Part III

he Colonial
Front: Historians,
Anthropologists,
and the Tourist
Industry
 rom a Native
ghter

E noi'i wale mai no ka haole, a,

'a'ole e pau na hana a Hawai'i 'imi loa

Let the haole freely research us in detail

But the doings of deep delving Hawai'i
will not be exhausted.

Kepelino
Nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian

W h e n I was young the story of my

people was told twice: once by my parents, then again by my school
teachers. From my 'ohana (family), I learned about the life of the old
ones: how they fished and planted by the moon; shared all the fruits of
their labors, especially their children; danced in great numbers for long
hours; and honored the unity of their world in intricate genealogical
chants. My mother said Hawaiians had sailed over thousands of miles
to make their home in these sacred islands. And they had flourished,
until the coming of the haole (whites).
At school, I learned that the "pagan Hawaiians" did not read or
write, were lustful cannibals, traded in slaves, and could not sing. Cap-
tain Cook had "discovered" Hawai'i, and the ungrateful Hawaiians
had killed him. In revenge, the Christian god had cursed the Ha-
waiians with disease and death.
From a Native Daughter

I learned the first of these stories from speaking with my moth-

er and father. I learned the second from books. By the time I left for col-
lege, the books had won out over my parents, especially since I spent
four long years in a missionary boarding school, called the Kameha-
meha Schools, for Hawaiian children.
When I went away, I understood the world as a place and a feel-
ing divided in two: one haole (white) and the other kanaka (native).
When I returned ten years later with a Ph.D., the division was sharper,
the lack of connection more painful. There was the world that we lived
in—my ancestors, my family, and my people—and then there was the
world historians described. This world, they had written, was the
truth. A primitive group, Hawaiians had been ruled by bloodthirsty
priests and despotic kings who owned all the land and kept our people
in feudal subjugation. The chiefs were cruel, the people poor.
But this was not the story my mother told me. No one had
owned the land before the haole came; everyone could fish and plant,
except during sacred periods. And the chiefs were good and loved
their people.
Was my mother confused? What did our kttpuna (elders) say?
They replied: Did these historians (all haole) know the language? Did
they understand the chants? How long had they lived among our peo-
ple? Whose stories had they heard?
None of the historians had ever learned our mother tongue.
They had all been content to read what Europeans and Americans had
written. But why did scholars, presumably well-trained and thought-
ful, neglect our language? Not merely a passageway to knowledge,
language is a form of knowing by itself; a people's way of thinking and
feeling is revealed through its music.
I sensed the answer without needing to answer. From years of
living in a divided world, I knew the historian's judgment: There is no
value in things Hawaiian; all value comes from things haole.
Historians, I realized, were very like missionaries. They were a
part of the colonizing horde. One group colonized the spirit; the other,
the mind. Frantz Fanon had been right, but not just about Africans. He
had been right about the bondage of my own people: "By a kind of per-
verted logic, [colonialism] turns to the past of the oppressed people,
and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it." 1 The first step in the coloniz-
ing process, Fanon had written, was the deculturation of a people.
What better way to take our culture than to remake our image? A rich
historical past became small and ignorant in the hands of Westerners.
 From a N a t i v e D a u g h t e r

And we suffered a damaged sense of people and culture because of

this distortion.
Burdened by a linear, progressive conception of history and by
an assumption that Euro-American culture flourishes at the upper end
of that progression, Westerners have told the history of Hawai'i as an
inevitable if occasionally bittersweet triumph of Western ways over
"primitive" Hawaiian ways. A few authors—the most sympathetic—
have recorded with deep-felt sorrow the passing of our people. But in
the end, we are repeatedly told, such an eclipse was for the best.
Obviously it was best for Westerners, not for our dying multi-
tudes. This is why the historian's mission has been to justify our pass-
ing by celebrating Western dominance. Fanon would have called this
missionizing, intellectual colonization. And it is clearest in the histo-
rian's insistence that pre-haole Hawaiian land tenure was "feudal," a
term that is now applied, without question, in every monograph, in
every schoolbook, and in every tour guide description of my people's
history.
From the earliest days of Western contact, my people told their
guests that no one owned the land. The land—like the air and the sea—
was for all to use and share as their birthright. Our chiefs were stewards
of the land; they could not own or privately possess the land any more
than they could sell it.
But the haole insisted on characterizing our chiefs as feudal
landlords and our people as serfs. Thus, a European term that
described a European practice founded on a European concept of pri-
vate land tenure—feudalism—was imposed upon a people halfway
around the world from Europe and vastly different from her in every
conceivable way. More than betraying an ignorance of Hawaiian cul-
ture and history, however, this misrepresentation was malevolent in
design.
By inventing feudalism in ancient Hawai'i, Western scholars
quickly transformed a spiritually based, self-sufficient economic sys-
tem of land use and occupancy into an oppressive, medieval European
practice of divine right ownership, with the common people tied like
serfs to the land. By claiming that a Pacific people lived under a
European system—that the Hawaiians lived under feudalism—
Westerners could then degrade a successful system of shared land use
with a pejorative and inaccurate Western term. Land tenure changes
instituted by Americans and in line with current Western notions of
private property were then made to appear beneficial to our people.

115
From a Native Daughter

But in practice, such changes benefited the haole, who alienated Ha-
waiians from the land, taking it for themselves.
The prelude to this land alienation was the great dying of the
people. Barely half a century after contact with the West, our people
had declined in number by eighty percent. Disease and death were
rampant. The sandalwood forests had been stripped bare for interna-
tional commerce between England and China. The missionaries had
insinuated themselves everywhere. And a debt-ridden Hawaiian king
(there had been no king before Western contact) succumbed to enor-
mous pressure from the Americans and followed their schemes for
dividing up the land.
This is how private property land tenure entered Hawai'i. The
common people, driven from their birthright, received less than one
percent of the land. They starved, while huge haole-owned sugar plan-
tations thrived.
And what had the historians said? They had said that the
Americans "liberated" the Hawaiians from an oppressive "feudal" sys-
tem. By inventing a false feudal past, the historians justify—and
become complicitous in—massive American theft.
Is there "evidence"—as historians call it—for traditional
Hawaiian concepts of land use? The evidence is in the sayings of my
people and in the words they wrote more than a century ago, much of
which has been translated. Historians however, have chosen to ignore
any references here to shared land use. But there is incontrovertible
evidence in the very structure of the Hawaiian language. If the histori-
ans had bothered to learn our language (as any American historian of
France would learn French), they would have discovered that we show
possession in two ways: through the use of an " a " possessive, which
reveals acquired status, and through the use of an " o " possessive,
which denotes inherent status. My body (ko'u kino) and my parents
(ko'u makua), for example, take the " o " form; most material objects,
such as food (ka'u mea'ai), take the " a " form. But land, like one's body
and one's parents, takes the " o " possessive (ko'u 'aim). Thus, in our
way of speaking, land is inherent to the people; it is like our bodies and
our parents. The people cannot exist without the land, and the land
cannot exist without the people.
Every major historian of Hawai'i has been mistaken about
Hawaiian land tenure. The chiefs did not own the land, they could not
own the land. My mother was right, and the haole historians were
wrong. If they had studied our language, they would have known that

