There Are No Real Hawaiians.

Abstract

There are no real Hawaiians is the titular argument of this thesis. Developing a method of wā/nana, or of weaving together time and space, I utilize postcards and ethnographic interviews to explore representations of Native Hawaiians throughout history and their impacts on contemporary Hawaiian identity today. I trace the history of tourism in Hawaiʻi as the emergence of imagined representations of Kanaka ʻŌiwi beginning with missionary efforts in the early 1800s to show how postcards and tourism (re)produce tropes of Hawaiian-ness. Because these stereotypes were construed by modernity and the colonial project, to view Hawaiʻi from a Western perspective is to always see Hawaiians as imagined by Others. From this perspective, it is impossible for there to be any real Hawaiians. Instead of understanding Hawaiians as Other, I argue that we must shift authority away from the West and to ʻŌiwi in order to better understand how Kanaka ʻŌiwi navigate the contemporary landscape and make sense of their own identities in the present.