Repositioning the Missionary by Vicente Diaz

In chapter 2, Vicente Diaz analyzes the authenticity of hagriographic sources pertaining to San Vitores that attempt to tell the heroic narrative of his life. According to Diaz, these stories are romanticized in a sense to provide a providential epic tale as it is the criteria for the canonization process of saints. This criteria also gives us hints that this story does not necessarily have to be historically accurate. On page 56, Diaz explains, “It cannot be emphasized enough that the only extant primary source documents on the events in question were generated and circulated in a concerted effort to canonize San Vitores in the seventeenth century, and again in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Of equal importance, perhaps as a function of that history, these documents exist only in the form of modern copies located primarily in Church and Jesuit archives.” This point is important because Diaz states that these primary sources are lost to the margins in the Positio of San Vitores, or the primary sources are un-traceable. This is problematic especially when writers rely on “modern copies of primary sources.” Diaz gives an example of how some primary source documents somehow got destroyed in a fire, yet they had obtained a copy. The whole process of edifying the life of this priest is suspect also because the Native testimony seemed to be fabricated because all three eyewitnesses statements followed a formulaic pattern basically saying the same thing. Why is this story immune to criticism or contention? Diaz explicitly articulates how the story is embellished to “work the native, ” yet it is a never-ending cycle as historians still reproduce histories from secondary source material, or works that were provided after the event.  In the case of Hawaiʻi, historians use sources such as Kuykendall or Gavan Dawes to write histories, when we have histories written in Hawaiian by Hawaiians that experienced the histories themselves. Why why why is the Native still worked over!

The other topic that I find interesting was when he describes the problematic use of the “invention of culture.” He uses Linnekin and Keesing as an example of academics who have purposed that the Kānaka Maoli invented cultural norms to facilitate political aims such as sovereignty. In response to this contested idea between the indigenous vs. the non-indigenous, Diaz explains this phenomenon as the “historical articulation of indigeneity.....One way to illustrate a theory of Native articulation is to historicize the processes of conversions to Christianity in terms of Native agencies whose investments in Christianity tactically invert canonical narratives.”(pg.23) For  example, Diaz explains how Chamorro Catholicism is practiced through a uniquely indigenous framework.  What I have learned here is that when researchers/ academics make a claim about inventing culture they are making a claim about the authenticity of your culture because they see it as a threat. Diaz helps illuminate the possibility that this hybrid form of Chamorro Catholicism is really the native “pulling a fast one” on the haole. So in canonizing San Vitores there is Native agency as well too. I mean come on this religion has a lot of pagan qualities (such as giving divine qualities to human beings) so perhaps it fell in well with their own Native religion.