116
 From a N a t i v e Daughter

no one owned the land. But was their failing merely ignorance, or sim-
ple ethnocentric bias?
No, I did not believe them to be so benign. As I read on, a pat-
tern emerged in their writing. Our ways were inferior to those of the
West, to those of the historians' own culture. We were "less devel-
oped," or "immature," or "authoritarian." In some tellings we were
much worse. Thus, Gavan Daws, the most famed modern historian of
Hawai'i, had continued a tradition established earlier by missionaries
Hiram Bingham and Sheldon Dibble, by referring to the old ones as
"thieves" and "savages" who regularly practiced infanticide and who,
in contrast to "civilized" whites, preferred "lewd dancing" to work.
Ralph Kuykendall, long considered the most thorough if also the most
boring of historians of Hawai'i, sustained another fiction, that my
ancestors owned slaves, the outcast kauwa. This opinion, as well as the
description of Hawaiian land tenure as feudal, had been supported by
respected sociologist Andrew Lind. Finally, nearly all historians had
refused to accept our genealogical dating of A.D. 400 or earlier for our
arrival from the South Pacific. They had, instead, claimed that our ear-
liest appearance in Hawai'i could only be traced to A.D. 1100. Thus, at
least seven hundred years of our history were repudiated by "superi-
or" Western scholarship. Only recently have archaeological data con-
firmed what Hawaiians had said these many centuries. 2
Suddenly the entire sweep of our written history was clear to
me. I was reading the West's view of itself through the degradation of
my own past. When historians wrote that the king owned the land and
the common people were bound to it, they were saying that ownership
was the only way human beings in their world could relate to the land,
and in that relationship, some one person had to control both the land
and the interaction between humans.
And when they said that our chiefs were despotic, they were
telling of their own society, where hierarchy always resulted in domi-
nation. Thus, any authority or elder was automatically suspected of
tyranny.
And when they wrote that Hawaiians were lazy, they meant that
work must be continuous and ever a burden.
And when they wrote that we were promiscuous, they meant
that lovemaking in the Christian West was a sin.
And when they wrote that we were racist because we preferred
our own ways to theirs, they meant that their culture needed to domi-
nate other cultures.

117
From a Native Daughter

And when they wrote that we were superstitious, believing in

the mana of nature and people, they meant that the West has long since
lost a deep spiritual and cultural relationship to the earth.
And when they wrote that Hawaiians were "primitive" in their
grief over the passing of loved ones, they meant that the West grieves
for the living who do not walk among their ancestors.
For so long, more than half my life, I had misunderstood this
written record, thinking it described my own people. But my history
was nowhere present. For we had not written. We had chanted and
sailed and fished and built and prayed. And we had told stories
through the great bloodlines of memory: genealogy.
To know my history, I had to put away my books and return to
the land. I had to plant taro in the earth before I could understand the
inseparable bond between people and 'aina. I had to feel again the spir-
its of nature and take gifts of plants and fish to the ancient altars. I had
to begin to speak my language with our elders and leave long silences
for wisdom to grow. But before anything else, I had to learn the lan-
guage like a lover so that I could rock within her and lay at night in her
dreaming arms.
There was nothing in my schooling that had told me of this
or hinted that somewhere there was a longer, older story of origins, of
the flowing of songs out to a great but distant sea. Only my parents'
voices, over and over, spoke to me of a Hawaiian world. While the
books spoke from a different world, a Western world.
And yet, Hawaiians are not of the West. We are of Hawai'i Nei,
this world where I live, this place, this culture, this 'aina.
What can I say, then, to Western historians of my place and peo-
ple? Let me answer with a story.
A while ago I was asked to share a panel on the American over-
throw of our government in 1893. The other panelists were all haole. But
one was a haole historian from the mainland who had just published a
book on what he called the American anti-imperialists. He and I met
briefly in preparation for the panel. I asked him if he knew the lan-
guage. He said no. I asked him if he knew the record of opposition to
our annexation to America. He said there was no real evidence for it,
just comments here and there. I told him that he did not understand
and that at the panel I would share the evidence. When we met in pub-
lic and spoke, I said this:
There is a song much loved by our people. It was written after
Hawai'i had been invaded and occupied by American marines.

118
 From a N a t i v e Daughter

Addressed to our dethroned Queen, it was written in 1893 and tells of

Hawaiian love of our homeland as well as our feelings against annex-
ation to the United States.

Kaulana na pua a'o Famous are the children of

Hawai'i Hawai'i
Kupa'a mahope o Who cling steadfastly to
ka 'aina the land.
Hiki mai ka 'elele o ka loko 'ino Comes the evil-hearted with
Palapala 'anunu me ka pakaha. A document greedy for plunder.

Pane mai Hawai'i moku o Hawai'i, island of Keawe,

Keazve. answers.
Kokua na Hono a'o The bays of Pi'ilani [of Maui,
Pi'ilani. Moloka'i, and Lana'i] help.
Kako'o mai Kaua'i o Mano Kaua'i of Mano assists
Pa'apu me ke one o Firmly together with the sands of
Kakuhihewa. Kakuhihewa.

'A'ole 'a'e kau i ka pulima Do not put the signature

Maluna o ka pepa o ka 'enemi On the paper of the enemy.
Ho'ohui 'aina ku'ai hewa Annexation is wicked sale
I ka pono sivila a'o Of the civil rights of the
ke kanaka Hawaiian people.

'A 'ole makou a'e minamina We do not value

I ka pu'ukala a ke aupuni. The government's sums of money
Ua lawa makou i ka pohaku, We are satisfied with the stones,
I ka 'ai kamaha'o o ka 'aina. Astonishing food of the land.

Mahope makou o Lili'ulani We support Lili'uokalani

A loa'a 'e ka pono o Who has earned the right to
ka 'aina. the land.
(A kau hou 'ia e ke kalaunu) (She will be crowned again)
Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana The story is told
Ka po'e i aloha i ka 'aina. Of the people who love the land.3

This song, I said, continues to be sung with great dignity at

Hawaiian political gatherings, for our people still share the feelings of
anger and protest that it conveys.

119
From a Native Daughter

But our guest, the haole historian, answered that this song,
although beautiful, was not evidence of either opposition or of imperi-
alism from the Hawaiian perspective.
Many Hawaiians in the audience were shocked at his remarks,
but, in hindsight, I think they were predictable. They are the standard
response of the haole historian who has no respect for Native memory.
Finally, I proceeded to relate a personal story, thinking that sure-
ly such a tale could not want for authenticity, since I myself was relat-
ing it. My tutu (grandmother) had told my mother, who had told me,
that at the time of the overthrow a great wailing went up throughout
the islands, a wailing of weeks, a wailing of impenetrable grief, a wail-
ing of death. But he remarked again, this, too, is not evidence.
And so, history goes on, written in long volumes by foreign peo-
ple. Whole libraries begin to form, book upon book, shelf upon shelf.
At the same time, the stories go on, generation to generation, family to
family.
Which history do Western historians desire to know? Is it to be
a tale of writings by their own countrymen, individuals convinced of
their "unique" capacity for analysis, looking at us with Western eyes,
thinking about us within Western philosophical contexts, categorizing
us by Western indices, judging us by Judeo-Christian morals, exhort-
ing us to capitalist achievements, and finally, leaving us an authorita-
tive-because-Western record of their complete misunderstanding?
All this has been done already. Not merely a few times, but
many times. And still, every year, there appear new and eager faces to
take up the same telling, as if the West must continue, implacably, with
the din of its own disbelief. But there is, as there has been always,
another possibility. If it is truly our history Western historians desire to
know, they must put down their books, and take up our practices: first,
of course, the language, but later, the people, the 'aina, the stories.
Above all, in the end, the stories. Historians must listen; they must hear
the generational connections, the reservoir of sounds and meanings.
They must come, as American Indians suggested long ago, to
understand the land. Not in the Western way, but in the indigenous
way, the way of living within and protecting the bond between people
and 'aina. This bond is cultural, and it can be understood only cultur-
ally. But because the West has lost any cultural understanding of the
bond between people and land, it is not possible to know this connec-
tion through Western culture. This means that the history of indige-

120
 From a N a t i v e Daughter

nous people cannot be written from within Western culture. Such a

story is merely the West's story of itself.
Our story remains unwritten. It rests within the culture, which is
inseparable from the land. To know this is to know our history. To
write this is to write of the land and the people who are born from her.

