Only after Reiki Kahikina Young left her home in Hawaii to attend college in the mainland United States did she begin to realize the depth of her connection to this isolated archipelago. She missed surfing, paddling out among friends she has known since elementary school. She missed warm air caressing her arm as she waved her hand out her car window. She missed soft rains. She missed picking up pho, spam musubi or sushi at the 7-Eleven across from her middle school. Making jokes in dialect.
She missed all the things that make her "local." But she did not miss the divisiveness of the very term "local."
Visitors and other newcomers to the archipelago – malihini, in the Hawaiian language – quickly bump into "local." Discounted prices at restaurants or hotels are advertised as kama’aina rates – for locals, or “children of the land.” Visitors will also overhear or see other snippets of Olelo, the Hawaiian language, or Pidgin used in marketing materials.
But the colloquialism has become less popular as more people realize how problematic it can be.
Since the 1930s, "local" has been used as a shorthand descriptor for certain longtime residents here, among them Asian and Pacific Islanders from working-class family backgrounds who can quickly invoke Hawaii Creole English, or Pidgin. A common language and commitment to community are part of what define "local."
“I see ‘local’ being used less nowadays,” said Candace Fujikane, an activist who has taught English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for more than two decades. “I think in general it’s used now just as a marketing term.”
The idea of "local" is an easy trope, a brochure image of racial harmony. But the local people of Hawaii aren’t a monolithic group of residents to be easily described over police scanners or in mainland American newspapers: “Local man robs bank” or “Area man wins lottery.”
"Local" has its origins in a rape and murder case in the 1930s that saw five working-class men – all Asian or Hawaiian – wrongly accused of rape by a white woman whose husband was a U.S. Navy officer stationed at Pearl Harbor.
Tabloid newspapers, radio broadcasters and those simply gossiping about the trial around the continental United States began using "local" as a shorthand way to refer to the five accused men and non-whites who were not part of the military community here.
“It was a way for people to very quickly and succinctly talk about racial and ethnic tensions at the time,” said John Rosa, a history professor at UH Manoa who has also taught high school in Hawaii.
One of the wrongly accused men, a Hawaiian named Joesph Kahahawai, was murdered after the rape trial ended in a mistrial. The accuser’s husband, a U.S. Navy officer named Thomas Massie, kidnapped and killed him in a rented Manoa bungalow with the help of his mother-in-law and two enlisted U.S. Navy sailors. Although Massie said he shot Kahahawai – which fit with defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s legal strategy – one of the enlisted men later claimed he shot Kahahawai.
The four were caught transporting Kahahawai’s body and found guilty of the murder. They were sentenced to 10 years in jail, but the territorial governor of Hawaii commuted their sentences to an hour served in the governor’s office. Together with Thalia Massie, who accused the five men of rape, they left Hawaii forever in the days after the commutation.
The trial left local Hawaii residents all the more frustrated by such a clear display of racism and visible systems of power and inequality.
“The whole thing brought into the foreground this question of how locals were perceived by the military and how whites receive differential treatment,” Fujikane said. “It signaled for people the differentials in power in Hawaii.”
Local has thus always been an oppositional identity formed to contest white oppression.
Still, casual chats about "local" identity can get warmly nostalgic or kitschy. Local residents of Hawaii grow up with shared experiences both profound and simple – like seeing movies released in the island state long after cousins on the mainland in the 1980s. They may share family histories tied to sugar plantations and trace their family roots back to the same places – like the province of Guangdong in China, from which 70% of Chinese families in Hawaii today originate, said Douglas D. L. Chong, president of the Hawaii Chinese History Center.
In the 1990s, revered Hawaiian nationalist and scholar Haunani Kay-Trask lit a fire of controversy when she repeatedly demanded residents here claim belonging in one of two groups: settlers or indigenous people.
This paradigm upset some Hawaii residents, particularly those descended from Asian ancestors who struggled against white supremacist management practices on sugar plantations here starting in the 19th century. "Local" had been popularly used for decades to convey a diverse array of non-white people who have roots in Hawaii, while Hawaiian, or Kanaka Maoli, is used specifically for those who are Native Hawaiian.
Yet Trask publicly called out the way the term "local" hides the indigenous people of Hawaii, Kanaka Maoli. Bundled in the cloak of "local," Kanaka Maoli disappear. The myth of the nonexistence of indigenous people continues.
The settler moniker can still feel inadequate and uncomfortable for young Hawaiian Studies scholars or Pacific Islander activists supportive of Kanaka sovereignty, those whose genealogies ultimately rest outside Hawaii, yet who know no other home.
A new book by Candace Fujikane, the activist and English professor, proffers two additional identities for Hawaii residents who are not native Hawaiian: settler ally and settler aloha aina. The latter indicates someone without genealogical ties to Hawaii who demonstrates deep commitment to understanding and protecting Hawaiian lands – the aina – and the independence of Hawaiian people.
In “Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaii,” Fujikane connects the importance of Hawaiian sovereignty and the implementation of centuries-old land and cultural practices here to the fight against climate change.
“Being settler aloha aina, we don’t stand just to support native Hawaiians, but we stand for decolonization. We stand against climate change,” she said.
“We stand to protect the land because Kanaka Maoli stewardship of the land that’s been going on for thousands of years,” she said.
The social and political fabric of Hawaii has evolved since the days of white supremacist plantation oligarchies, and with it so should the way people speak about themselves, says political science professor Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua.
“We need to advance our language to be able to account for the complexities of the world today,” she said.
“First is to fundamentally recognize the Kanaka relationship to land as familial and ancestral and to consider – as a settler – where do I fit in to that family?,” Goodyear-Kaʻōpua said. “Have I been invited into that family? How do I contribute to that family?”
That question is one a new generation in Hawaii is grappling with today.
Young, the student who moved to the mainland for college, returned to the islands after three years and earned her bachelor’s degree in Hawaiian Studies. Now she works as an artist among a multiethnic generation of younger Hawaii residents treading their own way through the prickly patch of identity in the islands.
“Local is just another way to separate us,” she said. “Those kinds of labels are just meant to destroy our connection with each other. Whoever breathes her air, whoever drinks her water, whoever bathes in her ocean is part of her. Is Hawaii. We are the breath of Hawaii. If you feel the rain on your skin, that’s her. That’s you. That is her breath giving life to you.”
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