Hawaii - Jeff Campbell [28]
The median age in Hawaii is 38, with 22% under 18 years old and 14% over 65. However, Hawaii’s population is definitely getting older. Since 2000, the senior population has grown at 1.9% annually – over twice the statewide growth rate of 0.8% – and estimates are that by 2030 over 25% of people in Hawaii may be 60 years and older.
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In the tremendously moving No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa (2006), Henry Nalaielua describes living with Hansen’s disease in Moloka’i’s famous leprosy colony, where he still lives today.
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MULTICULTURALISM
Hawaii’s diversity is both eclectic and narrow at once. That’s because Hawaii is uniquely positioned between and yet isolated from the Asian and North American continents. Depending on your perspective, Honolulu is either the USA’s most Asian city, or it’s Polynesia’s most American city. When comparing US states, Hawaii is as ethnically diverse as – and more racially intermixed than – California, Texas and Florida, but it’s nearly missing the African American and Mexican Hispanic populations that help define those states and most mainland multiculturalism.
Among older locals, plantation-era stereotypes still inform social hierarchies and interactions. During plantation days, whites were the wealthy plantation owners, and for years afterward, minorities would joke about their privileges as the white ‘bosses.’ As the Japanese rose to economic and political power after WWII, they tended to capitalize on their status as ‘minorities’ and former plantation laborers. But in a growing cultural divide, Hawaii’s younger generation often dismisses these distinctions and alliances, even as they continue to speak pidgin, the plantation era’s linguistic legacy.
Any tensions among ethnicities are quite benign compared with racial strife on the US mainland. Locals seem slightly perplexed at the emphasis on ‘political correctness.’ Among themselves, locals good-naturedly joke about island stereotypes, eg talkative Portuguese, stingy Chinese, goody-goody Japanese and know-it-all haole. Hawaii’s much-loved comedians of the 1970s and 1980s – Andy Bumatai, Frank DeLima and Rap Reiplinger – used such stereotypes to hilarious comic effect.
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Following in Mary Kawena Pukui’s footsteps, Davianna McGregor examines ‘cultural kipuka’ in Na Kua’aina: Living Hawaiian Culture (2007), which traces how cultural ‘islands’ of traditional rural Hawaiian life, like Waipi’o Valley, survive within modernity’s incessant flow.
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Things shift when nonlocals enter the picture, since they don’t share island history and don’t always appreciate island ways. For instance, while the acceptability of pidgin as a language has many critics, the loudest complaints often arise from mainland haoles who don’t speak it to begin with. In general, tourists and transplants are welcomed but have to earn trust and respect.
If you’re called a haole, don’t worry. It’s rarely an insult (if it is, you’ll know). Instead, like pake (Chinese), Japanee (Japanese), hapa (mixed race), portagee (Portuguese) and so on, haole is usually just a thick-skinned pidgin term that simply describes who you are.
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In Change We Must (1989), revered kupuna (elder) Nana Veary describes her spiritual journey, a path that embraces Pentecostal, metaphysical and Zen beliefs but never strays from Hawaiian spirituality and aloha.
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RELIGION
Ancient Hawaiian religion fell to the wayside when the kapu system collapsed and Christian missionaries arrived (see the boxed text, Click here). But it never died completely, and today Hawaiian traditions and ritual are increasingly incorporated into public life. Christian