3
Hawaiian scholarship and to those scholars who are much more qualified, to undertake
this type of archival research.
Methods
In order to conduct this research, I conducted “talk story” interviews of two
prominent Hawaiian women with respect to their relationship to Hawaiian plants. As this
is a work in progress, I did not complete the several other interviews I initially set out to
do. While there are four sections to this project, there are only two sections to this paper.
That is, I have only had the opportunity to interview two of the women listed below.
Furthermore, while I did not plan to focus solely on traditional uses of Hawaiian plants,
they were certainly an important component of the interviews. To this end, I have
specified the aforementioned four factors which I believe merit consideration. This is not
only because of the traditional prominence of women in these areas, but also because
women’s stories are understudied and often undervalued. Again, it is certainly possible
that these are not the only factors that are worthy of examination. Rather, they are the
ones that I believe have the potential to be the most productive.
There are several methodological concerns with this type of research. However, I
will only address two in this paper, as I have addressed the others elsewhere (Mironesco
2003, unpublished dissertation): whiteness, and the power relationship between
researcher and researched. On the first point, how did my whiteness affect the answers I
received, the questions I asked, and the analyses and conclusions I drew? In asking
myself these questions, I tried to understand that it is “necessary to decenter white,
middle-class, heterosexual, Western women in Western feminist thought and yet still
generate feminist analyses from the perspective of women’s lives” (Harding 1991, 13).
Convention