Latest revision as of 18:44, 13 April 2006

NATIVE HAWAIIAN CULTURE

NOTES

1/ I [Larry Kimura] would like to acknowledge the contributions of Dr. William H. Wilson, Assistant Professor of Hawaiian, University of Hawai'i at Hilo, to this paper. He and I assembled this paper after I was approached by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to produce something for the Native Hawaiians Study Commission. We both regret that we did not have the time to make a more thorough contribution ("He wahi ma 'u n_C na'e keia"). We are grateful to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs for their interest in seeing that Hawaiian language concerns be addressed in some fashion by the Commission.

2/ Haole originally meant any foreigner, and is clearly an old precontact word, since it occurs in old chants. Marquesan has a cognate, Hao'e, with a similar meaning. Captain Cook and even early Chinese visitors were termed haole. With the preponderance of foreigners of European descent, haole came to mean individuals of European cultures, and new terms came to be applied to the Chinese and other non-Western ethnic groups. As greater distinctions came to be made in European groups, haole was applied more and more to Americans, including American Blacks, termed haole 'ele'ele, "black haole." Today, haole is used in both Hawaiian and local English to refer to the mainstream American ethnic group and culture alone. It is not uncommon for local people to make statements like, "He isn't a haole, he's German" (or Italian, or English, etc.) in describing a person from Europe or an American citizen with a strong ethnic background. Similarly, it is not uncommon for persons who are not of purely WASP [white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant] background to be referred to as haole because of their cultural and linguistic background (Standard American English). Although some haole people new to Hawai'i immediately jump to the conclusion that haole is a derogatory term, it is not, and is used by haole raised in Hawai'i to describe themselves. English alternatives (white, Caucasian, and American) are all either too broad or too narrow. White is used for people who do not go to the beach; Caucasian includes local Portuguese and Europeans who differ culturally from the haole group; and American is used to refer to citizenship. The quoted passage is from Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origins and Migrations (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969), p. 285.

3/ Note, for example that the outline given in the Draft Report of the Native Hawaiians Study Commission on language (p. 130) erroneously states that Hawaiian, Tahitian, Samoan, and Maori are dialects of one language called Proto Polynesian. This is equivalent to saying that English, German, Russian, and French are dialects of one language called Proto Indo-European. Although English speakers may recognize related words in European languages, they are not mutually intelligible dialects of the same language. Furthermore, Proto Indo-European, the ancestor of these European languages and many of those of India, ceased to be a unified single language in the far distant past. The same applied to Polynesian languages and Proto Polynesian.