Recollections: Memoirs of John Dominis Holt 1919-1935

Honolulu, HI: Ku Paʻa, 1993. 1st edition. paperback. Fine. Fine condition appears unread - like new Ships from Hawaii. In his autobiography, Recollections, Memoirs of John Dominis Holt, 1919-1935, Holt conveyed his impressions and thinking as a hapa-haole Hawaiian man. Genealogy mattered. Among his illustrious European ancestors were the English Lord George Paulet and the French Lucien Bonaparte. He writes:
Our family identity was created and nurtured in part by those hapa-haole house odors,
creating a greenhouse effect that flowed through the rooms. But the air itself was Hawaiian. The smells of the land, trees, shrubs and flowers, the appearance of rocks covered with lichen and the various
smells of these ashore were all unmistakably Hawaiian. The enormous reality of our having been
people with Hawaiian ancestors who had lived for eons separated and distinct culturally and spiritually from the other people of the world was a powerful, silent determinant in our emotional attachment to the idea of being natives of Hawaiʻi. Like it or not,somewhere in the complex regions of psyche, we kept this realization alive. It set us apart, linking us physically to the brilliant culture that existed here before Captain Cook, and later others, arrived to see for the first time this group of islands, its people, and their way of life.