When it comes to thinking about being local in Hawaii, most might not immediately think back to a notorious murder case of nearly a century ago.
Yet, the Massie case of 1931-1932, in which a young Native Hawaiian was tragically killed by a group of whites associated with the Navy, is precisely the historic event that scholars at the University of Hawaii say is central to appreciating the concept of local identity.
“The Massie Case has since become a kind of origins story of the development of local identity in Hawaii among working-class people of color,” John P. Rosa writes in his 2014 book, “Local Story: The Massie Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History.”
In his view and that of other scholars, it represented the first time the term “local” was used in Hawaii with any significance.
And while definitions of local identity have evolved, at its core local identity is as much about dividing people as it is about uniting them, and about who has power and influence and who does not.
It’s common to hear people define local as where someone went to high school, taking your slippers off before entering someone’s home, preferring your peanuts boiled or speaking pidgin English.
But, while these habits are not without comfort and significance, they are in a sense only surface-level connections that may prevent the people of Hawaii from recognizing what really brings us together, and what may be in the way of bridging differences to address the many troubles in our society.
What defines local identity, says Jonathan Okamura, an ethnic studies professor at UH Manoa, is a shared appreciation of the land, the peoples and the cultures of the islands.
But now that shared identity could be imperiled by the same powers that held sway in the 1930s: a local and national government inattentive to their concerns, abetted by economic forces controlled by others.
Hawaii was already becoming too reliant on outside economic forces, especially tourism, Okamura warned 25 years ago, disrupting the value of a shared identity.
The color of one’s skin may not serve as the best way to identify who is and is not local.
“Local identity, while not organized into a viable social movement, will continue in its significance for Hawaii’s people if only because of their further marginalization through the ongoing internationalization of the economy and over-dependence on tourism,” he wrote. (...)
Today, the troubles that are dividing us are made all the more difficult by economic dependency on tourism, the large military presence in the islands, and foreign investment and ownership that Okamura writes about.
Local identity and any disconnect that comes with it is also being shaped by increased immigration from the mainland and the broader Asia-Pacific region to Hawaii even as the local-born population is moving elsewhere.
Rosa says that local identity doesn’t necessarily divide us as long as we continue to discuss what it means to be local.
“Sometimes things get a little emotional when we think about identity and ‘who I am,’ but when we think of what place and shared values might be, that is one way to think about it,” he said in an interview. “It is people committed to this place in particular ways.” (...)
What Is Local?
It is easy to think of local identity as being based on race and ethnicity.
Indeed, in the Massie case Grace Fortescue singled out Joseph Kahahawai as the “darkest” of the five men. And the words malihini haole are frequently and sometimes pejoratively used to describe whites who move here from the mainland.
The working-class origins of local identity were informed by the labor needs of the plantations that brought large numbers of migrants from China, Portugal, Japan, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Korea to Hawaii in the mid-to-late 19th century and into the early 20th. Many stayed, and it is their descendants that “made up the core of locals” since the 1930s, says Rosa in a 2018 book, “Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai’i.”
Meanwhile, a white oligarchy remained in power in the islands for decades following the Massie case.
But demographics gave way to substantial change through several transformative periods since that time: martial law during World War II, the return of Japanese-American veterans to the islands, the so-called 1954 revolution that saw the territorial Legislature wrestled away from mostly white Republicans by racially diverse Democrats, the tourism and development boom that begins in the 1950s and 1960s, the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, the Japanese investment of the 1980s and the economic slowdown of the 1990s.
Hawaii is now in the midst of another transformative period, one whose dimensions are still being drawn but one that continues to reflect the dynamics of previous generations. It is also driven by something that did not exist until recently: the online world and social media.
All through it, local identity has continued.
“Over the years, local identity gained greater importance through the social movements to unionize plantation workers by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in 1946 and to gain legislative control by the Democratic Party in 1954,” Okamura writes.
Today, those who might identify as local are no longer just members of the working class. There are whites whose roots go back multiple generations. And the color of one’s skin may not serve as the best way to identify who is and is not local.
Changing Demographics
There is also a new category of people besides Native Hawaiian, haole and local — one that Rosa calls “other.”
Their arrivals began in small numbers in the 19th century but have grown significantly, more recently from places such as Latin America — including Mexicans and Brazilians — Southeast Asia (Vietnamese) Micronesia (Marshallese and Chuukese) and other parts of the Pacific (Samoans).
Are these groups considered locals?
It depends, in part on whether they acquire local knowledge, language and customs, whether they have respect for the indigenous population, the degree of their intermarriage rates, and on whether these groups are still primarily connected to their former homes or are nurturing ties to their new ones.
