American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

Preface

vii Preface My research on the 1989 Hawai‘i program at the Smithsonian began, as do many endeavors in Hawai‘i, with “talk story.” At the time, I was a recent transplant to the islands, and I was working as a volunteer archivist in the Folk Arts division of the Hawai‘i State Foundation for Culture and the Arts (HSFCA). As I sifted through records of many impressive HSFCA projects, I ran across the program book for the 1989 Hawai‘i program at the Festival of American Folklife (FAF; now Smithsonian Folklife Festival, or SFF). Based on my reading of the FAF program book, it seemed to me that a folklife festival involved an incredible amount of money and work for an event that lasted only ten days, and I (never having put on a folklife festival) naively decided that a festival was a showy, but transitory and inefficient, way to support traditional arts and artists. I made this assessment primarily in contrast to the behind-the-scenes sponsorship of the HSFCA Folk Arts Master and Apprentice Program, which funds the perpetuation of traditional cultural practices and to which I accorded more long-range impact. As I skimmed the program book for the 1989 FAF, I noticed that many of the same traditional arts practitioners—musicians, lei makers, dancers, saddle makers, and so on—who had been in the Master and Apprentice Program had also represented Hawai‘i in Washington, D.C. The idea of celebrating Hawai‘i’s thirtieth anniversary of statehood with a display of Hawaiian culture on the National Mall struck me as ironic given the presence of an active sovereignty movement. I took the program book home with me for a closer look and discovered familiar names on the staff page. People I knew through the ethnomusicology department of the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa had been involved as staff. When I asked them about their experiences, a rich vein of intriguing anecdotes surfaced—memories that were remarkably vivid even after fourteen years. It was then that I began to suspect that there was more to a folklife festival than meets a casual festivalgoer’s viii Preface eye. My subsequent investigation into the making of the Hawai‘i program in 1989 not only revealed the complexity of the festival-making process and the existence of festival culture, but also illuminated the complexity of cultural identities in Hawai‘i and how they are often construed in opposition to identity politics in the continental United States, or “the mainland,” as it is called in Hawai‘i. Despite having been a student and a teacher of multicultural literature and culture on the mainland for many years, I had to learn from scratch how multiculturalism is constructed in Hawai‘i. That I live in Hawai‘i but am not from Hawai‘i is a position that provides a unique view. Being both a haole (Caucasian) and settler in Hawai‘i, a place with a long history of socioeconomic exploitation by outsiders, I am often aware of being in the position of perpetual outsider. This position bears both limitations and advantages. With regards to this research, my positionality had useful parallels with the positions of some festival workers and many festival viewers. Like many of the visitors to the Hawai‘i program in Washington, D.C., in 1989, my previous notions of Hawai‘i had been filtered through romanticized stereotypes based on tourist industry and media hype. My own process of discovery was instructive in understanding how many visitors to the National Mall were surprised by a representation of Hawai‘i that was not in accord with expectations shaped by Tin Pan Alley and Waikiki tourism. For festival visitors and for the mostly haole culture workers from the Smithsonian who brokered the Hawai‘i program, the 1989 Festival became an invaluable tool for learning more about Hawai‘i history and culture, a threshold to “the other side of the island,” as once festivalgoer put it. Although I did not attend the 1989 FAF, through my research into the nuts and bolts of its festival-making process, I, too, like program visitors, heard many local voices to which I would not otherwise have been privy. In my efforts to contextualize and get below the official narratives of the Hawai‘i program, I turned to a variety of sources. To understand the intertwined histories of tourism and state sponsorship for traditional arts in Hawai‘i, I perused the Bishop Museum Archives...