Hawaiian theme dropped after uproar
Tropical Night at U of S has been stripped of all Hawaiian cultural themes after taking flak on Facebook last week.
The Jan. 24 event is a fundraiser for the Student Wellness Initiative Toward Community Health (SWITCH), a group working with inner-city residents at the Westside Community Clinic.
Originally branded Hawaiian Night, the Arts and Sciences Students Union event encouraged students to “Say Aloha to Louis.”
The poster showed a darkhaired, bikini-clad, apparently American tourist — an image the group took from an old airline advertisement for Hawaii. Within 12 hours, a new Tropical Night poster instead featured a palm tree.
U of S student Erica Lee, an Idle No More activist and one of the event’s critics, said she might not have realized the problems with Hawaiian imagery had another student not brought it to her attention.
“It’s something that’s so pervasive in our culture. We think of Hawaii and we think of flower leis, we think of grass skirts and sexy hula girls,” she said.
“It’s like having any other racial or ethnic group-themed party. It’s something that seems like a fun and harmless idea but there are Hawaiian scholars that feel really passionately about not being represented in such a commercialized way.”
The history of Hawaii includes aboriginal people who were violently settled and had customs banned, she said.
The hula dance was formally banned for a period in the midnineteenth century following pressure from Christian missionaries, and later regulated by the state.
“For so long we oppressed them and didn’t let them do it, and now people in the West will take that and commercialize it.”
Lee said she was “really happy” the ASSU responded so quickly. The native studies department and the ASSU were scheduled to meet Friday afternoon, along with Lee and a scholar from the University of Hawaii via Skype.
The original idea behind the event was to raise money for SWITCH and “let the students escape the bitter cold into something a little bit more warm,” said Dylan Pollon, vice president of communications for ASSU.
“We are pretty culturally aware, so we reacted pretty quickly and very proactively due the cultural concerns, as we are a representative of the student body,” Pollon said.
Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoole Osorio, a professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii, agreed the appropriation of cultural icons is always a concern, but he said the images were not terribly offensive.
“What the students were actually appropriating was not so much native as it was tourists,” he told the National Post.
“As far as this particular image is concerned, I doubt that many Kanaka Maoli [native Hawaiian] voices would be raised in protest for a bunch of students in a very cold place who are trying to imagine being in a warmer place.’’ Lee doesn’t buy that argument. “I found it a little disturbing a male scholar would be willing to play up the sexualization of indigenous Hawaiian women so casually,” she said.
“A large issue for indigenous Hawaiian women is prostitution and being forced into situations where male tourists will want a sexy indigenous Hawaiian woman to sleep with for fun when they’re on the island.”
Pollon said other campus groups planning events can learn that it’s important to be culturally aware, “because things one person may portray in one light, somebody else could portray in another.”
The best guideline, Lee said, is to simply not use another group’s culture for events.