Chad Blair: A 30 year old rant about Hawaii tourism still sounds true

Everyone is talking about the visitor industry these days – how it is receding (maybe too much), how we need to manage it even better (beach user fees, anyone?), How it mines the Aina and the wharf (our vital natural resources), like us need (or not need) a tourism authority, how we still need to diversify the economy (ha-ha-ha, good ones), even how to keep idiots from touching Hawaiian monk seals (you would think that up to five years in prison and a fine of $ 50,000 would suffice).

Renewed interest in what to do with the state’s # 1 industry, along with the recent death of Haunani-Kay Trask, brings me back to a controversial thesis by the famous indigenous scholar that I first saw as a PhD student 30 years ago read at UH Manoa.

The title alone is still provocative – “Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture“, which appeared in the winter 1991-1992 edition of an academic journal. A shorter, but often verbatim, version can be found in Trask’s “From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii” (UH Press; 1999).

Here is Trask’s perspective on Hawaii from an outsider:

Trask explains that this fiction stems from “the depths of Western sexual disease that requires a dark, sinless native for instant gratification between imperialist wars.” The fiction is immortalized in Hollywood and songs like “Lovely Hula Hands” are recorded by the likes of Bing Crosby, Alfred Apaka and Don Ho.

A key point in Trask’s essay is that corporate tourism is degrading Hawaii and destroying the native Hawaiians by making money that rarely resonates with most Hawaiians. For the latter, life is “hard, ugly and cruel”.

In her view, corporate tourism – that is, the pimps – includes overseas and Hawaiian conglomerates, the hotels, the airlines, the landowners (“like the missionary Castle & Cook of Dole Pineapple”), the media, the unions, the construction companies and the state-sponsored Hawaii Visitors Bureau, as it was then called.

So Trask concludes her article: “If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please don’t. We don’t want or need tourists anymore, and we definitely don’t like them. If you want to support our cause, forward this message to your friends. Many Thanks.”

“Terrible Exploitative Truth”

Trask’s thesis was controversial to say the least at the time of its publication. She had “woken up” long before the term became widespread.

But “Lovely Hula Hands” is also justified and can help us to find out more about our relationship with the visitor industry today. While the data cited to support their reasoning is decades old, in many ways things haven’t changed too much – or for the worse:

• In 1959, Hawaiian residents outnumbered tourists by more than 2 to 1. At the time of Trask’s article, tourists outperformed residents by 6 to 1 and native Hawaiians by 30 to 1.
• Tourism is said to be the “only single biggest factor” in Oahu‘s crime rate, including crimes against people and property.
• Demographers warned that “the rapid growth of the tourism industry is securing the trend towards a rapidly growing population with lower per capita income”.
• More flora and fauna from the Hawaiian Islands “are now extinct or endangered than in the rest of the United States.”
• Hawaii has “by far the worst” ratio of average family income to average cost of housing in the country.
• Almost a fifth of the resident Hawaiian population is classified as near homeless – “that is, those whose mishap results in immediate homelessness on the street”.

Do not keep all data points from Trask. For example, Oahu’s groundwater supplies were projected by the Bank of Hawaii to be “insufficient” to meet the needs of residents and tourists by the year 2000.

But other points are enlightening, prescient, and deeply worrying. When she wrote the essay, the average cost of a house in Oahu was around $ 350,000. Now it’s three times as much.

More than 29,000 families were on the waiting list for Hawaiian Trustlands. There are now around 28,000.

And the number of American tourists vacationing on the islands at the time Trask wrote was 5 million. The last COVID-19-free year for visitor arrivals – 2019 – recorded 10.4 million tourists, including international visitors.

In this context, consider what Trask has to say in “Lovely Hula Hands” about cultural prostitution:

The result of the long-term, coordinated campaign of the Hawaiian tourism hype is the “terrible exploitative truth” that the industry is “the leading cause of environmental degradation, low wages, land expropriation and the highest cost of living in the United States.”

Trask admits that many Hawaiians don’t see tourism as part of colonization. They think it is necessary to create jobs. But Trask argues that Hawaiians cannot understand their own cultural degradation “because we live in it … we are unaware of our oppression”.

Trask’s admonitions about tourism may not be remembered today. But none other than the New York Times noted in its obituary for her this week that she had “railed” against the industry in both her poetry and academic work.

“She challenged the marketing of the Hawaiian Islands as a tolerant paradise, a portrayal that she believed ignored the history of violence against the land and its indigenous people,” the Times wrote.

Goal management

Trask’s solution to free the Hawaiians from Hawaii’s tourism morass is decolonization and sovereignty. I don’t think Hawaii is further down this path when From A Native Daughter was released in 1993, 100 years after the fall of the Hawaiian kingdom.

But more and more people in Hawaii are facing the fact that the visitor industry has reached an unsustainable turning point.

In May, the HTA reported that 57% of residents who responded to a survey last fall “totally agreed” that Hawaii was too dependent on tourism, up from 37% in 2019. And more and more people agree that their island “is” run at the expense of the locals for tourists. “

Tourism will always be a part of Hawaii. It is encouraging that the HTA, with a President and CEO from Hawaii – John De Fries – and brand manager – Kalani Ka’anā’anā – also called Destination Management Action Plans for Kauai, Maui Nui (Maui, Molokai and Lanai) Hawaii Island and Oahu.

Destination management, as HTA defines it, includes attracting and training “responsible” visitors, advocating solutions for “overcrowded attractions, overburdened infrastructure and other tourism-related problems” and working with other “responsible agencies” to manage natural and cultural assets improve appreciated by residents and visitors.

How the HTA could do this by slashing its $ 79 million budget by $ 20 million thanks to House Bill 862 – which relieves the agency and leaves its financial security in the balance – is unclear.

But local government officials are realizing that tourists can no longer willfully flood the islands.

Governor David Ige tweeted this week after reports of tourists messing with monk seals: “Visitors to our islands – you are asked to respect our people, our culture and our laws protecting endangered species not found anywhere else in the world . For those who don’t, make no mistake, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. “

Meanwhile, Hawaii’s image as a resort wonderland is being sustained by popular entertainment such as the new HBO miniseries “The White Lotus”. As The Atlantic put it, the series is a gathering of wealthy guests trying to escape their troubles at a five-star resort on Kauai – a show “about rich people rotting in their own toxic privilege” .

I didn’t see the show, but the promotional photo – reproduced below – speaks volumes.