in Hawai‘i, Trask argues that several aspects of Polynesian and Hawaiian cultures, including their language, dress, and dance forms, have been marketed as products for the mass consumption of tourists.
I am certain that most, if not all, Americans have heard of Hawai‘i and have wished, at some time in their lives, to visit my native land. But I doubt that the history of how Hawai‘i came to be territorially incorporated, and economically, politically, and culturally subordinated to the United States is known to most Americans. Nor is it common knowledge that Hawaiians have been struggling for over 20 years to achieve a land base and some form of political sovereignty on the same level as American Indians. Finally, I would imagine that most Americans could not place Hawai‘i or any other Pacific island on a map of the Pacific. But despite all this appalling ignorance, five million Americans will vacation in my homeland this year and the next, and so on into the foreseeable capitalist future. Such are the intended privileges of the so-called American standard of living: ignorance of, and yet power over, one’s relations to native peoples.
Source: Haunani-Kay Trask, “Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture” from From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1999). Copyright © by Haunani-Kay Trask. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Thanks to postwar American imperialism, the ideology that the United States has no overseas colonies and is, in fact, the champion of self-determination the world over holds no greater sway than in the United States itself. To most Americans, then, Hawai‘i is theirs: to use, to take, and, above all, to fantasize about long after the experience.
Just five hours away by plane from California, Hawai‘i is a thousand light-years away in fantasy. Mostly a state of mind, Hawai‘i is the image of escape from the rawness and violence of daily American life. Hawai‘i—the word, the vision, the sound in the mind—is the fragrance and feel of soft kindness. Above all, Hawai‘i is “she,” the Western image of the native “female” in her magical allure. And if luck prevails, some of “her” will rub off on you, the visitor.
This fictional Hawai‘i comes out of the depths of Western sexual sickness which demands a dark, sin-free native for instant gratification between imperialist wars. The attraction of Hawai‘i is stimulated by slick Hollywood movies, saccharine Andy Williams music, and the constant psychological deprivations of maniacal American life. Tourists flock to my native land for escape, but they are escaping into a state of mind while participating in the destruction of a host people in a native place.
To Hawaiians, daily life is neither soft nor kind. In fact, the political, economic, and cultural reality for most Hawaiians is hard, ugly, and cruel.
In Hawai‘i, the destruction of our land and the prostitution of our culture are planned and executed by multinational corporations (both foreign-based and Hawai‘i-based), by huge landowners (like the missionary-descended Castle and Cooke—of Dole Pineapple fame—and others) and by collaborationist state and county governments. The ideological gloss that claims tourism to be our economic savior and the “natural” result of Hawaiian culture is manufactured by ad agencies (like the state-supported Hawai‘i Visitors’ Bureau) and tour companies (many of which are owned by the airlines), and spewed out to the public through complicitous cultural engines like film, television and radio, and the daily newspapers. As for the local labor unions, both rank and file and management clamor for more tourists while the construction industry lobbies incessantly for larger resorts….
My use of the word tourism in the Hawai‘i context refers to a mass-based, corporately controlled industry that is both vertically and horizontally integrated such that one multinational corporation owns an airline, the tour buses that transport tourists to the corporation-owned hotel where they eat in a corporation-owned restaurant, play golf and “experience” Hawai‘i on corporation-owned recreation areas, and eventually consider buying a second home built on corporation land. Profits, in this case, are mostly repatriated back to the home country. In Hawai‘i, these “home” countries are Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and the United States….
With this as a background on tourism, I want to move now into the area of cultural prostitution. “Prostitution” in this context refers to the entire institution which defines a woman (and by extension the “female”) as an object of degraded and victimized sexual value for use and exchange through the medium of money. The “prostitute” is then a woman who sells her sexual capacities and is seen, thereby, to possess and reproduce them at will, that is, by her very “nature.” The prostitute and the institution which creates and maintains her are, of course, of patriarchal origin. The pimp is the conduit of exchange, managing the commodity that is the prostitute while acting as the guard at the entry and exit gates, making sure the prostitute behaves as a prostitute by fulfilling her sexual–economic functions. The victims participate in their victimization with enormous ranges of feeling, including resistance and complicity, but the force and continuity of the institution are shaped by men.
There is much more to prostitution than my sketch reveals but this must suffice for I am interested in using the largest sense of this term as a metaphor in understanding what has happened to Hawaiian culture. My purpose is not to exact detail or fashion a model but to convey the utter degradation of our culture and our people under corporate tourism by employing “prostitution” as an analytic category.
Finally, I have chosen four areas of Hawaiian culture to examine: our homeland, or one hanau that is Hawai‘i, our lands and fisheries, the outlying seas and the heavens; our language and dance; our familial relationships; and our women.
Nā Mea Hawai‘i—Things Hawaiian
The mo‘ olelo, or history of Hawaiians, is to be found in our genealogies. From our great cosmogonic genealogy, the Kumulipo, derives the Hawaiian identity. The “essential lesson” of this genealogy is “the interrelatedness of the Hawaiian world, and the inseparability of its constituent parts.” Thus, “the genealogy of the land, the gods, chiefs, and people intertwine one with the other, and with all aspects of the universe.”1
In the mo‘ olelo of Papa and W akea, earth-mother and sky-father, our islands are born: Hawai‘i, Maui, O’ahu, Kaua‘i, and Ni‘ihau. From their human offspring came the taro plant and from the taro came the Hawaiian people. The lessons of our genealogy are that human beings have a familial relationship to land and to the taro, our elder siblings or kua‘ana.
In Hawai‘i, as in all of Polynesia, younger siblings must serve and honor elder siblings who, in turn, must feed and care for their younger siblings. Therefore, Hawaiians must cultivate and husband the land which will feed and provide for the Hawaiian people. This relationship of people to land is called malama ‘ aina or aloha ‘ aina, care and love of the land.
When people and land work together harmoniously, the balance that results is called pono. In Hawaiian society, the ali‘i or chiefs were required to maintain order, abundance of food, and good government. The maka‘ ainana or common people worked the land and fed the chiefs; the ali‘i organized production and appeased the gods.
Today, m alama ‘ aina is called stewardship by some, although that word does not convey spiritual and genealogical connections. Nevertheless, to love and make the land flourish is a Hawaiian value. ‘ aina, one of the words for land, means that which feeds. Kama‘ aina, a term for native-born people, means child of the land. Thus is the Hawaiian relationship to land both familial and reciprocal.
Our deities are also of the land: Pele is our volcano, Kane and Lono our fertile valleys and plains, Kanaloa our ocean and all that lives
