Think of the word aloha, which expresses mutual compassion as deeply significant in Native Hawaiian culture but is stripped down to an empty greeting by haole. “There is this incredible sense of entitlement that white Americans in particular feel to being at home in Hawaii,” Native Hawaiian scholar Maile Arvin told me in an interview in 2015. This colonial fantasy allows settlers to believe they’ve been afforded all-inclusive consent to access the islands. Much like the colonization of Turtle Island or North America, Hawaii is imagined to have been “discovered” by Europeans, as if, just 58 years ago, a verdant and volcanic archipelago magically floated up to the ocean’s surface, replete with hula dancers entertaining sunburnt white guys in Hawaiian shirts.
It’s hard to think of Hawaii as anything other than one of the world’s premier vacation destinations, and we owe that to the erasure of Native Hawaiian history and culture pre-statehood. That’s why we started calling our tours DeTours, a journey off the normal path.”Ĭontinue Reading Article After Our Video Recommended Fodor’s Video Reclaiming Aloha “Once you can see the problem, then you can begin to imagine different futures,” Kajihiro added, “and you have a responsibility to do something with this knowledge. Considering the perception of Hawaii as a playground and outpost of a foreign power, it’s only fitting that Hawaiians are using the forums of tours and travel guides to bring attention to the military presence there, often obfuscated by the lure of leisure. It is the second most powerful industry on the islands, with tourism leading the way. military on 11 bases spread across every county in Hawaii, costing the state $7.8 billion in 2015 alone, according to the Hawaii Defense Economy project. “Militarization is everywhere in Hawaii, and yet it is hidden in plain sight,” he said, referring to the 80,000 active duty and civilian personnel serving every branch of the U.S. After statehood was secured in 1959, Hawaii’s economy went from being dominated by sugar plantations and the military to tourism and the military. “The tourism industry provides the mask to conceal the violence of this arrangement and naturalize its presence,” said Kajihiro. intervention on the islands, drawing attention to its role in overthrowing the kingdom over a century ago, and its use of the islands as a strategic linchpin “to extend American empire across the Pacific.”Ĭonsidering the perception of Hawaii as a playground and outpost of a foreign power, it’s only fitting that Hawaiians are using the forums of tours and travel guides to bring attention to the military presence there, often obfuscated by the lure of leisure. Along with Native Hawaiian Terry Keko‘olani, he leads demilitarized tours, or DeTours, to historic points of U.S. “Hawaii is captured by the twin forces of militarism and tourism,” Kyle Kajihiro, who is an activist and himself a fourth-generation migrant of Japanese ancestry, recently told me over email. military-to begin to understand that process.
None of them need look further than the state’s other major industry-the U.S. In 2015 Hawaii received 8.6 million arrivals, most of them Americans from the lower 48, who spent $15 billion that year alone. As haole, or outsiders, we have to ask ourselves why our popular imagination of a Hawaiian paradise rarely considers the reality of its original inhabitants, and what processes took place to enable such a mass tourist presence to propagate there. To the roughly 156,000 Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, who are greatly outnumbered by migrants, settlers, and their descendants, aloha means something completely different. When most people think of Hawaii, images of hula dancers, surfers, and honeymoons might come to mind. Through DeTours, they challenge both by showing tourists Hawaii from their perspective. Native Hawaiians living in the “vacation paradise” are caught between the state’s two major industries, the U.S.