Hawaii Special Issue : Hawaiian Renaissance

I knew the Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki was big, but until last month, I didn’t suspect it had room enough for two Hawaiis.

The most obvious of the two is the commercially packaged version that lies all around as you walk the 20-acre, 2,542-room beachfront resort on a Friday night. On those evenings, bathed in the light of its 77 gasoline-fed tiki torches, the hotel stages its “King’s Jubilee” show with 10 hula dancers and a man playing the role of King David Kalakaua, the “merry monarch” of the islands who revived interest in hula and Hawaiian music in the 19th Century. After the free hourlong performance, the hotel staff explodes fireworks over the beach, and thousands of vacationers stand below and marvel at the indigo sky, the creamy sand, the commotion of the tides.

I took in a portion of that scene the night I arrived. But after a few minutes, I snuck off to the hotel’s Tapa Ballroom to spend a couple of hours with the other Hawaii, the one that native Hawaiians are struggling to sustain.

The event was a community children’s hula competition, advertised on bulletin boards within the hotel. I paid the $10 admission and sat among several hundred locals to admire the dancing, chanting and drumming of 18 hula schools, known as halau , and the kumu (teachers) who lead them.

The annual Hula Oni E Keiki Hula Festival, assembled by the Halau Hula O Hokulani, was created three years ago. If the cultural offerings outside felt vaguely like a Las Vegas floor show, the atmosphere of these performances shared more with mainland Little League games and piano recitals.

Vendors offered homemade crafts. In the front row sat a line of impassive judges. And before them proceeded scores of nervous keiki --children--some of whom had studied hula for eight years and were just entering their teens. As 13-year-old Jessica Kamalani Bond prepared to take her solo, the master of ceremonies read a few details from her bio.

“When she grows up,” he said, “she would like to be a computer technician and professional hula dancer.”

That night, and for the next six days on Oahu, Kauai and Maui, I found two distinct trends at work: Hawaiians are exploring and celebrating their native culture with more enthusiasm than they have in perhaps a century, and the Hawaiian tourism industry is pouring new emphasis into replicating and advertising the most visitor-friendly elements of that culture.

If you’re a strictly sun-sand-surf traveler, you’re likely to notice small things here and there, many of them merely cosmetic: fewer plastic leis at the hotels, more Hawaiian-made products in gift shops, more taro dishes on menus.

Still, the list grows longer daily: At the Hyatt Regency Kauai, members of the island’s historical society meet with interested guests for “talk-story” sessions. At the half-dozen sites of Hawaiian Hotels & Resorts, an “essence of Hawaii” promotional campaign, devised last year, highlights historical aspects of each site. On the two ships of American Hawaii Cruises, passengers now find that the crew includes a traditional Hawaiian storyteller. Last month on the Big Island of Hawaii, the Kona Village Resort threw a birthday party for 83-year-old Imgard Aluli, one of the state’s most prolific Hawaiian songwriters. Meanwhile, Molokai, for decades one of the least tourism-oriented of the islands, now sells itself to visitors as “the most Hawaiian island” of them all.

But there’s more to this than marketing. Glance at a community bulletin board, chat with a resident, make an inquiring phone call to a museum or cultural group, look in one of the islands’ local festivals, or perhaps merely take a closer look at your hotel lobby, and you’ll probably find hints of a deeper, more rewarding--and more conflicted--Hawaii.

In fact, a stranger can easily see those 77 closely tended Hilton torch flames as a sign of the strange state of tourism and cultural politics in Hawaii these days: Everyone, it seems, is declaring his or her eagerness to protect the flame of native Hawaiian tradition. But for every torch-bearer, there seems to be another set of presumptions and ambitions and another formula for feeding the flames.

One obvious element in Hawaii’s introspective mood is the delicate condition of the tourism industry, which generates an estimated 40% of the state’s gross product and is only now coming back from a deep three-year slump. Too poor to continue the developers’ orgy of mega-resorts, monorails and water slides that capped off the 1980s, the industry’s leaders last year publicly vowed to renew their emphasis on trappings of traditional Hawaii, a trend that had already been growing for several years. Now, in ever-greater numbers, tourism leaders are matching hotels with local hula schools, urging local guides to pass tests in island history and tutoring workers in aloha spirit.

