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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A millenium of (mostly) good times,
By
This review is from: Waikiki 100 B.C. to 1900 A.D.: An Untold Story (Hardcover)
With the excepton of the Buddha's sacred bo tree, no place on earth has had more published about it per square foot than the 600 or so acres of Waikiki. But almost all of it has been about Waikiki in this century.
The late George Kanahele set out to correct this skewed vision by telling the story of Waikiki before modernization. Not, however, before tourism. From a very early time, Waikiki was a place of hookipa or hospitality. A good place to pick up girls. Legend tells how the champion surfer Kalamakua fell for Keleanuihoho`ana`api`api, a beautiful surfer from Maui, when she rode the famous wave Kalahuewehe ("First Break" to today's surfers) clad only in flowing tresses. Surf naked, indeed. Coming ashore, Kalea remarked that Waikiki was "the most pleasant place we have seen." The locals replied, "This is a place for enjoyment." The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the French say. Kanahele begins with the land. Waikiki was not the most desirable place at first, he concludes, because it lacks a good reef. The first Hawaiians probably settled at Kaneohe or someplace similar, where protein food was more abundant. Only after the population grew did settlers move to Waikiki, which had its attractions: water from three valleys, plenty of land easily developed for kalo (taro) and fishponds, an easy climate. It became a favorite resort of chiefs and chiefesses and, for hundreds of yearss, was the capital of Oahu. For the first thousand years or more, though, there are only glimpses, deductions made through considerations of natural history and archaeological finds, and a few stories such as the "battle of the owls" (actually in Manoa, but Kanahele treats the area comprehensively), when the animals still participated in local politics. But once the chants and geneaologies arrive, Waikiki's history begins to parallel the history of Oahu's chiefs. By the 18th century, Waikiki starts to participate in the history of the wars between Maui and Hawaii. After Kamehameha unified the islands for the first time, Waikiki was, for a heartbeat, the capital of the kingdom, but is soon gave up its political status. Much of the book concerns the 19th-century royalty, who built famous homes that, though long gone, still contribute a memory of Waikiki as a place of famous hookipa. The commercialization began when Haloa, son of Wakea and progenitor of the Hawaiians, was still in Waikiki. But Haloa, found in the loi (ponds for we taro), was in headlong retreat. (Haloa is taro or kalo, blood brother and ancestor to the Hawaiians.) Commercial tourism began with a shed where you paid a small fee to change clothes. Soon some simple rooms were added. The traditional commerce of Waikiki, fish and kalo, had already passed out of the hands of the indigenes. By 1900 all the fishponds were leased to Chinese operators. As late as the reign of Kamehameha IV, in 1863, the king himself worked the taro fields, as an example to the people, which "affirmed not only the economic importance of taro buts its cultural and spiritual linkages with the Hawaiian body politic." A shrinking population of Hawaiians, combined with new competition for labor, doomed the loi and the fishponds, doomed Haloa. The turning point, according to Kanahele, was Henry Whitney's 1890 guidebook to "WAI-KI-KI," "the first to market the image of Waikiki as a playground for royalty and the rich on a sandy beach framed by coconut palms and Diamond Head." The rest we know. Kanahele, who wrote and taught much about Hawaiian values, was an unusual man. He seemed to move without any self-consciousness between his Hawaiianness and his modernity. He wrote about mana (spiritual power) as an Hawaiian and about land transfers as a Cornell doctor of philosophy. He was able to write, for example, that title deeds from the late kingdom contradict the view that haoles (whites) "stole" Waikiki. This toughmindedness was -- and still is -- so rare in Hawaiian historiography as to be almost unique. Kanahele was probably best known as a meliorist, and he ended this book by saying that, "while Waikiki was losing much of its old Hawaiianness, it was simultaneously gaining a new kind of Hawaiianness . . . . Waikiki was no longer only Hawaiian, but its spirit -- its mana -- was. It awaited a new expression." Waikiki couldn't have found a more sympathetic historian. My only problem with "Waikiki" is that Kanahele thoughlessly repeats the myth that the diseases that wiped out most of the Hawaiians were especially devastating because the Hawaiians "had no immunity." Well, neither did the Europeans. Measles caused about 10% of deaths in England in Captain Cook's time, at least as many as it ever did in Hawaii. Nobody was ever born immune to measles. The notion that Hawaiians were more susceptible to diseases like smallpox was created by the missionaries, at a time before Pasteur, when nobody know why or how diseases spread. The same diseases had a worse impact in Hawaii, because they carried off the productive and experienced older people, rather than the babies, who were then, as ow, held at a very low value. But immunity had nothing to do with it.
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