The problem with Indigenous reconnection

Unless you live near your tribe, you don't have all the pieces. No matter how much I learn the language and the history, I won't have the culture. It was banned from my grandpas home because his parents moved here to assimilate. They passed as white so they pretended to be white.

Some things leaked through, like the aloha spirit, but generally most things died away. Now unless I were to move to Hawaiʻi, or to a place with a higher percentage of Hawaiians, ill always be missing that bit of my culture that I am trying to reclaim. Maybe I never will be able to as white settlers in Hawaiʻi sometimes come on threads in other places and call me haole (foreigner) because I was not born in Hawaiʻi. Some things just can't be learned from a distance and I worry may never be learned.

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I know my other culture and have lived it. I'm trying to nurture this culture that was ignored and pushed away.