Читать книгу Mapping the Social Landscape - Группа авторов - Страница 89

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 within it, and so on with the 40,000 and 400,000 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 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 is a characteristic portrayal of commodified hula dancers, one male and one female. The costuming of the female is more South Pacific—the Cook Islands and Tahiti—while that of the male is more Hawaiian. (He wears a Hawaiian loincloth called a malo.) The ad smugly asserts the hotel dinner service as a l u ‘au, a Hawaiian feast (which is misspelled) with a continuously open bar, lavish “island” buffet, and “thrilling” Polynesian revue. Needless to say, Hawaiians did not drink alcohol, eat “island” buffets, or participate in “thrilling” revues before the advent of white people in our islands.

But back to the advertisement. Lahaina, the location of the resort and once the capital of Hawai‘i, is called “royal” because of its past association with our ali‘i, or chiefs. Far from being royal today, Lahaina is sadly inundated by California yuppies, drug addicts, and valley girls.

The male figure in the background is muscular, partially clothed, and unsmiling. Apparently, he is supposed to convey an image of Polynesian sexuality that is both enticing and threatening. The white women in the audience can marvel at this physique and still remain safely distant. Like the black American male, this Polynesian man is a fantasy animal. He casts a slightly malevolent glance at our costumed maiden whose body posture and barely covered breasts contradict the innocent smile on her face.

Finally, the “wondrous allure” referred to in the ad applies to more than just the dancers in their performances; the physical beauty of Hawai‘i “alive under the stars” is the larger reference.

In this little grotesquerie, the falseness and commercialism fairly scream out from the page. Our language, our dance, our young people, even our customs of eating are used to ensnare tourists. And the price is only a paltry $39.95, not much for two thousand years of culture. Of course, the hotel will rake in tens of thousands of dollars on just the l u‘au alone. And our young couple will make a pittance.

The rest of the magazine, like most tourist propaganda, commodifies virtually every part of Hawai‘i: mountains, beaches, coastlines, rivers, flowers, our volcano goddess, Pele, reefs and fish, rural Hawaiian communities, even Hawaiian activists.

The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai‘i can be yours, that is, you the tourist, the non-native, the visitor. The place, the people, the culture, even our identity as a “native” people is for sale. Thus, the magazine, like the airline that prints it, is called Aloha. The use of this word in a capitalist context is so far removed from any Hawaiian cultural sense 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 welcome tourists to ensure they keep coming. Just as the pimp regulates 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 suspended, 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 managers—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 don’t generally agree that the tourist industry prostitutes Hawaiian culture. To me, this is a measure of the depth of our mental oppression: We can’t 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.

My brief excursion into the prostitution of Hawaiian culture has done no more than give an overview. Now that you have heard a native view, let me just leave this thought behind. If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please don’t. We don’t want or need any more tourists, and we certainly don’t like them. If you want to help our cause, pass this message on to your friends.