Hawaii. It says so right there in the tour books. Pacific paradise, tropical splendor, aloha spirit, beautiful hula dancers, soft lilting Hawaiian harmony with the accompaniment of the distinctive slack-key guitar, sumptuous luaus, adventurous Polynesians setting out in beautifully carved longboats for unknown places, a Hawaiian culture that places a high regard for the ohana (family), a dedication to the ancient culture that lives today as the language is still taught and a monarchy ousted more than a century ago continues to be revered.
     Beautiful bronze-skinned Polynesian-looking women in grass skirts or sarongs and robust, strong, dark-skinned Hawaiian men working and playing in loving harmony with them. It’s all true.
     Up to a point. Just as the notion of Hawaii’s native population being com-posed mostly of those native Hawaiians is far from the truth, so some of the cultural notions of what Hawaiians are all about are not exactly on target—at least not where many of the ethnic people who make the islands their home are con-cerned.
     Hawaii today is described by sociol- ogists as representing more cultural groups and varieties of ethnic peoples than any other part of the United States, all of whom that arrived more than 1,000 years after the first Polynesians settled the islands as the native Hawaiians, the population growing until, it has been estimated, it reached a peak of more than 500,000, or about a third of today’s population.
     The haoles (Caucasians of European descent) arrived with Captain Cook in 1778 (there is some evidence Spanish explorers preceded him), who named what he saw the Sandwich Islands and began the first written notations of things Hawaiian, beyond what can be discerned from ancient petroglyphs dotting the islands. Until those explorers arrived, all knowledge of Hawaii was handed down orally, along with all of the prejudices, misconstrued facts and other faults that accompany that type of communication.
     In general, the oral history relates a caste system dominated by island-specific monarchs, served by ministers who carried out their will and a religious leader in the form of a high priest in charge of what the haoles would call pagan rituals, all part of a system that survived in large part until the first few decades following Cook’s arrival.
     Next ranked the ali’i (chiefs) who received their jobs mostly through their own lineage, but whose scope of rule was decided by the king, whose post also was inherited. Religious practitioners, such as the church ministers and elders of the haole world, came next, then the craftsmen and, as with any society, the makaainana (the subjects or common people) who comprised the majority of the population believed to number 300,000 to 500,000 and, as with the common people elsewhere in history and on the globe, did most of the hard labor.
     But the makaainana were not at the bottom of the rung in Hawaii. Also, as with much of history and strewn about the globe, the islands had their last in line—the kauwa (outcasts) who did the lowest of the work and whether as slaves, indentured servants or whatever structure those above them chose to impose.
     As is still the practice in today’s societies around the world, power and dominance was practiced not with logic, science or simple education, but through mythology—ascribing an act as sacred or profane so the ignorant will know to follow a strict rule even if they don’t understand it. In the pre-haole Hawaiian culture, that system relied on descrip- tions of certain acts as sins, others as holy, wrapped up in a single word, kapu (taboo). In pre-haole Hawaii, you lived by kapu depending on your rank in society. The makaainana, for example, could be put to death merely because their shadow touched a person of very high rank, not just that of the monarch. Kapu ruled all of Hawaiian behavior.
     The written history tells us much of the pre-haole Hawaiian culture lived on for the first few years as Cook’s “discovery” got bandied about and seamen, merch-ants and eventually American mission- aries representing the most puritan of religious beliefs landed to impose their will. King Kamehameha of Oahu was able, through a series of island-by-island wars, to unify the islands under a single monarchy in 1795 and his descendants reigned or merely served as king until Kamehameha V died in 1872, and subsequent kings and queens had to be voted into the office, with the haole-imposed state legislature have final say with confirmation.
     By the time of last Kamehameha (the line is still revered by native Hawaiians as the epitome of their pre-haole days, although even the first one was largely subjugated by the white settlers), missionaries, who began arriving in 1820, had managed to ban the hula dance (but not eradicating it, as it was preserved behind their backs), educate more than 52,000 students, making the islands more literate than most regions of the states, introduce European/American medical care and medicines, and, of course, slowly turning the islands from pagan to Christian.
     The native-Hawaiian heiaus (temples) and belief in separate gods of earth, wind, fire and water largely withered away even before the first missionaries arrived, making them susceptible to the new religion the haoles brought. Still, the kapu system of Hawaiians dominating Hawa- iians remained in one form or another up until the first post-Kamehameha king, William Lunalilo, abolished it altogether.
     By then, not only haoles had settled on the islands, but the Chinese had been arriving to work on haole plantations since 1852, Japanese since 1868 (comprising nearly half the population early in the 20th century and causing the U.S. Congress to stop their immigration), and then Portuguese who had settled in Southeast Asia earlier, Germans, Oki- nawans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, hun-dreds of whom ordered mail-order brides from home, and finally Filipinos began arriving in 1906, just about all of the groups to work on the haole plantations. Samoans also have migrated since 1919, but rarely for plantation work.
