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Chapter 1 Introduction [W]hat constitutes ‘‘tradition’’ to a people is ever-changing. . . . The Hawaiian relationship to land has persisted into the present. What has changed is ownership and use of the land. . . . Hawaiians assert a ‘‘traditional’’ relationship to the land not for political ends, . . . but because they continue to believe in the cultural value of caring for the land. That land use is now contested makes such a belief political. —Haunani-Kay Trask This book focuses on the representation of Hawai‘i as a legendary space in modern and contemporary narratives that, via verbal and visual translation , have adapted Native Hawaiian traditional stories. This is not a book about Hawaiian legends. It is a study of how Hawaiian stories labeled as ‘‘legends’’ have been translated to produce a legendary Hawai‘i primarily for non-Hawaiian readers or audiences; and it is a study of how some historical and contemporary Hawaiian counternarratives offer an invitation to unmake this imaginary construction and re-envision Hawai‘i as an indigenous ‘‘storied place.’’ Put differently, this book documents the uses to which ‘‘legendary traditions’’ have been put to reinforce a tourist-oriented image of Hawai‘i in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and argues for a re-cognition of Hawai‘i as sustained by indigenous conceptions of place and genre. Narrative Tradition My general task is to investigate narrative tradition within a framework that rejects the popular understanding that what is ‘‘traditional’’ is conservative and uninventive, and instead considers tradition as an ongoing ‘‘process of cultural construction’’—a process situated in the preoccupations and negotiations of the present, a process where every teller engages with the past and interprets it so as to affect listeners or readers. In this view, as folklorist Henry Glassie elucidates, tradition is ‘‘the cre- 2 Chapter 1 ation of the future out of the past’’ (395) so that both responsibility (to the past, community, audience) and creativity (the opportunity to affect change) are active ingredients of any telling.1 Let me state from the start that this focus on change in ‘‘tradition’’ is not to be simply equated with the ‘‘invention of tradition,’’ which quite apart from its scholarly genesis has in journalistic and popular usage been read as ‘‘fakelore’’ and as such has impacted indigenous peoples in negative ways. Rather, as Glassie points out, tradition is akin to history, both being an ‘‘assembly of materials from the past, designed for usefulness in the future’’; and its ‘‘continuity’’ effect is a dynamic, rather than static, aspect of culture: tradition commonly operates and persists via change (395). 2 Tradition is thus ‘‘to be understood as a process of cultural construction’’ (398), an ongoing process rather than a naturalized inheritance, and one that hinges on the complex negotiations characterizing its individual recollections and performances—negotiations that play out both the performer’s responsibility to the past as source and the performer’s responsibility to the present as audience or participants . Performance, then, whether it is the retelling of a narrative or the staging of a ritual, is the opportunity for an individual or group to ‘‘take control’’ (404) through an engagement with the past and to act so as to affect the future. Preventing us from reading this opportunity as unbound creativity, Glassie’s language, ‘‘take control,’’ also alerts us to the power dynamics—political, institutional, social, economic, gendered —that are inescapably at stake in the uses we make of both tradition and performance.3 It follows that the opposite of tradition ‘‘is not change but oppression’’ (396). Historical violence, in other words, is at the core of the rupture of tradition, a rupture that, at the hands of a new power, may take the form of translation (as recontextualization and recodification) or unequivocal suppression. In its record of continuous change, then, tradition is ‘‘a key to historical knowledge’’ (398), a documentable site for a ‘‘better history’’ that speaks ‘‘of the engagement of wills, of the interaction among traditions, each fraught with value, all driving toward their different visions of the future’’ (396). What guides my investigation is this understanding of tradition, and in particular its relation to colonialism—certainly one of the most significant violent agents of change on this planet. How does colonialism rupture the (narrative) traditions of colonized and/or indigenous peoples ? Clearly it others them; at times it violently seeks to erase them; but even in doing so it represents them.4 In rupturing tradition, colonialism then simultaneously delegitimizes the narratives of the colonized and...

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