There is no litmus test for being local. But newer arrivals to Hawaii who integrate into local society rather than resist it — who seek to transplant themselves in a new environment with the same trappings of their old one — may sometimes find it easier to get along. (...)
In a May 2002 column, the Advertiser’s Lee Cataluna revisited the topic. She wrote, “Every couple of months, a new one will show up in your e-mail inbox, one of those ‘You know you’re local if …’ lists.”
But Cataluna also observed that, “The only problem with those lists is they’re made for people who have no doubt that they’re local.” They are for “entertainment purposes only, eliciting happy nods of recognition rather than gasps of self-revelation.”
What Cataluna wanted to talk about was people who did not grow up in Hawaii but who had spent “some serious time and effort to understand and adopt the culture.”
She asked, “When do they know they’ve turned the corner to local-ness? How can they tell when they’ve passed major milestones?”
Such a list, she said, would include these characteristics:
But there is also much to celebrate and even honor in localisms.
“Our cultural expression is manifest through the adoption of others’ customs as our own,” said Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, an ethnic studies professor and the department’s director for the Center for Oral History, in an interview. “It is identified with Hawaiians — mixed plates, that sort of thing — and if you lose that you begin to erode at those cultures that cohere us and connect us.
“And the fact that people are coming together to celebrate life events, bringing food and sharing — on Molokai, people go and clean yards when someone passes away — if we stop doing those things, we are going to lose that connection. So it is important.”
Yet, the Massie case of 1931-1932, in which a young Native Hawaiian was tragically killed by a group of whites associated with the Navy, is precisely the historic event that scholars at the University of Hawaii say is central to appreciating the concept of local identity.
“The Massie Case has since become a kind of origins story of the development of local identity in Hawaii among working-class people of color,” John P. Rosa writes in his 2014 book, “Local Story: The Massie Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History.”
In his view and that of other scholars, it represented the first time the term “local” was used in Hawaii with any significance.And while definitions of local identity have evolved, at its core local identity is as much about dividing people as it is about uniting them, and about who has power and influence and who does not.
It’s common to hear people define local as where someone went to high school, taking your slippers off before entering someone’s home, preferring your peanuts boiled or speaking pidgin English.
But, while these habits are not without comfort and significance, they are in a sense only surface-level connections that may prevent the people of Hawaii from recognizing what really brings us together, and what may be in the way of bridging differences to address the many troubles in our society.
What defines local identity, says Jonathan Okamura, an ethnic studies professor at UH Manoa, is a shared appreciation of the land, the peoples and the cultures of the islands.
But now that shared identity could be imperiled by the same powers that held sway in the 1930s: a local and national government inattentive to their concerns, abetted by economic forces controlled by others.
Hawaii was already becoming too reliant on outside economic forces, especially tourism, Okamura warned 25 years ago, disrupting the value of a shared identity.
The color of one’s skin may not serve as the best way to identify who is and is not local.
“Local identity, while not organized into a viable social movement, will continue in its significance for Hawaii’s people if only because of their further marginalization through the ongoing internationalization of the economy and over-dependence on tourism,” he wrote. (...)
Today, the troubles that are dividing us are made all the more difficult by economic dependency on tourism, the large military presence in the islands, and foreign investment and ownership that Okamura writes about.
Local identity and any disconnect that comes with it is also being shaped by increased immigration from the mainland and the broader Asia-Pacific region to Hawaii even as the local-born population is moving elsewhere.
Rosa says that local identity doesn’t necessarily divide us as long as we continue to discuss what it means to be local.
“Sometimes things get a little emotional when we think about identity and ‘who I am,’ but when we think of what place and shared values might be, that is one way to think about it,” he said in an interview. “It is people committed to this place in particular ways.” (...)
What Is Local?
It is easy to think of local identity as being based on race and ethnicity.
Indeed, in the Massie case Grace Fortescue singled out Joseph Kahahawai as the “darkest” of the five men. And the words malihini haole are frequently and sometimes pejoratively used to describe whites who move here from the mainland.
The working-class origins of local identity were informed by the labor needs of the plantations that brought large numbers of migrants from China, Portugal, Japan, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Korea to Hawaii in the mid-to-late 19th century and into the early 20th. Many stayed, and it is their descendants that “made up the core of locals” since the 1930s, says Rosa in a 2018 book, “Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai’i.”
Meanwhile, a white oligarchy remained in power in the islands for decades following the Massie case.