Notes
1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968),
p. 210.
2. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1968). Hiram Bingham, A Residence of
Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Isles (Hartford, CT: H. Huntington, 1848);
reprinted in 1981 (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle). Sheldon Dibble, A History of the
Sandwich Isles (Honolulu: Thrum Publishing, 1909). Ralph Kuykendall, The
Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1854: Foundation and Transformation (Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1978); originally published in 1938. Andrew Lind,
An Island Community: Ecological Succession in Hawai'i (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1938). H. David Tuggle, "Hawai'i," in The Prehistory of Polynesia,
Jessie D. Jennings, ed. (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1979). See also
Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, Its Origins, and
Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of
Kamehameha I (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969); originally pub-
lished in 1878-1889. Lest one think these sources antiquated, it should be noted
that there exist only a handful of modern scholarly works on the history of
Hawai'i. The most respected are those by Kuykendall (1938) and Daws (1968)
and a social history of the twentieth century by Lawrence Fuchs, Hawai'i Pono:
A Social History (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1961). Of these, only
Kuykendall and Daws claim any knowledge of pre-haole history, while con-
centrating on the nineteenth century. However, countless popular works have
relied on these two studies, which, in turn, are themselves based on primary
sources written in English by extremely biased, anti-Hawaiian Westerners,
such as explorers, traders, missionaries (e.g., Bingham [1848] and Dibble
[1909]), and sugar planters. Indeed, a favorite technique of Daws'—whose
Shoal of Time is the most acclaimed and recent general history—is the lengthy
quotation, without comment, of the most racist remarks by missionaries and
planters. Thus, at one point, half of a page is consumed with a "white man's
burden" quotation from an 1886 Planters Monthly article ("It is better here that
the white man should rule.") Daws's only comment is, "The conclusion was
inescapable" (p. 213). To get a sense of such characteristic contempt for
Hawaiians, one has to read only the first few pages, where Daws refers sever-
al times to the Hawaiians as "savages" and "thieves" and where he approv-
ingly has Captain Cook thinking, "It was a sensible primitive who bowed
before a superior civilization" (p. 2). See also—among examples too numerous

121
From a N a t i v e Daughter

to cite—his glib description of sacred hula as a "frivolous diversion," which,

instead of work, the Hawaiians "would practice energetically in the hot sun for
days on end . . . their bare brown flesh glistening with sweat" (pp. 65-66).
Daws, who repeatedly displays an affection for descriptions of Hawaiian skin
color, taught Hawaiian history for some years at the University of Hawai'i. He
once held the Chair of Pacific History at the Australian National University's
Institute of Advanced Studies.
3. Samuel H. Elbert and Noelani Mahoe, Na Mele o Hawai'i Nei: 101
Hawaiian Songs (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1970), pp. 62-64.
 fhat Do You Mean
" White Man?

O n a recent Saturday night, I

watched a 1932 film, The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. The movie
opens in Egypt, where two British archaeologists and a non-Native
believer in what is described as the "Egyptian occult" are debating
whether to open an unearthed treasure, some 3,700 years old.
Engraved with a death curse, the artifact troubles the occult believer,
who argues against its opening to the senior archaeologist. The two
discuss the issue outside the tomb, leaving a junior archaeologist with-
in. The believer of the "Egyptian occult" states the Native case, once
removed, that any disturbance will anger the gods, who must surely
take their just revenge. The senior archaeologist replies that "in the
interests of science," the discovery must be investigated. Even if he
subscribed to Egyptian beliefs, he says, he would not allow them to
deter the progress of his work. His friend issues a final warning, then
departs in fear.
During their discussion, the eager junior archaeologist has
opened the box, withdrawn a mysterious scroll, and begun to translate
it, thus awakening our friend, Boris Karloff, long asleep in his mummy
case standing uncovered against the tomb wall. As Karloff makes off
with the scroll, the junior archaeologist succumbs to the ancient curse,
laughing idiotically, forever lost to insanity.
I, of course, cheered this turn of events.
But alas, Native Hawaiians do not, as far as I know, possess any-
thing so powerful and immediate as the curse of the Egyptian gods to
From a Native Daughter

threaten those who disinter our cultural remains. In other respects,

however, we are remarkably similar to the Egyptians.
Like Egypt, Hawai'i is part of a white colonial empire. Hawaiian
culture and people are dominated by a long-distance power, the
United States of America, whose settlers flood our land. We are fair
game for tourists, adventurers, politicians, and, of course, purveyors of
intellectual colonialism, including historians, anthropologists, and
archaeologists. Our culture is seen—as is Egyptian culture in the film—
to be foreign, prescientific, and representative of the threatening-
because-potentially-uncontrollable unknown. Most important,
Hawaiians, like Egyptians, are those being disinterred, studied, and
removed to museums. The entire subject of the film assumes the power
of the British colonizers to control the Egyptian colonized, just as the
practice of archaeology in Hawai'i assumes the power of foreigners to
dig up and study our remains. Hawaiians, like Egyptians, are but the
backdrop for history: we do not make our own history; we merely
watch as others concoct a history for us. The film's racist assumptions,
like the assumptions of archaeology and anthropology in Hawai'i, are
clear: these Natives are not real people (meaning white people) who
have a real culture (meaning European culture) deserving of the kind
of respect that operates between equals. Therefore, Native customs and
beliefs are of little consequence; they cannot be seriously compared to
"scientific" concerns, nor can they limit or direct, not to mention stop
altogether, the work of "scientists." The attraction of the film for Euro-
American audiences is that Native resistance, in the form of the
mummy, will pit the feared, colonized world of the "occult" Egyptians
against the safe, rational world of the "scientific" British. The fantasy
life of the colonizers will be satisfied while their worst fears are laid to
rest: the mummy will fight, but he will lose. Cultural dominance is rei-
fied in film artifact.
In Hawai'i, the politics of colonial anthropology and archaeolo-
gy are not publicly debated or even acknowledged by its practitioners
in the university or the museum or the field, and certainly not in the
contract firm. Because most archaeology in Hawai'i is "contract" archae-
ology, that is, archaeology done for hire to satisfy state or federal
requirements, professional ethics often take a back seat to the demands
of speedy development. Simply said, contract firms find that monetary
self-interest requires that they discover no significant sites, especially
religious sites, that might trigger statutory oversight and eventual pro-
tection. That these realities are an outgrowth of colonial domination is

