I didn’t use the name. But I couldn’t forget it.
A Hawaiian girl began without a Hawaiian name, when being Native Hawaiian wasn’t cool. When a high school classmate gave Sally-Jo Bowman a Hawaiian name in 1956, she ignored it because it wasn’t “official” and she focused on becoming a journalist. Yet, over many years, “Keala-o-Ānuenue,” The Path of The Rainbow, crept subliminally into what she chose to write about and how she wrote. Eventually that pathway surfaced and became front and center in her heart and mind.
Sally-Jo Keala-o-Ānuenue Bowman grew up in Kailua, O‘ahu, born in 1940 to a half-Hawaiian father and a Swedish mother from North Dakota. Her memoir pieces have appeared in various magazines and literary journals, and she is the author of The Heart of Being Hawaiian and co-author of No Footprints in The Sand.
Photo credit: Myrna Wheeler
Release Date: September 2020
112 pages
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