Hawaii Locals Share What They Need Vacationers to Know About Their Historical past and Tradition

You could assume Hawaii. However there’s extra to those gorgeous islands than white-sand seashores and breezy palm bushes. 

Past the surf breaks and world-class sunsets, Hawaii has a posh story. Navigators had been born right here. There’s an unmatched reverence for the land. It is a spot as soon as—and nonetheless—full of warriors, working laborious to battle for his or her cultural preservation. And as our company share, Hawaiian tradition isn’t simply alive on the islands—it touches the far corners of the world, too. 

On this week’s episode of Misplaced Cultures: Residing Legacies, we’re exploring Hawaii by the voices of cultural practitioners, historians, and lecturers, together with Evan Mokuahi Hayes, a Hawaiian historian who returned to the islands in the hunt for therapeutic. He discovered it, unexpectedly, in a taro patch.

“Hawaii has this lovely method of, even when you don’t have anything to provide, it is going to meet you there,” he shares on the episode. “It has a method of therapeutic damaged components of you, primarily, and filling these empty areas.” 

That connection to ʻāina—to land and Earth—runs deep for a lot of. As Dr. J. Uluwehi Hopkins, a professor of Hawaiian historical past, explains on the episode, “We’ve got cosmogonic genealogies … that say we grew proper out of the land right here, that the land itself is our ancestors.” The result’s a worldview constructed on stewardship, not possession.

That view was virtually shattered within the late 1700s, when Western contact reshaped the islands’ political and non secular landscapes. 

“Our Hawaiian chiefs wished to kind a authorities that different nations would respect and subsequently work together with in an equal method,” Hopkins explains. “And the Hawaiian individuals truly did not need land possession, however the authorities enacted it as a result of they realized that if we established land in a method that had an proprietor, if one other overseas energy got here and took us over, they needed to respect the landowners.” 

This episode additionally explores the arrival of American missionaries within the nineteenth century, the rise of the sugar trade, and the unlawful overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani. “She crafted this actually great, good response during which she says, ‘I’ll yield my authority till the U.S. president realizes the illegality of his personal minister,’” Hopkins shares. 

Via all of it, Hawaiian tradition has endured, particularly in hula. “Hula is strictly what individuals see,” says Hokulani Holt, a kumu hula, or instructor of the artwork of hula. “It’s the visible illustration of the phrases that you’re listening to. You can’t have hula with out phrases.” Holt provides, hula will not be merely a efficiency; it’s historical past in motion. 

To get to know Hawai‘i on a brand new degree, take heed to this week’s episode of Misplaced Cultures: Residing Legacies. It is out there now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Participant FM, or wherever you get your podcasts.