124
 W h a t Do Y o u Mean " W e , " W h i t e Man?

also ignored, or flat-out denied, as are the political and ethical implica-
tions arising out of such origins. While thoughtful scholars and orga-
nizations in other places try to address their roles in dispossessing and
further colonizing the people they study, anthropologists and archae-
ologists in Hawai'i (most of whom are white American) refuse to see
Hawaiians as a colonized people whose Native land is a colonial pos-
session of the United States.1 Worse, they avoid the simple observation
that most, if not all, anthropology and archaeology in Hawai'i is done
by non-Natives for non-Natives. Indeed, I do not know of any pub-
lished piece written by an anthropologist on Hawai'i which questions
the presence of anthropologists or archeologists here or challenges
their assumed intention of "scholarship" or analyzes the racist assump-
tions of foreigners who believe a few years training in an American
university (or any other university) qualifies them to study, describe,
and pass judgment upon Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian people.
There is a singular lack of controversy here while a phalanx of acade-
mic colonizers prepares our burial grounds for development, charac-
terizes our cultural beliefs as ideological inventions for political ends,
and determines what is and who is Hawaiian.2
Despite raging battles in the Hawaiian community over disin-
terment of our ancestral bones (for example, Honokahua on Maui and
the Pele Cave in Puna), the bombing of our sacred places (Kaho'olawe
Island, Mâkua, Pohakuloa), industrial development of our forests and
oceans (such as geothermal energy production and manganese nodule
mining), resort development of our shorelines and valleys, which fore-
closes Hawaiian fishing and agricultural projects (for example, the
West Beach project on O'ahu), and highway development of our val-
leys (H-3 freeway), anthropologists and archaeologists have vigorous-
ly resisted examining their work and its political impact as they aid
state and private developers in transforming our lands and waters.
They have run away from the accurate Native accusation that their
arguments are used by our colonizers—for example, the U.S. military,
the resort industry, the state government, and other anthropologists—
in furthering our degradation, our suffering, and our powerlessness.
When criticized by Hawaiians in struggle, their defense is a retreat into
"science" or "scholarly endeavor," as if these projects have no histori-
cal contexts and are not themselves subject to error, racist intent, and
political usage. Anthropologists and archaeologists have gone on the
offensive, attacking Natives who oppose them as "ignorant about their
culture" or "romantic and mixed up." 3

125
From a N a t i v e Daughter

Here, the hidden racism of anthropology and archeology is

made manifest through Native challenge. When push comes to shove,
anthropologists and archaeologists say what they really think: they are
the experts on Native culture; they have superior knowledge of it.
Natives, by comparison, are uninformed and untrained, and should
not, therefore, have control over their sites and culture. In this political
context, foreign "experts" with the support of local and state govern-
ment, including planning and other legal processes, are pitted against
"emotional" Natives who have nothing to rely upon but their person-
al and cultural integrity in asserting that their sacred places and
beloved lands must not be damaged. This situation is obviously colo-
nial. The indigenous people, once rulers of their own destiny, are total-
ly subjugated to the technocrats of another culture dedicated to endless
profit on the ancestral birthsands of the Native people.
It is not merely that Hawaiians are institutionally powerless to
decide how and whether their people and their cultural remains
should be studied at all. It is that a whole way of life, of being in and
with the world, has been obliterated. The destiny that is left to Native
people then becomes an imposed life of never ending struggle in a los-
ing war.
The daily experience of resistance for Hawaiians is bitter,
indeed. When we challenge what experts say and write, we are
attacked for not knowing what and who we are, for being grossly polit-
ical or for "haole bashing." Because we are presumed to be inferior in
terms of Western training and concepts, the public debate never
approaches the issues but always falls back on disparagement of our
psychological state or our emotional and rational equilibrium. In other
words, we are characterized in terms reserved for the infirm or the
mentally incompetent. Many Hawaiians, myself included, have been
branded as "crazies," simply because we assert the priority of our cul-
tural values—for example, that land is our ancestor and that burial
grounds are sacred—over the American insistence that all value pro-
ceeds from moneymaking. (In the Hawaiian way of thinking, a value
that holds money and "science" as the promise of human fulfillment is
itself crazy.) If this public disparagement does not stifle our resistance,
then the counterattack becomes an economic one. Thus, there have
been various attempts to have us fired from our jobs, or to prevent us
from getting jobs, especially if they have some professional status that
would challenge archaeologists and anthropologists.

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 W h a t Do Y o u M e a n " W e , " W h i t e Man?

While Hawaiians suffer this colonial yoke, anthropologists deny

the very methodology of their work as exploitative. To Native peoples,
anthropology is based on a peculiarly Western belief that studying
books and learning to do fieldwork bequeaths a right to go halfway
around the world to live with, observe, and write about another peo-
ple. Moreover, this exploitation of a people's hospitality and generosi-
ty does not carry with it any responsibility of repayment in kind, or of
privilege and privacy. At some time in their professional lives, anthro-
pologists live with Natives who are in struggle, dispossessed, and, in
some cases, endangered. But in the interests of knowledge or science or
some other abstraction, the anthropologist has no obligation to aid the
people he or she studies, to withhold information that threatens the
people or is considered sacred or privileged to them, or to be a part of
their struggles, whatever they may be. In other words, the anthropolo-
gist is a taker and a user. And if the people who are taken suffer from
the anthropologist's work, too bad. No moral or ethical responsibility
attaches to the anthropologist or the archeologist.
Familiar examples come from places where Native peoples are
being removed or killed at an incredible rate, such as the Amazon or
the Philippines or tribal areas in India. But this colonial exploitation is
also occurring right here and right now in Hawai'i.
Jocelyn Linnekin, former student of Marshall Sahlins and a
tenured professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Hawai'i-Manoa, has written a book—Children of the
Land—and an article, "Defining Tradition: Variations on the Hawaiian
Identity," in which she asserts that modern-day Hawaiians have
"invented" what they claim is a traditional value of love and caring for
the land. She refers to this value, called 'aloha 'aina or malama 'aina, as a
"slogan" (rather than a real cultural value) that is used by the Protect
Kaho'olawe 'Ohana and other Hawaiian groups in their efforts to stop
military bombing of Kaho'olawe. She goes on to say that the sacred
meaning of Kaho'olawe was invented because Hawaiian nationalists
needed a "political and cultural symbol of protest" in the modern peri-
od. Despite nineteenth-century evidence of Kaho'olawe's importance,
Linnekin argues that the island's meaning has been created for the pur-
poses of Hawaiian political maneuvering today.4
In her article, Linnekin writes, "For Hawai'i, 'traditional' proper-
ly refers to the precontact era, before Cook's arrival in 1778" (p. 242).
But later, on the same page, she admits that "tradition is fluid...." Still,

127
From a Native Daughter

despite this confusion, she criticizes Hawaiians for a "reconstruction of

traditional Hawaiian society" in the present. Linnekin's difficulty stems
from the kind of wrong-headedness that insists on hard-edged bifur-
cations of reality: pre-Western culture versus post-Western culture.
But what constitutes "tradition" to a people is ever changing.
Culture is not static, nor is it frozen in objectified moments in time.
Without doubt, Hawaiians were transformed drastically and irrepara-
bly after contact, but remnants of earlier lifeways, including values and
symbols have persisted. One of these values is the Hawaiian responsi-
bility to care for the land, to make it flourish, called malama 'aina or
aloha 'aina. To Linnekin, this value has been invented by modern
Hawaiians to protest degradation of the land by developers, the mili-
tary, and others. What Linnekin has missed here—partly because she
has an incomplete grasp of "traditional" values but also because she
does not understsand and thus misapprehends Hawaiian cultural
nationalism—is simply this: The Hawaiian relationship to land has
persisted into the present. What has changed is ownership and use of
the land (from collective use by Hawaiians for subsistence to private
use by whites and other non-Natives for profit). Asserting the
Hawaiian relationship in this changed context results in politicization.
Thus, Hawaiians assert a "traditional" relationship to the land not for
political ends, as Linnekin argues, but because they continue to believe
in the cultural value of caring for the land. That land use is now con-
tested makes such a belief political. This distinction is crucial because
the Hawaiian cultural motivation reveals the persistence of traditional
values, the very thing Linnekin claims modern Hawaiians have
"invented."
In her book, Linnekin severely criticizes Hawaiian nationalists,
arguing that their nationalism is so much ideological fodder in the fight
for land claims while disparaging their cultural origins as something
less than "Hawaiian." She mistakenly says the Hawaiian movement is
urban in origin and even misunderstands the lack of nationalism in
other ethnic groups. 5
Apart from the factual errors Linnekin has made—the move-
ment is rural in origin; aloha 'aina is a traditional value; Hawaiians are
nationalist and other ethnic groups are not because we are the only
group in Hawai'i to have been made, literally, nationless in the land of
our birth—her position that we have "invented" our traditions has
now been repeated by other anthropologists, such as the anti-Native
professor, Roger Keesing; by newspapers, such as the New York Times
and the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, and worst of all for

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 W h a t Do Y o u M e a n " W e , " W h i t e Man?

