The intoxicating melody played insistently in my mind for days afterwards. All things considered, it wasn’t the most significant piece in kumu hula (master teacher) Vicky Holt Takamine’s teaching repertoire. But the story that accompanied the light-weight, show-business-style song captured my attention as much for what it told about the fate of hula in the long history of cultural resistance in this Pacific extension of the American homeland as for the many things that its all-too-familiar “Hawaiian sound” left unsaid.

As a young woman, there was not a single hotel in Waikiki that did not see Vicky Holt Takamine dance. In the 1950s and ‘60s, she told those of us gathered for a meeting of the Board of Directors of the organization she founded nine years ago to promote the traditional arts of Native Hawaiians, tourism offered native artists more complex negotiating room than it does today.

Some of Hawai‘i’s master hula chanters and musicians, Vicky recalled, doubled as Masters of Ceremonies at many hotel lū’au shows. Hotel entrepreneurs relied on master native teachers to stage the cabaret-like show that attracted visitors. The fraught politics and economics of cultural representation were always present, to be sure, but as Vicky remembers those times, “there was always room for negotiation and self-determination.” There were small victories for Hawaiian native culture to be had inside the treacherous folds of entertainment; for example, when the native Hawaiian language was banned from 1898 to 1980, it was hula that kept the language alive. But then things changed.

Starting in the 1970s, the hotels began expanding; marketing campaigns began appropriating native knowledge for corporate gain and soon thereafter removed tourist industry executives started dictating who should be hired and what should be presented. “Someplace, somewhere, someone began to conceive of coconut bras on pretty models and us (sic), native artists, began to lose control of the products of our labor,” says Vicky without any hint of anger or melancholy in her voice.

It may seem odd to begin a narrative about a visit to the PA’I Foundation with a reference to tourism. The organization has worked hard to situate itself at the forefront of a grassroots movement in the Hawaiian Islands invested in the recovery of the social memory of native artistic practices. And yet, the context of a particularly voracious form of tourism and the assumptions that any association of hula with commercialism conjure up for many people still today largely saturate any possible understanding of this ancient art form.

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