
So far we’ve learned about the Mongols. I mostly used the TCI materials which I obviously can’t share here, but I also had my kids watch John Green’s Crash Course video on the Mongols. I don’t know if I’d recommend this because John Green talks SO FAST and it’s hard for students (especially my ELL kiddos) to keep up, but I love John Green so much I can’t help myself. Here are some questions I wrote to go along with the video.
Now, we are learning about Polynesians. I have most of my Polynesian lesson plans on the LitThink website here, but to summarize:
Here is the He Wa`a, He Honua documentary and some questions I wrote to go with it.
Primary and secondary wayfinding sources: A slide deck and a student worksheet.
Here is a reading Did Polynesian Voyagers Reach The Americas Before Columbus, adapted from History.com. I’ll have students summarize each paragraph (hence the blank space following each paragraph) to use as evidence while writing thesis paragraphs later.
Next up will be lessons on the gold-salt trade in Africa and the Kingdom of Ghana, and then a few lessons on European conquistadors. Then students will write their first thesis paragraphs. Of course, I’ll let you know how it goes!
A place to explore: Hawaii, but not how I did it.
As a Seattle-based traveler, I should have tons of stories about trips to Hawaii. Everyone around here goes to the islands on the regular. Direct flights are common, as is the desire to escape the Seattle rain and decamp to the sunshine during winter and spring school breaks.
Not me though. The draw of Spring Training baseball in Arizona, visiting my best friend in San Diego, or my family’s desire for Disney takes over most warm-vacation plans. Someday we’ll get to Hawaii though.
I have been once, but it barely counts.
My Hawaii trip was twenty+ years ago and EASILY the lamest trip of my life.
The trip was with my then-boyfriend’s family. I didn’t really like the boyfriend, but I did like his family, even though they were a little boring.
Sometimes you never realize how boring people are until you travel with them.
On this trip to Hawaii, did we…
Hike to waterfalls?
See Waimea Canyon?
Kayak?
Snorkel? Surf? Go on a boat tour?
See a Luau? A Hula dance?
Check out historical or heritage sites? Iolani Palace, the only royal palace in the United States, where the Queen was imprisoned is in Honolulu, but did we go to Fort Elizabeth on Kauai, as is the Kaneiolouma Cultural Complex?
Lay out on the beach?
No! None of the above.
The trip consisted of shopping for pearls. We went jewelry shopping EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Then we’d go out to a nondescript chain restaurant, come back to the hotel, and watch a movie. I think we went to the beach once.
I don’t have any pictures of this time, which is fine. Just imagine cases of black pearl rings and a Pizza Hut dinner, and you’ve got an idea of my vacation. Try not to be jealous.
I’m like this too with authors! Isn’t fun to “watch” their evolution. :)
Not necessarily a lame trip with boring people, but my parents and I just have fundamentally different ideas about vacations. My parents are beach people: they can sit on the beach for a full day. After an hour, max two, I am done. When I lived in LA, I flew down to Mexico to meet them at a conference they were attending. While I'm sure they would have preferred to spend their one non-lecture day on the beach, I made them go to Tulum instead. We were going to go SOMEWHERE and be EDUCATED and not just SIT ON THE BEACH ALL DAY.
Follow up: when I met my parents in Las Vegas (similar circumstances as the above) I made them go to Lake Mead for a day, too. My reasoning: literally when else are you going to go to Lake Mead and see the Hoover Dam? There might have been some grumbling about wanting to see more hotels and not go to a dam but I WAS NOT TO BE DETERRED.