The Mountain Told Me to Stop Being a Victim
Considering New Identities
PHOTO BY CAITLIN DUQUETTE
Earlier this month, Caitlin Duquette curated our Loam Loves: February missive for you all. “A multidisciplinary and a mountain ridge line from Maui, Hawaii” as well as the author of the newsletter Unsettled, Caitlin is a writer, herbalist, and mutual aid organizer.
In this essay—adapted from Unsettled—Caitlin shares more of her ongoing journey with identity. Moved by the mountains on her beloved home of Maui, Caitlin is in the process of excavating what stories she wants to hold onto, and what stories she wants to let go of.
Caitlin’s essay resonates with Loam as it touches on several of the themes—belonging, disposability culture, and care— that Kailea and Kate explore in our forthcoming anthology with the Center for Humans and Nature (more here). We are so grateful to Caitlin for sharing just some of her story with us.
Since I learned the word ‘decolonization’, I’ve wanted to find ways to experience what it had to offer. But I’ve never had a human model to teach me how. I wasn’t born into a family with explicit values or practices rooted in social justice. University provided an initial understanding of systemic harm at the intersections of the -isms not only through lectures, but also through managing loans as a low-income student. By simultaneously living through and studying social disparities, I started to recognize myself as victimized.
As someone who knows the struggles of poverty intimately and had experiential and ancestral anecdotes that backed up identities of powerlessness, I allowed myself to be consumed by the narratives I encountered in academic spaces. These narratives, in turn, had me in the grips of victim identity.
I come from a family of displaced Indigenous peoples and Europeans who settled on Maui during the mid-1800s sugar boom. My home of Maui, Hawaiʻi, has undergone a massive wave of gentrification that negatively impacts Indigenous and historically marginalized peoples in our community. Of course, many privileges come with going to school and seeking a degree, learning the history of the people you come from, and having the option to catalyze positive change in the face of repetitive cycles of harm. But during my learning, I wasn’t given time to metabolize all of the histories—attempted genocides, western medical experimentation, war and enslavement—that I already intuitively held in my young body.
For me, victimhood was receiving harm and choosing to see powerlessness as the only option. At some point, however, through all of this learning, I realized that I had to dissolve my own victimhood. A mountain, in particular, held me through this process.
I love my mountain. It’s known by the name Haleakalā — a kupuna told me the name was simplified for American visitors. This version directly translates to “house of the sun,” which is less accurate to the story of the Polynesian demigod Māui who lassoed the sun and slowed it with one foot on a puʻu and one on a ridge line. To my knowledge, the sun never housed itself there, and before Māui it used to pass by quickly. Alaheakala1 or ʻAleheakala is my mountain’s older, native name2, which translates to snaring the sun, bringing us closer to Māui’s story.3
I’ve seen the mountain both in my dreams and during my waking life. To pay my respects, I have to drive off-road and through gates that require keys, codes, or familial connections. Any place I go, no matter the transportation method, I go softly, respectfully. There are no visitors in these lesser known places, just a few scattered native plants, a lot of grass, lava, and ungulates. Maybe a hunter or two, and on a good day a kupuna or two. I like to visit the ʻiliahi grove that survived the sandalwood trade, the subalpine shrubland of Wao Akua, and the quarter-sized kūpeʻe shells camouflaged at the bottom of prickly tide pools makai side. Each time I connect with these magnificent beings, I become more liberated.
On one of these visits, after several hours of delicious, uninterrupted writing time, I arrived at a set of choices: to remain in my victimhood, or to be open to learning new, thriving ways of being outside of stories that centered on marginalization.
I had been reflecting on my ancestry and the trauma laced within my blood memory. Suddenly, I stopped and sat with the wind. This place is known for its bracing winds, powerful even on a beautiful day, leaving the landscape undesirable by mass developers. I thought about how the wind was here before the ranchers, before Hawaiians, even before lava poured and stacked and poured again down the newly formed mountainside. The wind will be here long after us, too.
In this moment I realized that the wind doesn’t give a shit. The wind will keep moving across this landscape, across and through my body, despite the trauma, pain, and victimhood.
I thought about how existence can be based on storied meaning, and how my own ideas of identity were limiting. Limiting me, to be precise. How my endpoint had to be something beyond ‘victim’, and the act of holding tightly to my own relationship with being marginalized.
I felt a sudden release in my body, as if the mountain were gifting me spaciousness, possibility, bravery. I asked, “Where can we find the blueprint for new stories, stories we’ve never told ourselves before?” I let my fingers trace over the white moss and lichen that spread across dry, black lava rocks like mycelium, forging new connective pathways across the stories I held within myself. I closed my eyes and imagined the sensation of the wind from beneath a pueo beating its wings over prey. Are these the blueprints, both ancient and new? Can we find the stories when the tide rises, the churning in the whitewash of tidepools that have overflowed? Can we see ourselves prolific again in these cycles?
I’m finding it harder to find value in my trauma. I want to learn the lesson, bless it, and release my grip from it, leaving space for new stories to emerge. Until this moment on the mountain, all I could seem to see were the footprints of white settler culture—invasive species “taking up space,” invasive human behaviors “taking up space”. Now, in the absence of being a victim, I am letting uninterrupted beauty reform in my mindscape. I’m letting the wind keep moving through me.
Alaheakala by Kuana Torres Kahele
Sites of Maui (1998), edited by E.P. Sterling
Alehe is to snare.