A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

chant and hula performances, kahuna medicine, and ancient sports and games. All of
these fell into disuse following annexation, but several ethnographers like Nathaniel B.
Emerson 242 worked at preserving an apparently dying culture. One must be aware, though,
that today a large amount of knowledge and customs is lost forever.
It is difficult to define one decisive turning point towards an increased political
and cultural awareness in the islands. There is rather a cluster of events that resulted in
what today is called the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. Probably the two most
important movements were the Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana’s struggle to stop the navy
from bombing the island for target practice (see chapter 5.4.2), and the revival of
traditional ocean voyaging symbolized by the Hokule’a, the double-hulled sailing canoe
that was the first to trace the sea routes of ancient Polynesians, navigating by stars and
currents alone. 243 Professor for Hawaiian Studies and political activist Haunani-Kay Trask
dates the starting point for the political renaissance movement in 1970, when a typical
eviction struggle in Kalama Valley on O’ahu led to a public debate about land use and
land claims that is still going on. 244 Rural Hawaiian communities, which had remained
relatively untouched during the plantation period, were falling victim to rapid
development of their agricultural areas beginning in the early 1960s. These communities
were realized to be the last repositories of a vital Hawaiian language and of cultural and
social traditions retained from pre-contact times. For Trask, the logical consequence is
that the native rights movement “would begin and flourish in rural areas, where the call
for a land base would be the loudest.” 245 The ultimate goals that emerged out of the land
242 See Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, New York
1964.
243 For more information on the revival of ocean voyaging, see the Website of the Polynesian Voyaging
Society (PVS): http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/pvs/. For an account of multi-level implications of such
voyages, see Finney in Franklin et al. 2000.
244 Trask 1999: 67. The following information is taken from Trask’s book, whose main emphasis is on
politics, as well as from Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: the Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i,
Philadelphia 1993, which focuses more on cultural aspects.
245
Trask 1999: 66. Her reading of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth probably informed her train of
thought here. As hinted at before, it is necessary to point out that it were essentially statehood and the total
incorporation into American dominion that enabled the current development of criticism and resistance:
Hawaiians were not only exposed to U.S. mass culture and mass tourism, but also to the American
university system and to civil rights movements, all of which provided them with a pattern of action to
apply to the Hawaiian situation. Ardent critic Trask went to the mainland for education (as did many other
Local writers and intellectuals), and she mentions Malcolm X and the Black Civil Rights Movement as
examples for the shape of her struggle. Moreover, she acknowledges the university’s role as a birthplace for
awareness, resistance, and ‘civil disobedience’ (186). Trask is not the only Hawaiian whose thinking and
writing are unquestionably shaped by exposure to U.S.-American ideas and concepts, no matter how much
emphasis is placed on her indigenous side.
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