The Disinherited: Blood Blalahs

Description

A rip-roaring adventure—written in the tradition of the proletarian literature of the 1930s and 1940s novels by Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Hemingway—that reads like a modern myth, The Disinherited: Blood Blalahs is the first novel ever published about the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement for Indigenous rights and liberation.

In this alternate history, four Hawaiian boys born the month Hawaii became a state in 1959 grow up in Havaiikiville, Oahu’s remotest plantation village, where the world’s sweetest sugarcane is grown.

Best friends during their “small kid days,” they enjoy good fun adventures at their banyan treehouse near the jungle or surfing at Puka Pants Beach and become inseparable Blood Brothers. The happy-go-lucky boys are never apart—until a tragedy befalls Havaiikiville, and they’re forced to go their separate ways.

Shattered, Lio Pandora is in and out of Halawa prison; Lu Malasada is appointed attorney general, then runs for U.S. Senate; Pili da Keed Kala is the mob’s accountant; and Kimo Me He Mea fights for Native rights as the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement’s leader. Then, on August 12, 1998, the 100th anniversary of the U.S. annexation of Hawaii, an apocalyptic event reunites the Blood Brothers again—for one final, fateful time.

The unfolding saga is set against the Indigenous struggle for land, water, culture, dignity and self-determination. The characters are all rooted in how the dispossession of Native people impacts them and the different ways oppressed individuals respond. As “Trumperialism” threatens Natives from Greenland to Gaza to Panama, Blood Blalahs dramatizes what American expansionism has actually done to Indigenous people in Hawaii.

In this novel journalist Ed Rampell, an eyewitness to the mass demonstrations, occupations, evictions and much more in Hawaii during the 1980s and 1990s, fictionalizes the events and activists that shook the Islands. With a foreword by longtime Hawaiian Sovereignty leader Mililani B. Trask.