The state’s Tourism Training Council has certified about 250 of the estimated 2,000 tour guide-bus drivers in the state. The training program, created a year ago and run through Kapiolani Community College, costs about $100, requires about 40 hours of classroom time over 10 weeks, includes a detailed text (which addresses head-on such issues as the deposing of Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last reigning monarch, and the epidemics sparked by diseases imported from Europe) and culminates with a 100-question exam.

Those who score 85 or higher are certified and presumably become more attractive to employers. The program is expected to grow from Oahu to other islands.

George Kanahele, a Cornell Ph.D. in government who has become the hotel industry’s leading instiller of aloha spirit, estimates that his Waiaha Foundation has made presentations to two dozen or more hotels since his first effort at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel (on the Big Island of Hawaii) in 1985, and says he senses more receptivity now than in years past. His current clients include the 28-property Outrigger hotel chain.

“If you’re in the hospitality business, you’re in the aloha business,” Kanahele says. “They’re one and the same.”

Still, this is not charity work. For the hotels and their siblings in the tourist trade under off-island ownership, being Hawaiian may have other benefits, but the bottom-line objective is to lure tourists and give them service that will bring them back again.

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Meanwhile, in the background of the tourist landscape stand leaders of the rapidly advancing but many-headed Hawaiian sovereignty movement. For many of them, being Hawaiian means not only political empowerment but mistrust of past exploiters, including the tourism industry. Though its leaders cannot agree on whether they want full independence, limited sovereignty under continued statehood, land, financial reparations or some combination of those, the movement has grown so powerful that last year it extracted from President Clinton a formal apology to native Hawaiians, on behalf of the American people, for the behind-the-scenes American scheming that brought the fall of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893.

After an upwelling of public demonstrations in Honolulu on the anniversary of the January coup (“RETURN STOLEN LAND!” demanded one placard), the movement has largely receded from view of most tourists. But its advances elsewhere continue: In May, after decades of using the island of Kahoolawe as a target for practice bombings--and recent protests by native Hawaiian groups--the Navy yielded the unpopulated, ordnance-scarred island to Hawaiian control. A state commission is deciding how the land will be used.

Clearly, hoteliers and the sovereignty movement leaders aren’t natural bedfellows. Yet as these mirror-image trends advance, each reaps benefits from a broader, quieter grass-roots Hawaiian cultural renaissance that has been building for two decades, leading more families to enroll their children in hula classes, more farmers to consider planting taro, whose roots when pounded become poi. In these circles, being Hawaiian is often a more personal matter.

On my second day on Oahu, I walked along the Waikiki waterfront, past stacked surfboards, crimson Texans, and two hip-looking Hawaiian teen-agers gently strumming ukuleles while a sign across the street shouted an offer of “MUUMUU FACTORY TO YOU” bargains. Enduring native culture in the shadow of crass commercialism, I thought.

But what is native? A 1989 state population study found that just 1% or less of the islands’ million-plus population was full-blooded Hawaiian, with another 18% classified as part-Hawaiian. And if the line between native and non-native history is drawn at 1778, when Captain James Cook arrived, the ukulele doesn’t make the cut. As I later learned, it didn’t exist in Hawaii until Portuguese sailors arrived in the 1870s bearing small guitars, and locals made a few changes in design.

*

On Kauai, I stayed happily at the Hanalei Bay Resort, which was rich in tennis courts, immaculately landscaped, featured taro pancakes on the breakfast menu and had just reopened after belated hurricane repairs. When I had a chance, however, I headed down the hill to investigate the lavish Princeville Hotel.

That resort, on bluffs over Hanalei Bay, was renovated in 1991 into one of the most formal settings in the islands, with classical music in the lobby and employees in suits and ties. Then came Hurricane Iniki in 1992 and some rethinking on the part of the hotel’s Japanese owners and its ITT Sheraton management. When the hotel reopened in October, 1993, the idea was to take on a more Hawaiian profile--more aloha shirts and muumuus, less formality.

But they’re still working with the same building. When I got there, the lobby gleamed with black and white marble, the lounge was lined with clubby bookshelves and full of classic European furnishings, and a gold-trimmed piano from Paris stood next to the dining-room entrance. Room rates began at $225.

