physical and metaphysical, is divine.
Within this world, the older people or kupuna are to cherish those who are younger, the mo‘opuna. Unstinting generosity is a value and of high status. Social connections between our people are through aloha, simply translated as love but carrying with it a profoundly Hawaiian sense that is, again, familial and genealogical. Hawaiians feel aloha for Hawai‘i whence they come and for their Hawaiian kin upon whom they depend. It is nearly impossible to feel or practice aloha for something that is not familial. This is why we extend familial relations to those few non-natives whom we feel understand and can reciprocate our aloha. But aloha is freely given and freely returned; it is not and cannot be demanded, or commanded. Above all, aloha is a cultural feeling and practice that works among the people and between the people and their land.
The significance and meaning of aloha underscores the centrality of the Hawaiian language or ‘ olelo to the culture. ‘ olelo means both language and tongue; mo‘ olelo, or history, is that which comes from the tongue, that is, a story. Haole or white people say we have oral history, but what we have are stories passed on through the generations. These are different from the haole sense of history. To Hawaiians in traditional society, language had tremendous power, thus the phrase, i ka ‘ olelo ke ola; i ka ‘ olelo ka make—in language is life, in language is death.
After nearly 2,000 years of speaking Hawaiian, our people suffered the near extinction of our language through its banning by the American-imposed government in 1896. In 1900, Hawai‘i became a territory of the United States. All schools, government operations, and official transactions were thereafter conducted in English, despite the fact that most people, including non-natives, still spoke Hawaiian at the turn of the century.
Since 1970, ‘ olelo Hawai‘i, or the Hawaiian language, has undergone a tremendous revival, including the rise of language immersion schools. The state of Hawai‘i now has two official languages, Hawaiian and English, and the call for Hawaiian language speakers and teachers grows louder by the day.2
Along with the flowering of Hawaiian language has come a flowering of Hawaiian dance, especially in its ancient form, called hula kahiko. Dance academies, known as h alau, have proliferated throughout Hawai‘i as have kumu hula, or dance masters, and formal competitions where all-night presentations continue for three or four days to throngs of appreciative listeners. Indeed, among Pacific Islanders, Hawaiian dance is considered one of the finest Polynesian art forms today.
Of course, the cultural revitalization that Hawaiians are now experiencing and transmitting to their children is as much a repudiation of colonization by so-called Western civilization in its American form as it is a reclamation of our past and our own ways of life. This is why cultural revitalization is often resisted and disparaged by anthropologists and others: they see very clearly that its political effect is decolonization of the mind. Thus our rejection of the nuclear family as the basic unit of society and of individualism as the best form of human expression infuriates social workers, the churches, the legal system, and educators. Hawaiians continue to have allegedly “illegitimate” children, to h anai or adopt both children and adults outside of sanctioned Western legal concepts, to hold and use land and water in a collective form rather than a private property form, and to proscribe the notion and the value that one person should strive to surpass and therefore outshine all others.
All these Hawaiian values can be grouped under the idea of ‘ohana, loosely translated as family, but more accurately imagined as a group of both closely and distantly related people who share nearly everything, from land and food to children and status. Sharing is central to this value since it prevents individual decline. Of course, poverty is not thereby avoided, it is only shared with everyone in the unit. The ‘ohana works effectively when the kua‘ana relationship (elder sibling/younger sibling reciprocity) is practiced.
Finally, within the ‘ohana, our women are considered the lifegivers of the nation, and are accorded the respect and honor this status conveys. Our young women, like our young people in general, are the pua, or flower of our l ahui, or our nation. The renowned beauty of our women, especially their sexual beauty, is not considered a commodity to be hoarded by fathers and brothers but an attribute of our people. Culturally, Hawaiians are very open and free about sexual relationships, although Christianity and organized religion have done much to damage these traditional sexual values.
With this understanding of what it means to be Hawaiian, I want to move now to the prostitution of our culture by tourism.
Hawai‘i itself is the female object of degraded and victimized sexual value. Our ‘ aina, or lands, are not any longer the source of food and shelter, but the source of money. Land is now called real estate, rather than our mother, Papa. The American relationship of people to land is that of exploiter to exploited. Beautiful areas, once sacred to my people, are now expensive resorts; shorelines where net fishing, seaweed gathering, and crabbing occurred are more and more the exclusive domain of recreational activities: sunbathing, windsurfing, jet skiing. Now, even access to beaches near hotels is strictly regulated or denied to the local public altogether.
The phrase m alama ‘ aina—to care for the land—is used by government officials to sell new projects and to convince the locals that hotels can be built with a concern for “ecology.” Hotel historians, like hotel doctors, are stationed in-house to soothe the visitors’ stay with the pablum of invented myths and tales of the “primitive.”
High schools and hotels adopt each other and funnel teenagers through major resorts for guided tours from kitchens to gardens to honeymoon suites in preparation for postsecondary jobs in the lowest-paid industry in the state. In the meantime, tourist appreciation kits and movies are distributed through the state department of education to all elementary schools. One film, unashamedly titled What’s in It for Me?, was devised to convince locals that tourism is, as the newspapers never tire of saying, “the only game in town.”
Of course, all this hype is necessary to hide the truth about tourism, the awful exploitative truth that the industry is the major cause of environmental degradation, low wages, land dispossession, and the highest cost of living in the United States.
While this propaganda is churned out to local residents, the commercialization of Hawaiian culture proceeds with calls for more sensitive marketing of our native values and practices. After all, a prostitute is only as good as her income-producing talents. These talents, in Hawaiian terms, are the hula; the generosity, or aloha, of our people; the u‘i or youthful beauty of our women and men; and the continuing allure of our lands and waters, that is, of our place, Hawai‘i.
The selling of these talents must produce income. And the function of tourism and the state of Hawai‘i is to convert these attributes into profits.
The first requirement is the transformation of the product, or the cultural attribute, much as a woman must be transformed to look like a prostitute, that is, someone who is complicitous in her own commodification. Thus hula dancers wear clownlike make-up, don costumes from a mix of Polynesian cultures, and behave in a manner that is smutty and salacious rather than powerfully erotic. The distance between the smutty and the erotic is precisely the distance between Western culture and Hawaiian culture. In the hotel version of the hula, the sacredness of the dance has completely evaporated while the athleticism and sexual expression have been packaged like ornaments. The purpose is entertainment for profit rather than a joyful and truly Hawaiian celebration of human and divine nature.
But let us look at an example that is representative of literally hundreds of images that litter the pages of scores of tourist publications. From an Aloha Airlines booklet—shamelessly called the “Spirit of Aloha”—there