Hawaiians, by the U.S. Navy as justification for ongoing destruction of

Hawaiian lands.6
In short, because Linnekin wanted to publish an allegedly schol-
arly article applying the "inventing tradition, inventing culture" school
of thought to Hawaiians, we, the Native people, are now faced with a
proliferating ideology that is hurting our real culture everyday, hurting
real Hawaiians everyday, and that is being used over and over to
undermine our claim to say who and what we are.
Of course, Hawaiian nationalists' claim to knowledge is our life
experiences as Natives within a culture that is 2,000 years old.
Linnekin's claim to knowledge is her brief training (in Michigan) as an
anthropologist. But the problem is more serious than epistemology. In
a colonial world, the work of anthropologists and other Western-
trained "experts" is used to disparage and exploit Natives. Thus, what
Linnekin writes about Hawaiians has more potential power than what
Hawaiians write. Proof of this rests in the use of Linnekin's argument
by the U.S. Navy that Hawaiian nationalists have invented the sacred
meaning of Kaho'olawe Island. Here, the connection between anthro-
pology and the colonial enterprise is explicit. When Natives accuse
Western scholars of exploiting them, they have in mind the exact kind
of situation I am describing.
Beneath this academic reaction to Native assertions of our own
culture is the entire question of evidence. How could an obviously
wrong-headed statement about Hawaiians inventing their love for the
land become such an oft-repeated "fact"? The answer is simple: a dif-
ferent standard of proof operates when Natives are involved. Every
reiteration of the "fact" of our cultural invention reinforces it as a tru-
ism. Because of deep-rooted racism at the core of Western history, neg-
ative descriptions are believed without the slightest shred of evidence
because the people in question are Natives. Were the same statements
to be made about white people, careful examination of evidence and
demands for more of it would be assumed. Not so with Natives.
I teach a course in Hawaiian studies called "Myths of Hawaiian
History." I devised the course after concluding that so much of what
passed for Hawaiian history was nothing more than a series of politi-
cal myths created by foreigners and designed to disparage our people.
Many of the myths—such as infanticide as a common practice in pre-
haole Hawaiian culture—were invented by missionaries. But what is
perhaps more telling is that these same myths are repeated today by
anthropologists and archaeologists. Thus the "great" Marshall Sahlins
(like the less great Eleanor Nordyke and Gavan Daws) asserts that

129
From a Native Daughter

Hawaiians practiced infanticide but offers as evidence only doubtful

missionary hearsay. The fashionable Valerio Valeri argues that
Hawaiian land tenure was feudal, but his only evidence is alleged lin-
guistic similarities between Hawaiian and European terms, hardly a
sound evidentiary base. Patrick Kirch, a leading figure in Hawaiian
archaeology, has written that tuberculosis was a "common pathology"
in pre-haole Hawai'i, which, in turn, is exaggerated by archaeologist
Paul Cleghorn, who claims that "many" Hawaiians suffered from it. At
this writing, no evidence exists that there was any tuberculosis in pre-
haole Hawai'i. 7
And the list of lies told by credible, professional academics about
us Native Hawaiians goes on and on. Indeed, it could be said that
anthropologists and archaeologists are inventing our culture at an
unbelievable rate.
To bewildered non-Natives, it may not be clear why we Natives
are so upset about all this or even what infanticide, feudalism, and
tuberculosis have in common as descriptions of pre-haole Hawaiian
society. Suffice it to say that these fabrications, when taken together,
form a tidy racist profile of a people who, in Western thinking, are
primitive (because they practice baby killing), backward (because they
have feudal land tenure), and diseased. The value of this description,
although false, is simply that Western impact is then seen to be benefi-
cial for Hawaiians, since it meant an end to infanticide, the liberation
of private property, and the excusing of diseased Westerners, such as
the celebrated Captain Cook, and the resulting massive depopulation
of Hawaiians. I could go on with this list, which also includes other
myths and other inventors from fields such as history, demography,
and politics. But the point has been made: when it comes to Natives,
negative statements are eagerly believed with but the thinnest evi-
dence or none at all because of the general racist belief in Native cul-
tural and physical inferiority.
As a Native Hawaiian who has participated for nearly fifteen
years in the current efforts of my people to sustain their peoplehood,
and nationhood, I have fought with anthropologists and archaeologists
many times: to stop disinterment, to insist on accurate representation
of the Hawaiian movement, to end osteological and DNA analysis. At
each juncture, I feel that we Hawaiians have no likelihood of convinc-
ing either the anthropologists or the archaeologists of our position.
They seem, almost to a person, to reject our arguments against "scien-

130
 What Do You Mean "We," White Man?

tific" study, so-called cultural analysis, and all the rest. Worse, some of
them have tried to injure our employment opportunities, to question
our motives and our sanity, even to assert that they are themselves
Native to Hawai'i.
All this has brought me to the following position. First, all
anthropology and archaeology on Hawaiians should stop. There
should be a moratorium on studying, unearthing, slicing, crushing,
and analyzing us.
Second, while this moratorium is in place, there needs to be seri-
ous discussion among anthropologists and archaeologists about their
political roles, their place in Hawai'i, and their responsibility to the
Hawaiian people. Some departure points here could be the kind of eth-
ical discussions that take place among atomic scientists and geneticists
regarding the potential damage of their work to other people. This is
especially true of work on the contemporary Hawaiian Movement that
is used daily by our enemies to disparage and attack us. In other
words, there needs to be some internal discussion among anthropolo-
gists and archaeologists about the impact of their work on living
Hawaiians and the ethical conflicts that spring from their research.
There needs to be an equal discussion between these two groups and
leaders in the Hawaiian community.
Third, Hawaiians must lead an independent, professional inves-
tigation into the Bishop Museum, the largest and oldest research muse-
um focusing on the Pacific Islands, with particular interest in tradi-
tional Hawaiian culture. Serious questions remain concerning the qual-
ity and professional integrity of their contract archaeology, including
questions of falsification of reporting on sites and mismanagement of
state funds. In the last ten years, Bishop Museum has come under
increasing fire from the Hawaiian community, practicing archaeolo-
gists, and other state agencies for shoddy work and an arrogant disre-
gard of Hawaiian cultural expertise in identifying religious sites.
Fourth, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Hawai'i
need to acknowledge and address the racist inheritance of their fields
as well as their own individual prejudices against a Native culture and
people classifed by Euro-American "civilization" as inferior and sav-
age. For many Hawaiians, including myself, archaeologists who dig up
our ancestors for money or glory are maha'oi haole, that is, rude and
intrusive white people who go where they do not belong. It is simply
wrong, culturally, for non-Natives to dig up our ancestors, to break