At 6:30 p.m., the blurt of a conch sounded in that genteel lobby, and a young man stepped forward with shell and drum, joined by a chanting woman with a lei and a crown of grass and bright fabric. Soon he was drumming (as his back rested against an overstuffed love seat), and she was dancing and narrating tales of Pele the volcano goddess. The cocktail crowd gathered to watch, applauded. I was half-ready for a waitress to appear bearing poi in fine china, but instead the audience fell back into pre-dinner chat, and the mist of surreality cleared.

The Princeville hotel was also contributing to a new project that seemed to hold interesting possibilities: a taro festival, celebrating the root that has been central to Hawaiian diets for centuries. The October event, staged at various sites on Kauai’s north shore, was designed to promote camaraderie among island taro growers (the water-rich Hanalei Valley is one of the state’s prime taro-growing areas) and encourage young Hawaiians to consider growing the root commercially.

Yet here, too, there’s irony at work. Of roughly 50 taro growers on the island, estimated Rodney Haraguchi, president of the Kauai Taro Growers Assn., far fewer than half are from native Hawaiian families. (Haraguchi’s family came to Hawaii from Japan three generations ago, and started growing taro in 1971.) And despite the cultural renaissance and a strong demand for taro, many native Hawaiian workers are drawn to jobs at resorts or construction companies that pay more and make fewer physical demands than taro farming operations do.

I missed the taro festival, but my timing was better for the Eo E Emalani I Alakai--that is, the sixth annual salute to the day in 1871 when Hawaii’s Queen Emma led an expedition to the Alakai Swamp above Kauai’s Waimea Canyon.

On the appointed Sunday, I made the scenic journey to Kokee--two hours, since I had to drive two-thirds of the way around the island, but what a pleasant chore--climbed the narrow road along the edge of Waimea Canyon and pulled up at a green meadow next to the small Kokee Natural History Museum. The festival, which featured several hula halaus and a re-enactment of the queen’s horseback ride through the area, had been advertised widely on the island, but there appeared to be only a few tourists among the hundreds who claimed free seats on the grass.

It was a great day. The sun shone brilliantly. In the shade, dragonflies coupled. The re-enactment of Queen Emma’s ride, led by regal Lisa Uilani Pai in Victorian-style dress on a white horse, drew a colorful posse of tag-along children in BONGO brand jeans and baseball caps. While the hula halaus posed for photos in their leaf crowns and grass skirts, less traditionally inclined Hawaiians lounged in jeans and cowboy hats. And when the hula performances began, they communicated a range of expression not likely to be found in dances at tourist venues: Some dances were exultant, others were somber and mournful, some developed slowly and gradually, and all were driven by a stark accompaniment of chanting and the pounding of hands on gourds.

*

The most far-flung stop on my Hawaiiana itinerary was Hana, the idyllic town on Maui’s isolated back side.

To reach Hana by car you must navigate the 50-odd narrow and winding miles of the Hana Highway, a journey that takes three hours or more. Driving the highway, I had that pleasant sense of trading mass commercialism for a world where coconut meat is peddled in driveways and waterfalls roar at every turn.

Reaching Hana, you find that the 66-acre Hotel Hana-Maui and the 4,700-acre Hana cattle ranch are the center of virtually everything. The hotel was born, with 10 rooms and a different name, in 1946, when ranch owner and mainland businessman Paul Fagan imported his minor league baseball team, the San Francisco Seals, to spend their spring training in Hana. Sportswriters followed, as Fagan knew they would. One of them labeled the place “Heavenly Hana,” and the exclusive resort was off and running.

Ownership has changed since then--the management is now Sheraton--and a $24-million renovation in 1989 pushed the size of the hotel to 96 rooms and suites, many dressed up with hardwood floors, skylights and blankets of merino wool, woven in England. But the staff of about 200 still includes many native Hawaiians, and the sprawling porches and wicker furniture are well suited to the tropics. For the last six years, the hotel has hosted the Haku Mele O Hana, a festival that gathers practitioners of traditional Hawaiian song for a non-competitive celebration of the arts.

As an arriving guest, I felt I had landed in a place apart. This is as it should be, really, because most of us were paying more than $300 nightly. (There are a couple of other much more affordable lodgings in town.)

