Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood

It was 1970-something, and Sina was not yet teaching at the University of Hawaii — a Samoan poet who had not yet become the first Samoan full professor in the States, and who had not yet written

of our oceans

the watery skin

of earth

pulled back to expose

a webbing of coral

rough & prickly

She was back in Samoa at a traditional Sunday feast with her mother, her brother Mike, her American sister-in-law, Carol, and three little boys so strikingly beautiful one would model professionally as a teen. They hadn’t yet sat down to eat, Sina remembers, when Mike announced that his wife and boys would not be able to eat most of what his mother had cooked, as they were now vegetarian. Also, everyone needed to stop calling the children by their birth names. Their new names were Bhakti, Jai, and Naryana. They were now devotees of a man named Chris Butler, whom they called Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa.