For around a thousand years, Hawaiian kings and chiefs—known as ali’i—controlled the land, and access was determined by social order. As the Hawaiian monarchy adopted a constitution and began to democratize in the 1830s and ’40s, a series of land-ownership laws called “the Great Mahele” made it possible for private citizens to own property on the islands for the first time. The Great Mahele was intended to provide a substantial amount of land for Hawaiian commoners, but the concept of property ownership was alien to Hawaiians, and only about 1 percent of native Hawaiians ended up being able to take advantage of the law. American entrepreneurs and industrialists managed to acquire land that would become hugely lucrative sugar, pineapple, and coffee plantations, and 70 percent of native Hawaiians found themselves landless by the end of the nineteenth century.
King Kalākaua, who began his reign in 1874, was a Hawaiian nationalist as well as a reckless partier (they called him “the Merrie Monarch”). He defended traditions such as the hula from the attacks of American missionaries, who disapproved of and suppressed whatever they felt was irreligious or amoral. Unfortunately, the king’s heavy drinking and reckless spending were what probably left him vulnerable to a power grab by a group of white businessmen calling themselves “the Hawaiian League.” The Mahele had made it possible for these men to make or inherit obscene amounts of money from pineapple and sugar plantations. In 1887, the league forced Kalākaua to sign away most of his power, some say at gunpoint. A cadre of Americans with growing financial interest in Hawaii held Kalākaua’s sister and successor, Lili‘uokalani, in the palace under house arrest for eight months after a counterrevolutionary group of native Hawaiians attempted to restore her authority as sovereign. Among these American businessmen were James Dole, founder of the Dole pineapple plantation (where tourists can now lose themselves in the world’s largest garden maze), and his cousin Sanford Dole, who then became interim president of the Republic of Hawaii. Activists for native sovereignty held several twentieth-century protests of the monarchy’s overthrow at ‘Iolani Palace; in 2008, a group of native Hawaiians managed to lock the gates to the palace. To these activists, Hawaii never should have become part of the United States. (...)
The whitewashed versions of local history celebrating the welcoming Hawaiian culture, ethnic diversity, and natural beauty don’t simply dominate the tourism industry. They’ve been accepted chronicles of the islands in film and on TV, and were taught in local and mainland schools for much of the twentieth century. Today, a movie like
The Descendants at least acknowledges the complicated history that left a few people in control of most of Hawaii’s land, and many popular guidebooks describe the collapse of indigenous rule as a result of certain monarchs’ poor choices and American colonialism. Hawaiian schools and universities teach rich ethnic-studies curricula of local history, mythology, culture, politics, and art. However, the fact remains that of the seven million tourists who visit the islands each year, a huge number will experience Hawaii as a Polynesian Disneyland, a place staffed and populated by smiling hula girls ready with leis and hollowed-out pineapples filled with rum. (...)
Winter is big-wave season on Oahu’s North Shore—on the radio, on the bus, in bars and restaurants, everyone was talking about “the Eddie,” a surf competition named after big-wave surfing icon Eddie Aikau, which only takes place when the waves at Waimea Bay are consistently breaking at over twenty feet. After I’d spent a deadening series of days composing pro-imperialist schlock for tour buses, Aikau’s story captured my imagination. His life seemed to epitomize the tension between Hawaii’s often-violent struggle against cultural interlopers and the popular image of a lush paradise for western recreation and consumption. Neither tour guide nor separatist, Eddie embodied the oppositional forces of tourism and resistance. Through his friendships, his surfing, and his ill-fated voyage across the ocean in a canoe, Eddie attempted to reconcile Hawaii’s cultural heritage with the aftermath of colonial destruction on the islands.
Eddie Aikau was born in 1946, and grew up with his five siblings in a Chinese graveyard in Pauoa Valley, on Oahu. Hawaiians of Chinese ancestry have lived in Hawaii for more than two hundred years, though most showed up in the mid-to-late nineteenth century to work on booming sugar and pineapple plantations. Pops Aikau and his kids maintained the cemetery grounds, digging up old bones and placing them in a mausoleum. The close-knit Aikau family spent most of their free time in the ocean. Diving, fishing, and paddleboarding animated a day-to-day existence of near poverty. As they became more proficient in the waves, Eddie and his brother Clyde started surfing with the native Hawaiian beach boys who partied with tourists and flirted with divorcées on the pristine beaches of Waikiki.
