<p>Which may just help explain why she&rsquo;s so totally out of place in today&rsquo;s Democratic Party. And her long-shot race for the presidency.</p>

- Kerry Howley

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.

When Sina next visited Mike and Carol’s house, there was nothing on the walls but pictures of the immediate family and portraits of Chris Butler, a 30-something, tan, sandy-haired Caucasian, an aging beach boy in leis and white linen. Altars to him had sprung up in every room. The children’s lives were filed with ecstatic chanting, prayer, and beach gatherings exclusive to Butler devotees. Sina, who studied Eastern religions and spirituality and taught from the Bhagavad Gita, tried to be openminded about the fact that they were, in her words, &ldqu