J. Osorio's article entitled Gazing Back: Communing with our Ancestors, begins with a tribute to David Hanlon who was a teacher and important figure and source of inspiration in The Life of Osorio. For me, reading this article was so moving, inspiring, and a microcosm of an entire semester's accumulation of knowledge and insights into a culture that I have lived alongside my entire life but never fully understood. I don't know if comparing my appreciation for Professor Osorio to that for David Hanlon is worthy praise because Hanlon marked Osorio's entire life, but I know that I have never believed so much in the spirit of contemplation of a culture until now and I took a Hawaiian studies course for six weeks. As I read this article I felt guilty, as I have on many occasions throughout this course. Growing up as a white kid in Kahuku I always thought I was not one of the ignorant and foolish haole in understanding "Native issues" - I thought I was instilled with the values ​​of respecting our 'aina and wanting to understand 'olelo Hawaii it was a characteristic that distinguished me from my peers. As a teenager, I always had more respect for the local population and minorities, in fact, for me, white people never helped me at all in my growth as an adult. The people who hurt me the most were my white parents, and the people who didn't help me when I needed it most were my rich, stuck-up white family. The people who were there for me as I struggled not only through adolescence, but also through abusive parents and drug addiction in every aspect of my nuclear and extended family – were Hawaiian and Filipino families. They were people who descended from a community that relied on sugarcane plantations in Kahuku. My family wasn't my mother and father, my family was a community of people who were there for me and treated me as if they were their own. I never liked being white. How proud I am in this, to be part of a culture that has conquered and destroyed almost every other civilization on the face of the earth in the name of a merciless God. I felt separated from my ethnicity and always wished I could be dark, be something other than who I am – and I managed to feel that way for a long time.