It’s no problem slipping into the slow pace of the place--a koi pond here, a canopy of trees there, a pair of long swimming pools, a “wellness center” for workouts, tennis courts. Shuttles leave hourly for Hamoa Beach, a nearby lolling spot where hotel staff members are on hand to offer refreshments. I snapped pictures. I watched the rain (this is the wet side of Maui.) I took a ukulele lesson from the hotel social director, Makala Waring, who is full-blooded Hawaiian.

Our first tune was “Tiny Bubbles,” of Don Ho fame, which made for an interesting scene: While I strummed the chords, and rain splattered on the fronds outside, Waring outlined the historically close relationship between the hotel and its employees and stressed the importance of finding a tourism-friendly solution to the sovereignty question.

That night I signed up for the hotel’s weekly luau at Hamoa Beach ($53 a head for adults). There was a pig in a pit oven, plenty of poi (though mainlanders are put off by its pasty blandness), multiple refills of rum punch, family-style seating at picnic tables, and lots of live guitar and ukulele music, performed by musicians who double as workers in the hotel’s stables, engineering department and front office. The hula portion of the show was dominated by three daughters of hotel staff members, none older than 11. The evening ended with a rendition of “Aloha Oe,” the most famous of many songs written by the deposed Queen Liliuokalani.

By day, I drove out toward Oheo Pools in Haleakala National Park. The Oheo Pools are a becalming scene--a river drops by stages over black volcanic rocks into the sea--but they are also a fine illustration of how, in years past, some promoters’ idea of being Hawaiian seemed to involve a little artificial history.

Over decades, with encouragement from hotel employees and rental car companies, Hana has become known as the site of “The Seven Sacred Pools.” This is despite the fact that original Hawaiians aren’t known to have had any particular beliefs or superstitions associated with Oheo Pools or any of the other streams in the area, and despite the fact that, depending on the water flow and how you count, you might see seven or 17 or 70 pools along just about any stream’s path. You might as well call them the Several Secular Pools.

Rangers for the National Park Service have abandoned subtlety on this issue and now hand out flyers saying “Seven Sacred Pools? There’s no such place! It’s a name made up as a sales gimmick to attract tourists to Hana . . . (and) is degrading to native Hawaiians who are trying to preserve their language and culture.”

From Hana I headed home, sheet music to “Tiny Bubbles” folded into my suitcase, sand in my shoes. No matter where you are in contemporary Hawaii, there are certain circumstances on which you can rely. There will be sand, there will be sea, and there will be an identity crisis.

GUIDEBOOK: Hawaiian Hideaways

Getting there: American, Continental, TWA, United, Delta, Northwest and Hawaiian Airlines all fly nonstop to Honolulu; Delta and United fly nonstop to Maui. Inter-island flights are offered by Hawaiian, Aloha and Mahalo. Some of the best bargains are package tours combining air fare and hotel accommodations, available through airlines and major tour operators such as Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays and Classic Custom Vacations.

Where to stay: On Oahu, the Hilton Hawaiian Village (2005 Kalia Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 97815; tel. 800-445-8667 or 808-949-4321). Brochure rates: $155-$320 nightly, double occupancy, though figures vary seasonally and during holidays. On Kauai, Princeville Hotel (P.O. Box 3069, Princeville, Hawaii 96722; tel. 800-826-4400 or 808-826-9644). Brochure rates: $250-$450 nightly, double occupancy. Also, Hanalei Bay Resort/Embassy Suites Kauai (5380 Honoiki Road, Princeville, Kauai, Hawaii 96722; tel. 800-827-4427 or 808-826-6522). It’s one property, with the traditional rooms marketed by the resort ($130-$230 nightly) and the suites marketed by Embassy Suites ($240-$1,000 nightly) On Maui, the Hotel Hana-Maui (Hana Highway, P.O. Box 8, Hana, Hawaii 96713; tel. 800-321-4262 or 808-248-8211). Brochure rates: $325-$795 nightly. The much-in-demand alternative: Waianapanapa Cabins (Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of State Parks, 54 S. High St., Room 101, Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii 96793; tel. 808-243-5354). Twelve rudimentary cabins. Rates vary from $5-$10 per night per person.

For more information: Contact the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, 3440 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 610, Los Angeles 90010, (213) 385-5301.