Hawaii - Jeff Campbell [20]
As was the hope, statehood had an immediate economic impact, and once again, Hawaii’s timing was remarkably fortuitous.
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In 1936, designer Ellery Chun updated the ‘palaka,’ a solid-colored plantation worker shirt, with a tropical print and a more casual style, which he dubbed the ‘aloha shirt.’ The rest is history.
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The decline of sugar (and pineapples) in the 1960s (due in part to the labor concessions won by Hawaii’s unions) left the state scrambling economically – and just then the advent of the jet airplane (and of disposable incomes) meant tourists could become Hawaii’s next staple crop. Tourism exploded, which naturally led to a building boom, in an ongoing cycle. In 1959, 175,000 visitors came, and by 1968, there were 1.2 million a year. By 1970, tourism was contributing $1 billion annually, four times what agriculture produced.
Ever since Mark Twain had visited in the 1860s, Hawaii had lived in the popular imagination as an earthly paradise, a lush, sensuous-yet-safe (and English-speaking) tropical idyll. Hawaii now gave rise to a full-blown tiki craze, in which the culture of Native Hawaiians was appropriated and commercialized to fulfill the romantically exotic, cross-cultural fantasies of vacationing Westerners.
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HAWAIIAN RENAISSANCE
By the 1970s, Hawaii’s rapid growth was making the state dizzy. New residents and visitors crowded the beaches and the roads, and rampant construction was transforming places like Waikiki so much they hardly resembled themselves. Ironically, the relentless peddling of ‘aloha’ got everyone wondering: did it actually exist, or was it just a marketing gimmick?
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Native Books Na Mea Hawai’i (www.nativebookshawaii.com) is a fantastic resource for both well-known and hard-to-find books about Hawaii and Native Hawaiian culture.
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In fact, what did it mean to be Hawaiian? In the 1970s and 1980s, this question became a quest for Native Hawaiians, who turned to elders and the past to recover their essential selves, and by doing so became more politically assertive.
Up to now, no one had ever satisfactorily answered Cook’s question: was it really possible that ancient Polynesians voyaged to Hawaii deliberately, or were they blown there by accident? In 1973, three men formed the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and they researched and built a replica of an ancient voyaging canoe, Hokule’a (Click here). In 1976, they sailed it to Tahiti using only the stars for a compass – and thus proved the Polynesians’ feat and became Hawaiian cultural heroes.
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HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY & THE AKAKA BILL
In February 2009, Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka reintroduced into the US Congress the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act – aka the Akaka Bill. This seeks to establish the legal framework through which a Native Hawaiian government can be formed and thereby gain federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as the indigenous people of Hawaii. This would, in essence, finally put them on the same legal footing as the over 500 federally recognized Native American tribes.
Federal recognition of Native Hawaiians is widely supported in Hawaii (including by Governor Lingle), but there is lots of controversy and disagreement over what shape ‘Hawaiian sovereignty’ should ultimately take. As a result, the bill’s sponsors emphasize what the legislation does not do: it doesn’t establish a government (it provides the means for doing so); it doesn’t settle any reparation claims; it doesn’t take private land or create a ‘reservation’; it doesn’t authorize gambling; and it doesn’t allow Hawaii to secede from the US.
Establishing a Native Hawaiian government, as Senator Akaka has said, ‘is important for all people of Hawaii, so we can finally resolve the longstanding issues relating from the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.’
The two main options are the semi-autonomous ‘nation-within-a-nation’ model, similar to Native Americans, and outright sovereignty, in which Native Hawaiians would have full autonomy over portions