But demographics gave way to substantial change through several transformative periods since that time: martial law during World War II, the return of Japanese-American veterans to the islands, the so-called 1954 revolution that saw the territorial Legislature wrestled away from mostly white Republicans by racially diverse Democrats, the tourism and development boom that begins in the 1950s and 1960s, the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, the Japanese investment of the 1980s and the economic slowdown of the 1990s.
Hawaii is now in the midst of another transformative period, one whose dimensions are still being drawn but one that continues to reflect the dynamics of previous generations. It is also driven by something that did not exist until recently: the online world and social media.
All through it, local identity has continued.
“Over the years, local identity gained greater importance through the social movements to unionize plantation workers by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in 1946 and to gain legislative control by the Democratic Party in 1954,” Okamura writes.
Today, those who might identify as local are no longer just members of the working class. There are whites whose roots go back multiple generations. And the color of one’s skin may not serve as the best way to identify who is and is not local.
Changing Demographics
There is also a new category of people besides Native Hawaiian, haole and local — one that Rosa calls “other.”
Their arrivals began in small numbers in the 19th century but have grown significantly, more recently from places such as Latin America — including Mexicans and Brazilians — Southeast Asia (Vietnamese) Micronesia (Marshallese and Chuukese) and other parts of the Pacific (Samoans).
Are these groups considered locals?
It depends, in part on whether they acquire local knowledge, language and customs, whether they have respect for the indigenous population, the degree of their intermarriage rates, and on whether these groups are still primarily connected to their former homes or are nurturing ties to their new ones.
There is no litmus test for being local. But newer arrivals to Hawaii who integrate into local society rather than resist it — who seek to transplant themselves in a new environment with the same trappings of their old one — may sometimes find it easier to get along. (...)
‘Where You ‘Wen Grad?’
The topic of what it means to be local in Hawaii has been written about extensively in local media, including Civil Beat.
One of the most popular occasions was from the Honolulu Advertiser in 1996, which published readers’ answers to the question, “You Know You’re A Local If …”
The newspaper was flooded with countless letters, postcards, emails and faxes. It ended up publishing the “ones that made us laugh the hardest” while running more in a new column that would debut later that year.
Here are just a few excerpts from the initial article in the Advertiser that August, broken into categories for food, fashion, philosophy, habits, awareness and the like:
The topic of what it means to be local in Hawaii has been written about extensively in local media, including Civil Beat.
One of the most popular occasions was from the Honolulu Advertiser in 1996, which published readers’ answers to the question, “You Know You’re A Local If …”
The newspaper was flooded with countless letters, postcards, emails and faxes. It ended up publishing the “ones that made us laugh the hardest” while running more in a new column that would debut later that year.
Here are just a few excerpts from the initial article in the Advertiser that August, broken into categories for food, fashion, philosophy, habits, awareness and the like:
- “Your only suit is a bathing suit.”
- “You have at least five Hawaiian bracelets.”
- “You know ‘The Duke’ is not John Wayne.”
- “You measure the water for the rice by the knuckle of your index finger.”
- “You let other cars ahead of you on the freeway and you give shaka to anyone who lets you in.”
- “Your first question is, ‘Where you ’wen grad?’ And you don’t mean college.”
In a May 2002 column, the Advertiser’s Lee Cataluna revisited the topic. She wrote, “Every couple of months, a new one will show up in your e-mail inbox, one of those ‘You know you’re local if …’ lists.”
But Cataluna also observed that, “The only problem with those lists is they’re made for people who have no doubt that they’re local.” They are for “entertainment purposes only, eliciting happy nods of recognition rather than gasps of self-revelation.”
What Cataluna wanted to talk about was people who did not grow up in Hawaii but who had spent “some serious time and effort to understand and adopt the culture.”
She asked, “When do they know they’ve turned the corner to local-ness? How can they tell when they’ve passed major milestones?”
Such a list, she said, would include these characteristics:
- “You know you’re turning local when you no longer think eating rice for breakfast is strange.”
- “You know you’re turning local when, even though you hate seafood, you love poke cuz’ that’s different.”
- “You know you’re turning local when you say the word ‘pau’ so often that you forget what it means in English. Pau is pau.”
But there is also much to celebrate and even honor in localisms.
“Our cultural expression is manifest through the adoption of others’ customs as our own,” said Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, an ethnic studies professor and the department’s director for the Center for Oral History, in an interview. “It is identified with Hawaiians — mixed plates, that sort of thing — and if you lose that you begin to erode at those cultures that cohere us and connect us.
“And the fact that people are coming together to celebrate life events, bringing food and sharing — on Molokai, people go and clean yards when someone passes away — if we stop doing those things, we are going to lose that connection. So it is important.”
by Chad Blair, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