131
From a Native Daughter

their bones, to remove them for highways and hotels, and to publish
about them. Unlike white people, our culture is not obsessed with "sci-
entific" study of human skeletons. We have much aloha for our ances-
tors and think of their burials as worthy of both ceremony and respect.
This is why many of us Hawaiians do not support disinterment and
analysis of our ancestral remains. I cannot reconcile grave robbing of
my own people to increase "scientific" knowledge. Some things are
sacred, even though, to the West, nothing is. To me and to most
Natives, bones, graves, and rituals are sacrosanct. No exceptions.
For those who know little about such things outside Hawai'i, let
me just say that in the Maori and aboriginal situations, in my under-
standing, the Native peoples exert much more control over what and
how work is done regarding their culture and their artifacts. And in
entirely independent countries, the Native people decide everything.
Period. In this, as in so much else, Hawai'i is far behind other Pacific
nations.
Finally, I reiterate something all colonialists despise: Native land
belongs to Native people. They are the only residents with a genealog-
ical claim to their place. That Euro-Americans violently disagree with
this does not make it less true. Indeed, violent disagreement is violent
precisely to the degree that the presence of Euro-Americans is domi-
nant. In the Americas, white people insist on the fiction of "discovery"
of two continents where more than 150 million people lived at the time
of conquest. The genocide that followed contact continues today, but
that, too, is a story of denial.
In Hawai'i, Hawaiians are categorized as just another group of
immigrants who happened along some 2,000 years before whites and
Asians. Words like "indigenous" are never used by scholars or lay peo-
ple to describe Hawaiians. Nor is the word "settler" used to describe
immigrants. As racist as this obviously is, the denial of Native history,
culture, and humanity is central to the colonial endeavor. Archaeology
and anthropology, in Hawai'i as elsewhere, are integral parts of the
mammoth Euro-American project to dominate the human and natural
world.
For those who disagree, there is really no middle ground. Non-
Natives, no matter how long their residence in Hawai'i, should
acknowledge their status as settlers, that is, uninvited guests in our
Native country. Hawaiians are the only Native people. No other peo-
ple—Asian, white, etc.—can or should claim Native status. Put differ-
 W h a t Do Y o u M e a n " W e , " W h i t e Man?

ently, we are not all immigrants. Therefore, those who are Native
Hawaiians have the only honest claim to decide what is researched and
published about us and what is kapu (sacred).
This is my challenge and my hope.

Notes
1. Cultural Survival, Inc. (out of Harvard University), and the Inter-
national Work Group on Indigenous Affairs (out of Denmark) are two non-
Native groups that have been working for some time to aid indigenous peoples
the world over. Initiated by anthropologists, these groups have sought to pre-
sent the plight of Native peoples in such a way as to support them in their strug-
gle for survival. The formation of both groups was a response to the complicity
of anthropologists in the destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples.
For a critique of anthropologists and other scholars in terms of their
exploitation of Native peoples, see Edward W. Said, "Representing the
Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989):
205-225. Said concludes his survey with these words: "Perhaps anthropology
as we have known it can only continue on one side of the imperial divide, there
to remain as a partner in domination and hegemony" (p. 225). For an article
that seeks to create a typology of archaeologies, see Bruce G. Trigger,
"Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist," Man (N.S.)
19, 355-370. In this fine piece, the present form of archaeology done by
Americans—and, therefore, done in Hawai'i—is situated historically as part of
the so-called American "New Archaeology," which Trigger argues is an out-
come of postwar American imperialism. In Trigger's words, ". . . the New
Archaeology asserts the unimportance of national traditions themselves and of
anything that stands in the way of American economic activity and political
influence." This arrogant stand is surely what has been operating in Hawai'i
with contract archaeology, in which any Native opposition to unearthing bur-
ial grounds and preparing sites for construction projects is seen as an impedi-
ment to "science." Moreover, the view that Hawaiians should have control
over what happens to the record of their past, especially in terms of their own
cultural values, is dismissed as "romanticism" when, in truth, it is a challenge
to the imperialist notion that national traditions should be subordinated to the
harsh realities of life in capitalist society. Hawaiian resistance can be seen as an
assertion of an alternative tradition, one that is decidedly non-American, and
for which the past is a direct link with the present, a present that is living rather
than scholarly and artifactual.
2. The Society for Hawaiian Archaeology is not Hawaiian in any of its
parts but is, rather, a professional organization whose ideology reflects the
needs of predominantly haole archaeologists in Hawai'i for continued private
and state support in archaeological work. The questions of who is an "expert"
on things Hawaiian, of who has a claim to speak for the Hawaiian past, of the
involvement of archaeologists in the destruction of things Hawaiian, and more

133
From a Native Daughter

have been systematically ignored by the Society. So, too, has any interaction
with Hawaiians who protest their work. Generally, the relationship between
activist Hawaiians and archaeologists is filled with conflict and distrust. From
the Hawaiian point of view, this is healthy, since without such opposition the
voice of our ancestors would be stilled and the heritage of our children would
be lost.
3. The controversy over the huge cemetery at Honokahua on Maui
(which involved the potential removal of nearly 2,000 ancient Native skeletons
for the building of a Japanese-financed hotel on missionary-owned land)
revealed what many archaeologists actually think about Hawaiians. For exam-
ple, disparaging comments were heard from the head of the archaeology
firm—Rosendahl—that had the contract to remove the burials. These com-
ments questioned the motivation, intelligence, and emotional stability of
protesting Hawaiians. Moreover, this controversy spilled into the Honolulu
dailies, which repeated charges that Hawaiians who resisted the unearthing
were emotional as opposed to the archaeologists who were merely doing their
job. To my knowledge, not a single archaeologist sided with the resistance
efforts. Indeed, the president of the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology,
Professor Terry Hunt, wrote to the governor asking that remains at
Honokahua be made available for osteological analysis. This position came
long after the issue had exploded into a statewide concern involving thousands
of protesting Hawaiians throughout the archipelago. Thus, no matter how seri-
ous our resistance, archaeologists continue to believe and assert that "science"
should determine the fate of Native remains.
4. See Jocelyn Linnekin, "Defining Tradition: Variations on the
Hawaiian Identity," American Ethnologist 10 (1983): 241-252.
5. Jocelyn Linnekin, Children of the Land: Exchange and Status in a
Hawaiian Community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985). For a
reading of Linnekin's work and a critique of her posture as a Western-trained
anthropologist misrendering Hawaiian culture, see my review of her book in
The Hawaiian Journal of History XX (1986): 232-235. For a careful analysis of both
Linnekin's argument and my own as a Native nationalist, see Jeffrey Tobin,
"Cultural Construction and Native Nationalism: Report from the Hawaiian
Front," in boundary 2, vol. 21 (Spring 1994): 111-133.
6. See the racist article by Roger M. Keesing, "Creating the Past: Custom
and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific," Contemporary Pacific 1 (1989): 19^12.
Also, see my response in "Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial
Struggle," Contemporary Pacific 3 (1991): 111-117. Keesing repeats Linnekin's
charges that modern-day Hawaiians have invented their love of the land. His
only citations for this assertion come from haole sources. As for Kaho'olawe,
Linnekin's falsehoods are repeated by a fellow anthropologist, one Tom Keane,
who was contracted by the Navy to write their cultural analysis of Kaho'olawe.
The study is entitled Kaho'olawe Island, Hawai'i Cultural Significance Overview.
The Sunday San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner (March 4,1990) reprinted a piece
from the New York Times on Natives inventing their culture. Hawaiians were
included as one example of this invention. No citation followed. Linnekin's

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false claim has become such a common property that, apparently, no citations
are needed.
7. See Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), p. 23; Kirch, Feathered Gods and Fishhooks (Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press, 1985), p. 243; and Cleghorn, review of Feathered Gods and
Fishhooks, in Journal of the Polynesian Society 96 (1987): 133. For an analysis of all
references, both missionary and scholarly, on the myth of infanticide in tradi-
tional Hawai'i, see David Stannard, "Recounting the Fables of Savagery:
Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myths," Journal of American
Studies 25 (1991): 3 , 3 8 1 - 4 1 8 . On the absence of tuberculosis in Hawai'i prior to
the arrival of haole, see David Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of
Hawai'i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: Social Science Research
Institute, University of Hawai'i, 1989), pp. 77-78.

