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>> John Dominis Holt, 1919-1993
John Dominis Holt, the author of the Art of Featherwork in Old Hawai˙i, [1] remembered feather kahili, capes and lei in the households of family members, emblems of their high rank as Hawaiian chiefs. When the featherwork collection of Johanna Drew Cluney became available after her death in 1978, he purchased it. An admirer of Aunty Johanna Cluney’s artistry, he called her the “great feather worker of our time.” [2] He donated the collection to the Kamehameha Schools and it is an important collection in the Kamehameha Schools Archives.
As a writer,
his 1964 essay, “On Being Hawaiian,” spurred the Hawaiian renaissance in language,
culture and the arts. As publisher of Topgallant Publishing Company, Ltd.,
Holt was a generous supporter of Hawaiian writers and of the Hawaiian culture.
He was a trustee of the
In his autobiography, Recollections, Memoirs of John Dominis Holt, 1919-1935, Holt conveyed his impressions and thinking as a hapa-haole man. Genealogy mattered. Among his illustrious European ancestors were the English Lord George Paulet and the French Lucien Bonaparte. His Hawaiian ancestors he best explains himself.
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 the seashore 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 Hawai˙i. 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.
In my teens, when I first gave thought to such matters,
I questioned my parents sedulously about our Hawaiian ancestors. How many
did we have? What did they do? Both my parents were well aware of their Hawaiian
ancestors and could easily recite the complicated names of these native antecedents.
They were never particularly happy to do this, as it had become outré to recite
one’s genealogy, particularly if the names of well-known chiefs flowed out
from the recitation.
My mother had two Hawaiian grandmothers. They have been
previously described, but I will add a few details. They were both born in
the 1850s…My mother always spoke of her people as “
My father’s parents were also part-Hawaiian, with a touch
of Tahitian blood contributed to the family by my great great-grandmother
Kauaki or Tauati, or Kalani-mama or Tani-mama…My great grandmother Hanakaulani
was half-Hawaiian and half-English. Her Hawaiian ancestry was impressive.
Her great grandfather was Kamehameha…
My father’s grandmother, Nancy Copp Daniels, was a hapa-haole.
She was born to the Chiefess Ha˙ole and an Englishman,
Charles Peter Copp…
How could I doubt being Hawaiian? This was something
that was innately lodged in my consciousness…But with the rapid changes that
came to the islands, I also became rapidly disconnected from things Hawaiian.
Ours was a life in which we continually balanced the native and the foreign.
…
At times, it was wonderful to have a mixed heritage.
It was a pleasure to be at home in Hawai˙i picking and eating
˙opihi, dancing
the hula, saying old prayers and listening to the old folks unravel stories
of the past in the beautiful cadences of the Hawaiian language.; it was also
a pleasure to sit at a beautifully appointed dinner table in Paris or London
discussing world problems, dressed in wonderfully heavy and well-cut clothes;
or racing from one end of New York to another for a period of years absorbing
haole culture. At times, however, it
could also be all quite confusing and quite painful.
[3]
Holt spent two years at Kamehameha Schools and
graduated from
Holt’s first
wife, Fredda Burwell, was a
After Fredda
died in 1972, Holt married
Born in 1919, Holt died in 1993 at age 73. He was survived by his wife, two daughters, Allison Kauikolani Holt Gendreau and Melanie Hanakaulani Holt Bostock, a son, Daniel Ahulii Ferriera-Holt, a sister, Eleanor Holt Pereira, brothers Samuel N. Holt and James R. Holt of Kamuela and seven grandchildren. [4]
[1] John Dominis Holt, The Art of Featherwork in Old Hawai˙i. Topgallant Publishing Co., Ltd, 1985.
[2]
John Dominis Holt, Recollections: Memoirs of John Dominis Holt, 1919-1935.
[3] Holt, pp. 355-358.
[4] “Author John Dominis Holt, 73, dies,” The Honolulu Advertiser, March 31, 1993.
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