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Nix the tiki bar: Hawaii tourism gets authentic

Saturday, September 15, 2012





"It's about having that sense of place — understanding who went before us, understanding that Waikiki is a place where we are so deep seated in our culture. And now, there's this resurgence to share it with our guests," said Kehaulani Kam, cultural services director at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Waikiki.

The trend may help improve the dim view many Native Hawaiians have of tourism, the state's largest industry and biggest employer. A 2010 state survey found nearly 60 percent of them don't believe it helps preserve their language and culture.


In it, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Fred Armisen play two underpaid entertainers in grass skirts at a Kauai restaurant. Johnson performs a sloppy dance resembling hula and Armisen strums the ukulele. Both sing in gibberish that tourists may think is Hawaiian.





Around that time, "in the 50s is, nighttime shows here shifted from being just Hawaiian, which they had been previously, to Polynesian. That's when you get a knife dancer, torch guys, Tahitian hula," said DeSoto Brown, a historian at Bishop Museum.


The agency wants people to identify a fire knife dance as Samoan and Tahitian hula as Tahitian when they use photos of various performances. If people want to show Hawaiian hula, they should be sure that's what's depicted in the images.

Keli'ihoalani Wilson, the agency's cultural director, said the aim isn't to knock other Polynesian traditions, but avoid confusion.

"It's all positive stuff. No scolding. Just helping," Wilson said.

For Lori Sablas, the cultural director at the Kaanapali Beach Hotel on Maui, it is about accuracy. "My mandate is: 'How do Hawaiians think? How do Hawaiians act?' Let's not change it. Let's not make it up," she said.

That means they grow taro — called kalo in Hawaiian, it's the starchy vegetable used to make the traditional dish called poi — on the property and prominently display canoes, pahu drums and other traditional artifacts.


The hotel's more than 200 employees went on boat rides to neighboring Lanai, the rural island recently bought by the world's sixth richest man, Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison.

They saw rare native sandalwood trees, heard a Lanai legend about a man who was banished there because he didn't listen to his father and learned about the long-lost art of using stars, waves, birds and other cues from nature to travel between islands.




Instead of building a Cinderella castle, Disney designed the hotel Aulani around the idea of telling guests about Native Hawaiian culture. One of the hotel's bars — the Olelo Room — has Hawaiian words on the wall, and its bartenders and wait staff speak Hawaiian.





"These people are on vacation. They don't have to wake up early but they choose to because they want to experience that," he said. "It's not a helicopter ride. It's not a surf lesson. It's a cultural experience."