On kauai i accompanied my grandparents to look at the

grandparents to look at the grounds of the Princeville Hotel with its
gleaming marble floors, manmade lake, floating swans, and hotel work-
ers wearing colonial livery and pith helmets leading carriages and draft
horses. As Hawaiian-ness became things to be marketed more and more
cheaply, Hawaiians could be exploited in their own land without even
being really visible to the wealthy traveler.

dialogue 2
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hall 409
Kitsch, however, remains highly visible, from aloha shirts to tiki bars
to Tin Pan Alley hapa-haole songs to Round Table’s “Maui Mama” pine-
apple and ham pizza. This has significant political implications, because
by making Hawaiian-ness seem ridiculous, kitsch functions to undermine
sovereignty struggles in a very fundamental way. A culture without dignity
cannot be conceived of as having sovereign rights, and the repeated mar-
keting of kitsch Hawaiian-ness leads to non-Hawaiians’ misunderstand-
ing and degradation of Hawaiian culture and history. Bombarded by such
kitsch along with images of leisure and paradise, non-Hawaiians fail to
take Hawaiian sovereignty seriously and Hawaiian activism remains invis-
ible to the mainstream; for example, Professor J Këhaulani Kauanui’s aca-
demic colleagues are unable to grasp that she actually makes exhausting
work trips to Hawai‘i (Kauanui, pers comm, 1999 ). I have had similar
experiences in writing grants for Hawai‘i-based projects; the implication
is that we are somehow scamming free vacations. In another example, the
word “aloha” has been so commodified, distorted, and exploited that its
use has provoked laughter among non-Hawaiians in the context of tiki
bars and campy comedy routines. Unpacking the layers of colonial accre-
tion on a foundational cultural concept is a daunting task.
The frivolity and omnipresence of kitsch images of Hawai‘i cover over
a history of massive death, colonial dispossession, and attempted cultural
destruction. And yet another factor that enables the kitschy transforma-
tions of Hawaiians and Hawaiian culture is that unlike other stigmatized
groups in the United States, Hawaiians are not feared, even though, with
our warrior history, our popular image could easily have been different.
Instead, our friendliness has been a major selling point for the tourist
industry for more than a century, possibly because the death toll from col-
onization was so one-sided.
“Hawaiian at Heart”
Outside of Hawai‘i, however, Hawaiian-ness has remained very much in
vogue. As Hawaiian culture in the form of music and hula becomes a
commodity, others buy Hawaiian-ness. On the North American continent
non-Hawaiians are greatly interested in Hawaiian language, music, and
so on. There is nothing wrong with this as such—and this financial and
artistic support enables the survival of many musicians and entertainers—
but I find it interesting that non-Hawaiians become interested in Hawai-
ians through the marketing of products, rather than through issues of land

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rights, oceanography and navigation, farming and fishing, or other pos-
sible vectors.