Tourist, stay home: native Hawaiians want their land back

Progressive, The, July, 1993 by Haunani-Kay Trask

Most Americans have come to believe that Hawai'i is as American as hotdogs and CNN. Worse, they assume that they, too, may make the trip, following the path of the empire into the sweet and sunny land of palm trees and hula-hula girls.

Increasing numbers of us not only oppose this predatory view of my native land and culture, we angrily and resolutely defy it. On January 17, 1993, thousands of Hawai'ians demonstrated against continued American control of our homeland. Marking the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of our native government by U.S. Marines and missionary-descended sugar barons, Hawaiian nationalists demanded recognition of our status as native people with claims to a land base and political self-determination.

For us, native self-government has always been preferable to American foreign government. No matter what Americans believe, most of us in the colonies do not feel grateful that our country was stolen along with our citizenship, our lands, and our independent place among the family of nations. We are not happy natives.

For us, American colonialism has been a violent process--the violence of mass death, the violence of American missionizing, the violence of cultural destruction, the violence of the American military. Through the overthrow and annexation, American control and American citizenship replaced Hawaiian control and Hawaiian citizenship. Our mother--our heritage and our inheritance--was taken from us. We were orphaned in our own land. Such brutal changes in a people's identity, its legal status, its government, its sense of belonging to a nation, are considered among the most serious human-rights violations by the international community today.

As we approach the Twenty-first Century, the effects of colonization are obvious: outmigration of the poor amounting to a diaspora, institutionalization in the military and prisons, continued land dispossession by the state and Federal governments and multinational corporations, and grotesque commodification of our culture through corporate tourism.

This latest affliction has meant a particularly insidious form of cultural prostitution. Just five hours by plane from California, Hawai'i is a thousand light years away in fantasy. Mostly a state of mind, Hawai'i is the image of escape from the rawness and violence of daily American life. Hawai'i--the word, the image, the sound in the mind--is the fragrance and feel of soft kindness. Above all, Hawai'i is "she," the Western image of the native "female" in her magical allure. And if luck prevails, some of "her" will rub off on you, the visitor.

The predatory reality of tourism is visible everywhere: in garish "Polynesian" revues; commercial ads using Hawaiian dance and language to sell vacations and condominiums: the trampling of sacred heiau (temples) and burial grounds as tourist recreation sites. Thus, our world-renowned native dance, the hula, has been made ornamental, a form of hotel exotica for the gaping tourist. And Hawaiian women are marketed on posters from Paris to Tokyo promising an unfettered "primitive" sexuality. Far from encouraging a cultural revival, as tourist industry apologists contend, tourism has appropriated and prostituted the accomplishments of a resurgent interest in things Hawaiian (the use of replicas of Hawaiian artifacts such as fishing and food implements, capes, helmets, and other symbols of ancient power, to decorate hotels).

As the pimp for the cultural prostitution business, the state of Hawai'i pours millions into the tourist industry, even to the extent of funding a private booster club--the Hawai'i Visitors' Bureau--to the tune of $30 million a year. Radio and television propaganda tells locals "the more you give" to tourism, "the more you get."

What Hawaiians get is population densities as high as Hong Kong in some areas, a housing shortage owing to staggering numbers of migrants from Asia and the continental United States, a soaring crime rate as impoverished locals prey on ostentatiously rich tourists, and environmental crises, including water depletion, that threaten the entire archipelago. Rather than stop the flood, the state is projecting a tidal wave of twelve million tourists by the year 2010. Today, we Hawaiians exist in an occupied country. We are a hostage people, forced to witness and participate in our own collective humiliation as tourist artifacts for the First World.

Meanwhile, shiploads and planeloads of American military forces continue to pass through Hawai'i on their way to imperialist wars in Asia and elsewhere. Every major Hawaiian island has lost thousands of acres to military bases, private beaches, and housing areas. On the most populous island of O'ahu, for example, fully 30 per cent of the land is in military hands.

Unlike other native peoples in the United States, we have no separate legal status to control our land base. We are, by every measure, a colonized people. As a native nation, Hawaiians are no longer self-governing.