135
 it
ovely Hula Hands":
Corporate Tourism
and the Prostitution
of Hawaiian Culture

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, polit-
ically, and culturally subordinated to the United States is known to
most Americans. Nor is it common knowledge that Hawaiians have
been struggling for over twenty 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 home-
land this year and the next, and so on, into the foreseeable capitalist
future. Such are the intended privileges of the so-called American stan-
dard of living: ignorance of and yet power over one's relations to
Native peoples. Thanks to postwar American imperialism, the ideolo-
gy 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 thou-
sand 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
 C o r p o r a t e T o u r i s m a n d P r o s t i t u t i o n of H a w a i i a n Culture

image of the Native "female" in her magical allure. And if luck pre-
vails, some of "her" will rub off on you, the visitor.
This fictional Hawai'i comes out of the depths of Western sexu-
al sickness that 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 polit-
ical, 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 is planned and executed by multinational corporations
(both foreign-based and Hawai'i-based), by huge landowners (such as
the missionary-descended Castle & Cook of Dole Pineapple fame), 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 (such as 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 such as film, television and radio, and
the daily newspaper. 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.
The major public educational institution, the University of
Hawai'i, funnels millions of taxpayer dollars into a School of Travel
Industry Management and a business school replete with a Real Estate
Center and a Chair of Free Enterprise (renamed the Walker Chair to
hide the crude reality of capitalism). As the propaganda arm of the
tourist industry in Hawai'i, both schools churn out studies that purport
to show why Hawai'i needs more golf courses, hotels, and tourist
infrastructure and how Hawaiian culture is "naturally" one of giving
and entertaining.
Of course, state-encouraged commodification and prostitution
of Native cultures through tourism is not unique to Hawai'i. It is suf-
fered by peoples in places as disparate as Goa, Australia, Tahiti, and
the southwestern United States. Indeed, the problem is so common-
place that international organizations—for example, the Ecumenical
Coalition on Third World Tourism out of Bangkok, the Center for

137
From a Native Daughter

Responsible Tourism in California, and the Third World European

Network—have banded together to help give voice to Native peoples
in daily resistance against corporate tourism. My focus on Hawai'i,
although specific to my own culture, would likely transfer well when
applied to most Native peoples.1
Despite our similarities with other major tourist destinations, the
statistical picture of the effects of corporate tourism in Hawai'i is
shocking:

Fact: Nearly forty years ago, at statehood, Hawai'i residents out-

numbered tourists by more than 2 to 1. Today, tourists outnum-
ber residents by 6 to 1; they outnumber Native Hawaiians by 30
to l. 2

Fact: According to independent economists and criminologists,

"tourism has been the single most powerful factor in O'ahu's
crime rate," including crimes against people and property.3

Fact: Independent demographers have been pointing out for

years that "tourism is the major source of population growth in
Hawai'i" and that "rapid growth of the tourist industry ensures
the trend toward a rapidly expanded population that receives
lower per capita income." 4

Fact: The Bank of Hawai'i has reported that the average real
incomes of Hawai'i residents grew only one percent during the
period from the early seventies through the early eighties, when
tourism was booming. The same held true throughout the
nineties. The census bureau reports that personal income growth
in Hawai'i during the same time was the lowest by far of any of
the fifty American states.5

Fact: Groundwater supplies on O'ahu will be insufficient to meet

the needs of residents and tourists by the year 2000. 6

Fact: According to The Honolulu Advertiser, "Japanese investors

have spent more than $7.1 billion on their acquisitions" since
1986 in Hawai'i. This kind of volume translates into huge alien-
ations of land and properties. For example, nearly 2,000 acres of
land on the Big Island of Hawai'i was purchased for $18.5 mil-
lion and over 7,000 acres on Moloka'i went for $33 million. In
1989, over $1 billion was spent by the Japanese on land alone. 7

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 C o r p o r a t e T o u r i s m a n d P r o s t i t u t i o n of H a w a i i a n Culture

Fact: More plants and animals from our Hawaiian Islands are
now extinct or on the endangered species list than in the rest of
the United States. 8

Fact: More than 29,000 families are on the Hawaiian trust lands
list, waiting for housing, pastoral, or agricultural lots. 9

Fact: The median cost of a home on the most populated island of

O'ahu is around $350,000. 1 0

Fact: Hawai'i has by far the worst ratio of average family income
to average housing costs in the country. This explains why fam-
ilies spend nearly 52 percent of their gross income for housing
costs. 11

Fact: Nearly one-fifth of Hawai'i's resident population is classi-

fied as near-homeless, that is, those for whom any mishap results
in immediate on-the-street homelessness. 12

These kinds of statistics render a very bleak picture, not at all

what the posters and jingoistic tourist promoters would have you
believe about Hawai'i.
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 and 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 coun-
try. In Hawai'i, these "home" countries are Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Canada, Australia, and the United States. In this sense, Hawai'i is very
much like a Third World colony where the local elite—the Democratic
Party in our state—collaborate in the rape of Native land and people. 13
The mass nature of this kind of tourism results in megaresort
complexes on thousands of acres with demands for water and services
that far surpass the needs of Hawai'i residents. These complexes may
boast several hotels, golf courses, restaurants, and other "necessaries"
to complete the total tourist experience. Infrastructure is usually built
by the developer in exchange for county approval of more hotel units.
In Hawai'i, counties bid against each other to attract larger and larger
complexes. "Rich" counties, then, are those with more resorts, since

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they will pay more of the tax base of the county. The richest of these is
the City and County of Honolulu, which encompasses the entire island
of O'ahu. This island is the site of four major tourist destinations, a
major international airport, and 80 percent of the resident population
of Hawai'i. The military also controls nearly 30 percent of the island,
with bases and airports of their own. As you might imagine, the densi-
ty of certain parts of Honolulu (e.g., Waikiki) is among the highest in
the world. At the present annual visitor count, more than five million
tourists pour through O'ahu, an island of only 607 square miles.
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 that 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 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 that 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, from resistance to
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 con-
vey the utter degradation of our culture and our people under corpo-
rate tourism by employing prostitution as an analytic category.
Finally, I have chosen four areas of Hawaiian culture to examine:
our homeland, our one hanau that is Hawai'i, our lands and fisheries,
the outlying seas and the heavens; our language and dance; our famil-
ial relationships; and our women.
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 constituents parts." Thus, "the genealogy of the land, the gods,
chiefs, and people intertwine one with the other, and with all aspects
of the universe." 14

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In the mo'olelo of Papa and Wakea, "earth mother" and "sky

father," our islands were 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 that will feed and provide for the Hawaiian people. This rela-
tionship 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, an abundance of food, and good gov-
ernment. The maka'ainana or "common people," worked the land and
fed the chiefs; the ali'i organized production and appeased the gods.
Today, malama '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.
Hawaiian deities also spring from the land: Pele is our volcano,
Kane and Lono our fertile valleys and plains, Kanaloa our ocean and
all that lives within it, and so on with the numerous gods of Hawai'i.
Our whole universe, 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 prized
value. 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 from 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 recipro-
cate 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 feel-
ing and practice that works among the people and between the people
and their land.
The significance and meaning of aloha underscores the centrality