Hawaiians have been surfing for more than a thousand years. There are legends and prayers dedicated to surfing, and the practice deeply influenced and reflected Hawaiians’ social status. In
Waves of Resistance, a groundbreaking study of the relationship between surfing, Hawaiian identity, and the movement for native sovereignty, historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker identifies a “culture of respect and exchange” on the beaches of Hawaii. For hundreds of years, how one behaved in the surf defined one’s place in society. Surfing brought prestige and generated community. A poor kid living in a graveyard could make a name for himself by holding his own in ocean breaks. Pops Aikau knew this, and convinced a local teacher and activist named John Kelly to take Eddie surfing on the winter swells at Waimea Bay.Though the ocean is placid and family-friendly during the summer months, winter swells on the island’s North Shore are about as welcoming as a New England blizzard. Originating from storms in the north Pacific Ocean, the waves at Waimea Bay, one of the fifty-one beaches covering the North Shore’s eleven miles of shoreline, may not be the world’s biggest, but, measuring from the face of the wave, they reach heights of more than twenty-five feet. From behind, they’re taller than four-story buildings. These were the waves that would come to define Eddie as a surfer. (...)
Eddie couldn’t have been further from the mainland surfer stereotype of a bleach-blond show-off with a stoner drawl. In
Eddie Would Go, a lovingly reported and extensive account of Eddie’s life (and a source for much of the biographical history in this essay), the writer Stuart Holmes Coleman draws an affecting portrait of Eddie as a deep, shy, and quiet person. He was short, with shaggy dark hair—a kid in a red swimsuit with matching Hobie board. In pictures, Eddie often seems to be staring past the camera. He was already hooked on the surf at Waimea Bay when, at twenty-two, he and another big-wave surfer, Butch Van Artsdalen, were hired to be the first lifeguards on the North Shore. Today, during the winter swells on Waimea, lifeguards on Jet Skis patrol just past the break, and yellow tape restricts dangerous sections of shoreline. Beachgoers respect the lifeguards’ authority. In the ’60s, however, swimmers regularly drowned at Waimea in the powerful current and unpredictable waves. Coleman writes that Eddie would let overconfident swimmers toss in the surf before rescuing them, so they’d leave the ocean with the necessary amount of fear and respect—what he called “the Aikau method of lifeguarding.” But no one drowned on his watch.
Eddie continued to grow as a surfer, placing well year after year in the Duke Classic. Named after Hawaiian surf icon Duke Kahanamoku, it was one of the only invitational surfing competitions in Hawaii at the time. But Eddie’s style of smooth, graceful turns and long, fluid rides began losing favor to a new approach. A group of Australians who had recently “discovered” the incredible surf in Hawaii pioneered a much more aggressive style of surfing, which they called “rip, tear, and lacerate.” The Australians were closely affiliated with the International Professional Surfers (IPS) organization, which had formed in 1976, and together they hoped to monetize surfing and bring the sport worldwide recognition. For these surfers, legitimizing the practice meant engaging in cutthroat competition and domination of the waves.
In 1976, a lanky young Australian named Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew published an article in
Surfer magazine called “Bustin’ Down the Door,” in which he praised the “spontaneous direction changes” and “radically carved faces” of this burgeoning style of surfing. Rabbit argued (in a largely unintelligible 1970s surfer dialect) that the surfing innovations of 1976—as opposed to the native surfing tradition of the past thousand years—would be what finally brought respect to surfing as a sport. “The development of modern-day surfing is a bitchin’ example of ‘the extended limits principle,’ and it is still a fairly young trip,” Rabbit wrote. “When surfing became a popular pastime roughly twenty years ago, the objectives and directions were quite basic, as the pure novelty of riding waves was in itself a breakthrough and a stoker.” To native Hawaiian surfers like Eddie, the notion that surfing in 1976 was “young” and “basic” was more than just laughable; it was insulting.
Rabbit and his compatriots’ naive arrogance regarding surfing and its provenance enraged locals. During the winter of 1977, a group of Hawaiian surfers swam out to the break at Sunset Beach and assaulted Rabbit, holding him underwater. Back on the beach, they told him to leave the North Shore for good. Rabbit may have “busted down the door,” but he clearly wouldn’t be moving in anytime soon. Terrified, Rabbit and his friends hid out in a room at the Kuilima Resort, taking turns keeping watch with a tennis racket in hand for self-defense.
by Nicole Pasulka, Believer |
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