Haoles in Hawaii

Theresa Conefrey

Houston Wood. Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawaii. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 240 pages. $63.00 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).

Houston Wood’s rigorous and original work challenges the typical guidebook depiction of America’s only island state as an idyllic paradise where happy Hawaiians are ever eager to share their aloha spirit with tourists and other outsiders. Wood aligns himself with postcolonialist scholar Edward Said in writing with the aim of participating in the "struggle over geography," and with Native Hawaiian activists in "commit[ting] to a project that actively opposes the dominant culture’s continuing attacks upon Natives" (3). In contrast to the mythical Hawaii of South Seas literature and Hollywood films that guidebooks seek to recreate, Wood offers the reader a troubling portrait of a once sovereign nation still struggling to reestablish an identity of its own, distinct from the ones superimposed on it by outsiders for more than two centuries. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, supplemented with relevant illustrations and tables, Wood explores the journals of Captain Cook, and the impact of Christian missionaries, Hollywood films, and tourism in Hawaii to explore how these have served to displace the indigenous culture. In short, this insightful study details the various strategies used by haoles to seize Hawaiian lands and undermine indigenous Hawaiian culture.

The first few paragraphs of chapter 1 effectively introduce the book’s main claim. The tone is set by the very first sentence: "The Euroamerican presence in Hawai’i has been associated with violence ever since one of Captain Cook’s lieutenants murdered an unarmed Hawaiian man the first day the English set foot in the islands in 1778" (9). The rest of the paragraph outlines acts of violence that followed and finally culminated in the 1893 deposing of Queen Liliuokalani by businessmen supported by gun-toting U.S. marines. Though such overt acts of violence are no longer a concern, Wood argues that outsiders continue to undermine Hawaiian culture by appropriating it for their own ends and clothing their "acts of conquest in a rhetoric that aims to justify and to disguise the consequences of their acts" (9).

Early chapters outline the impact of the most well known outsiders, Captain Cook and other early explorers and the first missionaries and their descendants. Chapter 2 offers a fascinating account of the rhetorical production of Cook’s voyages to Hawaii. In examining Cook’s journals, Wood notes, for example, that Cook’s daily journal entries are artifacts of a carefully crafted rhetorical style rather than the spontaneous outpouring he would have the reader believe them to be. While chapter 3 deals with invaders of a more peaceful kind, the missionaries and their descendants, Wood argues convincingly that their impact was nonetheless devastating on the indigenous culture.

Later chapters deal more specifically with the appropriation by outsiders of Hawaiian land. One particularly fascinating chapter discusses what Wood designates "echo tourism," a tourism based on nostalgia, on the way Hawaii never was. Discussing the "Hawaiiannizing" of Waikiki to stimulate tourism, Wood details how the attempt to revive the mythical image of Hawaii left little room for actual Native Hawaiians. Wood notes that tourists in Waikiki now "pay to learn how to hula, weave mats, string leis, and paddle outrigger canoes," and that they "go to luaus, eat ‘Hawaiian’ foods, served in supposedly ‘Hawaiian’ ways" and so on without the consent or participation of Native Hawaiians (92). Equally problematic is the appropriation of so-called Hawaiian spiritualism by practitioners of new-age religions. By way of example, Wood offers a brochure from a Canadian company that appears to contain little concrete evidence of the actual Native culture. He quotes Naone, a distraught Native Hawaiian, as responding with the plaintive cry that "people need to be told they can’t just make up stuff and say it is Hawaiian" (75). Wood notes wryly that it is unlikely his plea will be heard. "Metropolitan appropriations are disseminated worldwide, but the voices of Naone and others like him are barely heard" (75).

A minor concern I have with the work is that after poring through chapter upon impassioned chapter decrying the injustices reigned on Native Hawaiians by outsiders, I began to feel overwhelmed. What can one do as a concerned haole to offset the appropriation of Hawaiian culture and the displacement of Native voices? Wood’s solution is to write in such a way as to undermine his own and other outsider accounts of Hawaiian culture that claim a privileged knowledge of Native Hawaiians. He also notes that he tries to "encourage non-Natives to listen more attentively and often to Kanaka Maoli speaking for themselves" (169). However, the problem is, as he himself acknowledges earlier, that Native Hawaiian voices cannot compete with "metropolitan appropriations," with learned scholars trained in the Western tradition, able to publish their work internationally. Another problem, which Wood acknowledges, is that the Native Hawaiian voice is not unified. There are, for example, many different Native views on such issues as Hawaiian sovereignty, land use atop Mauna Kea, and whether non-natives should be allowed to vote in Native affairs.

A more serious concern is that despite Wood’s cohesive argument about the linkages between textual and physical displacements of Native Hawaiians and his call for "Euroamerican writers and teachers" to "encourage the reproduction and distribution of Kanaka Maoli texts," he ignores the vast majority of persons living in Hawaii who are neither Euroamerican "haoles" nor tourists but rather "locals," persons of predominantly Asian American descent, whose parents and often grandparents have lived their whole lives in Hawaii. These persons, whose ancestors came to Hawaii to labor on the Euroamerican sugar plantations do not identify with Native Hawaiian culture nor with mainstream American culture, yet Hawaii is their home. They too are Hawaiians. Where, in the polarized discussion between Euroamerican appropriation and a more authentic Native culture, is the space for this "local" but not Native Hawaiian culture? This third party complicates the issue, but for a comprehensive account, it must be acknowledged.

Despite these concerns, Wood’s original and insightful work on Hawaii is sure to engage a wide variety of readers, from those interested in Pacific literature and postcolonial studies to haoles who have decided to make this unique place their home.