     The population of native Hawaiians quite naturally became mixed with all of the non-indigenous arrivals, and the native population, according to some figures, dropped in half by 1836, to 50,000 by 1866 when the haole popu- lation has reached 3,000, and 25,000 by 1896.
     Most of the early decline was due to diseases introduced by haoles to a population with no immunity protection, but Mark Twain said one of the major “diseases” introduced was civilization, which made them “consumptive,” esti-mated native Hawaiians would be extinct in 50 years. “Civilization” also would help by introducing guns and booze to the islands to aid in the destruction of each other and their way of life. Twain was blessedly off base in his estimate of extinction, but sociologists at the Uni- versity of Hawaii now estimate the die-off could still happen by 2050.
     The first Kamehameha’s son, Liholiho (one of his sons by several wives he possessed at the same time, because kings everywhere in those days had a habit of being polygamists), also helped in destroying what had been Hawaiian tradition when he shared his inherited throne with his mother Kaahumanu, also highly revered today, and she stayed in a position of power into the rule of Kame-hameha III. She is credited with sowing the seeds that led her kinsmen away from the kapu system that had outlived the already-Hawaiian religious structure.
     Under that kapu system, which has lived on in more subtle forms long after a taboo system was necessary to maintain for dominance over the behavior of others, women had kauwa status with men. Much of the kapu system was intended to keep women subservient as well as maintaining the caste system and giving the ruling classes the wherewithal to impose their will.
     Ironically, the missionaries who helped to do away with much of the Hawaiian kapu, in turn imposed their own form of kapu on the Hawaiians, particu- larly on the women, who not only danced the hula along with men in what was then considered skimpy clothing, but did such awful things as ride a horse astride the animal’s back instead of the more genteel sidesaddle method.
     The missionaries sought to end that scurrilous practice, but without much success until it was too late, because women began to wear pants, making that kapu even more senseless. But the missionary teachings also brought an end to incestuous marriages, which had not been a Hawaiian kapu up until then, since the offspring of marriages among close relatives was believed by Polyne- sians in general to possess a certain mana, an aura of strength passed down from ancestors.
     The kapu system of Mark Twain’s day, as he colorfully described it in a chapter from his “Following the Equator; A Journey Around the World,” published in 1897, drawing on many of his impres- sions of the islands he developed after his initial four-month visit in 1866: “It required the sexes to live in separate houses. It did not allow people to eat in either house; they must eat in another place. It did not allow a man’s woman-folk to enter his house. It did not allow the sexes to eat together; the men must eat first, and the women must wait on them. Then the women could eat what was left—if anything was left—and wait on themselves. I mean, if anything of a coarse or unpalatable sort was left, the women could have it. But not the good things, the fine things, the choice things, such as pork, poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the choicer varieties of fish, and so on. By the tabu, all these were sacred to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them wondering what they might taste like; and they died without finding out.
     “These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear. It was easy to remem-ber them; and useful. For the penalty for infringing any rule in the whole list was death. Those women easily learned to put up with shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so expensive.”
     That was then, meaning as recent as 140 years ago, and Twain was describing only one type of kapu leveled against Hawaiian women. This is now. Obviously, much as changed. But, less obviously, much has not.
     It is no longer called kapu, it is no longer officially sanctified, but the Hawai ian women who talk story describe a treatment that might once have been leveled against kauwas that, if not officially sanctified, is being largely ignored in a culture that does not seem to have shrugged off all of the teachings of the past.
     Indeed, the growing zest among native Hawaiians to get their island back--many of them going so far as to wish to restore the Kamehameha monarchy--and using the term, “haole,” as much as a curse as a description, does not bode well for a lasting practice of alhoa.
     And, this is occurring in a time when the American culture appears to have taken a machismo bent, a trend not likely to have much influence in giving the Hawaiian culture a nudge back in the direction of the aloha spirit and the apparently always-false impression that native men and their women lived and worked in harmony.
     Is the current trend of Hawaiian men taking pride in their expanding girth and emphasizing their robustness, their passion for Polynesian tattoos, their admiration for the Polynesian male haka dances intended to intimidate the enemy, their preoccupation with today’s “bubba” sports and an overall mien that speaks of domination, really a trend that is native Hawaiian in nature, or does it speak of today’s American manhood as a whole?
     Is that attitude uniquely Hawaiian manhood asserting itself, or reasserting itself, or have native Hawaiians achieved the ultimate assimilation and already become extinct, in spirit if not in fact?

Lahaina Town Today