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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 that we
have oral history, but what we have are stories, such as our creation
story, passed on through the generations. This sense of history is dif-
ferent from the haole sense of history. To Hawaiians in traditional soci-
ety, 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 two thousand years of speaking Hawaiian, our peo-
ple suffered the near extinction of our language through its banning by
the American-imposed government in 1900, the year 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 under-
gone 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
is increasing every day. 1 5
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 halau, 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 own past and our own ways of life. This is
why cultural revitalization is often resisted and disparaged by anthro-
pologists 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 to this day. Hawaiians continue to have allegedly "ille-
gitimate" children, to hânai, or "adopt," both children and adults out-
side of sanctioned Western legal concepts, to hold and use land and
water in a collective form rather than a private property form, and to

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proscribe the notion and the value that one person should strive to sur-
pass 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 cen-
tral to this value, since it prevents individual decline. Of course, pover-
ty is not thereby avoided; it is only shared with everyone in the unit.
The 'ohana works effectively when the kua'ana relationship (elder sib-
ling/younger sibling reciprocity) is practiced.
Finally, within the 'ohana, our women are considered the life-
givers 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 lahui, or our "nation." The renowned beauty of
our women, especially their sexual beauty, is not considered a com-
modity 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 such as sunbathing, wind-
surfing, and jet skiing. Now, even access to beaches near hotels is strict-
ly regulated or denied to the local public altogether.
The phrase, malama '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 post-secondary school jobs in the
lowest paid industry in the state. In the meantime, tourist appreciation

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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 tal-
ents, 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 con-
tinuing allure of our lands and waters, that is, of our place, Hawai'i.
The selling of these talents must produce income. And the func-
tion of tourism and the State of Hawai'i is to convert these attributes
into profit.
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 corn-
modification. Thus hula dancers wear clownlike makeup, don cos-
tumes 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 ath-
leticism 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.
The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai'i can be yours,
that is, you the tourists', the non-Natives', the visitors'. The place, the
people, the culture, even our identity as a "Native" people is for sale.
Thus the word "Aloha" is employed as an aid in the constant hawking
of things Hawaiian. In truth, this use of aloha is so far removed from
any Hawaiian cultural context that it is, literally, meaningless.
Thus, Hawai'i, like a lovely woman, is there for the taking. Those
with only a little money get a brief encounter, those with a lot of
money, like the Japanese, get more. The state and counties will give tax
breaks, build infrastructure, and have the governor personally wel-

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come tourists to ensure that they keep coming. Just as the pimp regu-
lates prices and guards the commodity of the prostitute, so the state
bargains with developers for access to Hawaiian land and culture.
Who builds the biggest resorts to attract the most affluent tourists gets
the best deal: more hotel rooms, golf courses, and restaurants
approved. Permits are fast-tracked, height and density limits are sus-
pended, new groundwater sources are miraculously found.
Hawaiians, meanwhile, have little choice in all this. We can fill
up the unemployment lines, enter the military, work in the tourist
industry, or leave Hawai'i. Increasingly, Hawaiians are leaving, not by
choice but out of economic necessity.
Our people who work in the industry—dancers, waiters, singers,
valets, gardeners, housekeepers, bartenders, and even a few man-
agers—make between $10,000 and $25,000 a year, an impossible salary
for a family in Hawai'i. Psychologically, our young people have begun
to think of tourism as the only employment opportunity, trapped as
they are by the lack of alternatives. For our young women, modeling is
a "cleaner" job when compared to waiting on tables or dancing in a
weekly revue, but modeling feeds on tourism and the commodification
of Hawaiian women. In the end, the entire employment scene is
shaped by tourism.
Despite their exploitation, Hawaiians' participation in tourism
raises the problem of complicity. Because wages are so low and
advancement so rare, whatever complicity exists is secondary to the
economic hopelessness that drives Hawaiians into the industry.
Refusing to contribute to the commercialization of one's culture
becomes a peripheral concern when unemployment looms.
Of course, many Hawaiians do not see tourism as part of their
colonization. Thus, tourism is viewed as providing jobs, not as a form
of cultural prostitution. Even those who have some glimmer of critical
consciousness do not generally agree that the tourist industry prosti-
tutes Hawaiian culture. This is a measure of the depth of our mental
oppression: we cannot understand our own cultural degradation
because we are living it. As colonized people, we are colonized to the
extent that we are unaware of our oppression. When awareness begins,
then so, too, does decolonization. Judging by the growing resistance to
new hotels, to geothermal energy and manganese nodule mining,
which would supplement the tourist industry, and to increases in the
sheer number of tourists, I would say that decolonization has begun,
but we have many more stages to negotiate on our path to sovereignty.

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My brief excursion into the prostitution of Hawaiian culture has

done no more than give an overview. Now that you have read a Native
view, let me just leave this thought with you. If you are thinking of vis-
iting my homeland, please do not. We do not want or need any more
tourists, and we certainly do not like them. If you want to help our
cause, pass this message on to your friends.

Notes
1. The Center for Responsible Tourism and the Third World European
Network were created out of the activism and organizing of the Ecumenical
Coalition on Third World Tourism (ECTWT). This umbrella organization is
composed of the following member bodies: All Africa Conference of Churches,
Caribbean Conference of Churches, Christian Conference of Asia, Consejo
Latinoamericano de Iglesias, Federation of Asian Bishops Conference/Office
of Human Development, Middle East Council of Churches, Pacific Conference
of Churches. In addition, sister organizations, like the Hawai'i Ecumenical
Coalition on Tourism, extend the network worldwide. The ECTWT publishes
a quarterly magazine with articles on Third World tourism and its destructive
effects from child prostitution to dispossession of Native peoples. The address
for ECTWT is P.O. Box 24, Chorakhebua, Bangkok 10230, Thailand.
2. Eleanor C. Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawai'i, 2nd ed. (Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1989), pp. 134-172.
3. Meda Chesney-Lind, "Salient Factors in Hawai'i's Crime Rate,"
University of Hawai'i School of Social Work. Available from author.
4. Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawai'i, pp. 134-172.
5. Bank of Hawai'i Annual Economic Report, 1984.
6. Estimate of independent hydrologist Kate Vandemoer to community
organizing group Küpa'a He'eia, February 1990. Water quality and groundwa-
ter depletion are two problems much discussed by state and county officials in
Hawai'i but ignored when resort permits are considered.
7. The Honolulu Advertiser, April 8,1990.
8. David Stannard, Testimony against West Beach Estates. Land Use
Commission, State of Hawai'i, January 10,1985.
9. Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, phone interview, March 1998.
10. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 8,1990.
11. Bank of Hawai'i Annual Economic Report, 1984. In 1992, families
probably spent closer to 60 percent of their gross income for housing costs.
Billion-dollar Japanese investments and other speculation since 1984 have
caused rental and purchase prices to skyrocket.
12. This is the estimate of a state-contracted firm that surveyed the
islands for homeless and near-homeless families. Testimony was delivered to
the state legislature, 1990 session.
13. For an analysis of post-statehood Hawai'i and its turn to masa-based
corporate tourism, see Noel Kent, Hawai'i: Islands Under the Influence. For an
analysis of foreign investment in Hawai'i, see "A Study of Foreign Investment

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and Its Impact on the State," (Honolulu: Hawai'i Real Estate Center, University
of Hawai'i, 1989).
14. Lilikalä Kame'eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires (Honolulu:
Bishop Museum Press, 1992), p. 2.
15. See Larry Kimura, "Native Hawaiian Culture," Native Hawaiians
Study Commission Report, vol. 1, pp. 173-197.

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