The dormant volcano is considered sacred by many Native Hawaiians. Nearly 200 miles from Honolulu, on the island of Hawai‘i, Mauna Kea rises 13,796 feet above sea level, making it the highest point in the state. There’s no room for another version to emerge.Īt least that’s how it was until the telescope protests. In non-academic speak: To most outsiders, Hawai‘i is defined by the lei-draped, aloha-dispensing, honeymooner-welcoming image of the place. “Hawai‘i is overdetermined by the tourist discourse,” he replied. At one point, I asked Kajihiro how so many mainlanders can come to O‘ahu and yet see so little of the version he was showing me. For the next hour we tooled around Honolulu. Kajihiro started his car and we headed back down Hālawa Heights Road. The Pearl Harbor memorial marks not one but two acts of destruction, for the Pearl Harbor narrative erased the Hawaiian history of resistance that preceded it. The same military that wiped out countless agricultural, ecological, and cultural sites. This is the same military whose target practice bombed the island from World War II until 1990, when the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana halted the bombing, helping to birth the modern sovereignty movement. Now, more than 85,000 acres on O‘ahu-some 25 percent of the island-are controlled by the military. In the early 20th century, the sugarcane industry, urban development, and-especially-military expansion eradicated almost all of the loko i‘a. More than 20 loko i‘a, or Hawaiian fishponds, were created here, some as large as 100 acres, providing a sustainable source of protein for many on the island. For centuries Ke Awalau o Pu‘uloa was an estuary teeming with fish. The finer ones were glinting in the sun below us. Without an introduction, your average haole (foreigner) can’t just make an appointment, but that’s part of the point: Hawai‘i DeTours, as Kajihiro and colleague Terri Keko‘olani call the enterprise, aims to de-center the outsider, who never should’ve been at the center to begin with. (It’s still the site of an active Native Hawaiian struggle to stop the military training and to recover and heal the land, Kajihiro says.) military in 1942 and used for live-fire training for decades. Considered sacred by many Native Hawaiians, this ground in the foothills of the Wai‘anae Mountains was taken over by the U.S. government and military, staged a coup d’état and overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. One of his stops might be ‘Iolani Palace, where he’d talk about the white businessmen and sugar barons who, backed by the U.S. In 2000, he began moonlighting as a funny kind of tour guide-an on-the-side, word-of-mouth, extremely-not-for-money kind of tour guide. It frustrated Kajihiro, but it occurred to him that there existed a tool to push back against the nearly $18 billion tourism juggernaut responsible for this mindset. They don’t understand that there’s a history of colonialism and dispossession inscribed in the landscape itself.” “They have this vision of Hawai‘i as this multicultural paradise. “Even people who are otherwise politically conscious-they’d get to Hawai‘i and their brains just slip into vacation mode,” Kajihiro told me. For years Kajihiro watched as visitors from the mainland-perfectly intelligent and thoughtful visitors-transformed when they arrived in Hawai’i. The car belonged to Kyle Kajihiro, an academic and activist, and he was telling me how he fell into his third and highly unofficial line of work. While I only visited O‘ahu on that trip, there, in an idling car in a Honolulu shopping center, all my happy illusions about Hawai‘i as a whole began to unravel. But it was a wish with an asterisk, a catch I’ve been grappling with since my last trip to O‘ahu in late 2019. Wish we were here, this person had written.Īt some level, yes, of course I wished I was there. The image was generic-but the Hawai‘i-recognizing corner of my temporal lobe lit right up. White sand, turquoise water, lush green mountain rising soothingly in the distance. A while back, at a particularly apexy apex of pandemic awfulness, an acquaintance of mine posted a photo on Instagram.
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