Weaving Our Stories: Return To Belonging

Full of strength and loving provocation, Weaving Our Stories gathers poems, visual art, and stories of a new generation of Hawaiʻi changemakers. The collection reminds us that we can seek liberation in our ancestral stories, that we reach for liberation by carrying the stories of others, and that we find liberation when we learn and extend the complementary patterns among us. It is a brilliant representation of Hawaiʻi's own.

Weaving Our Stories is a drenching of Spirit that helped me remember the shared purpose I have with the world and now with beloved Kalihi, Waipahu, Koʻolauloa, and all of Hawaii. It is indeed an anthology that "...celebrates the radical and revolutionary role stories [play] in supporting our healing and liberation." Mahalo, dear poets, artists, writers, and evolutionary revolutionists, for putting this collection together. Mahalo nui Luanna Peterson for holding the center with the grace of our kupuna - all of them. Time for us to heal. It is an honor to be connected to this kaupapa.

The collection of writing bound in the Weaving Our Stories — A Return to Belonging anthology is doing serious work.

Previous book-length engagements that endeavor to disrupt extractive narratives of Hawaiʻi have spotlighted academics and the necessary critiques they mount of settler colonialism, Americanism, and imperial militourism. This collection is a welcome continuation of those Hawaiʻi conversations but is also one that insists on platforming the voices of intersecting contemporary social justice movements and organic intellectuals who challenge ideas of belonging, home, kuleana, memory, and imagination. Editor Luanna Peterson bookends the offerings of nearly 30 contributors with her own grounding introduction and a closing manifesto that sings as a salvo for the complicated work of weaving and untangling that lies ahead for movements for justice.
Luanna Petersonʻs editorial voice intercedes throughout the anthology as a narrator and context builder, weaving with co-collaborator Pūlama Long and their real-life community of youth story weavers and mentors. Peterson closes this collection with an urgency that also pulses throughout the writing in Weaving Our Stories. Writing in later 2023, she names how the many global crises of physical violence interweave with narrative violence, speaking directly of the genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo that have been fomented by the storymaking practices of colonizers. Her closing lines are of forgiveness, not of colonizers—never—but between we peoples reckoning with each other, hurting, struggling, learning, committing to imagining a world where we are all truly free. Just like weaving, forgiveness is an intentional action.

Weaving Our Stories — A Return to Belonging is an important literary collection for people committed to social justice in Hawaiʻi and in the world, not only for the value of individual contributions but because it models a practice of intentionality in building understanding and coordinating action across distance, difference, and time.

The young leaders and storytellers featured in Weaving Our Stories inspire and encourage us to move beyond received narratives that nourish bigotry or diminish one’s capacity for compassion and imagination. With powerful pedagogical and artistic impacts, the stories create space for us to name ourselves and heal out loud. The voices simultaneously remember and innovate as we re-familiarize ourselves with one another and ‘aina, to weave a tapestry of shared feeling and responsibility. Although the anthology speaks of loneliness and attempted erasure, its words also speak of deep belonging and strength—of the artistry, energy, ingenuity, and wisdom of people, place, and culture; of our commitments to one another; and the healing that comes from washing our eyes – and seeing our truth.

We are lovingly tethered to each other’s struggles, liberation, and survival...This is the mantra sweetly embedded across this profound, heartfelt body of work. Weaving Our Stories is a beautifully curated montage of community voices committed to preserving their indigenous lands and culture. Here is an anthology that collectively teaches us how to resist, build, and dream toward a liberated future. What Luanna Peterson and the contributors offer us is a divine vision to walk with our communities' ancestors and descendants with a collective vision of world-making. Throughout the anthology lives a chorus of powerful voices that are amplified in a series of interwoven manifestos, stunning visual art and spirited poetics often echoed in their mother tongue. Like strands of sweetgrass, these stories are interlocked and bound up across a multitude of lineages. Hawaii, like many of our homelands, has been a site of settler colonialism, US imperialism, and pillaging of its most abundant lands. Every page of Weaving Our Stories gives us an opportunity to reimagine, regenerate, and reclaim our legacies! What Weaving Our Stories does is make visible the histories and possibilities of freedom for its people and living cultural archive. Upon reading this anthology, I began to realize that each of the contributors in the book serves as a griot of the oral history and creative traditions…which have always been an instrument of change and freedom! Add this to your 2024 booklist.