Aloha - What is it is and what it isn't.
An involvement with the sport of outrigger canoeing will ultimately take you beyond the physical to a spiritual view of the world as embraced by the Polynesians. The notion of ʻAlohaʼ is one of these worlds. Visit Hawai`i and youʼre likely to hear it a couple of hundred times a day. It is said that it is more than a word; itʼs a way of life.
Fundamentally, it is an extraordinarily complex notion of what love, life, compassion and understanding alludes to being. Many outrigger canoe clubs incorporate this notion as a part of their constitution. I once heard it described as not being about politeness, repression of instinct, or sensibility, but about bone deep emotion. It grows out of a feeling, not limited by written language, but out of the senses and of primal instinct.
The ancient Hawaiians discovered Hawai`i out of such instinct, which Europeans loosely termed as good-fortune and chance.
Aloha is an emotional prism, spawned from an affinity with the ocean, to an extent that European culture has never quite grasped. While Europeans built stiff-ships to withstand the pounding of the ocean, Polynesians built canoes from organic materials designed to morph and flex with the ocean. They shaped hulls and sails which morphed with the wind, not against. They designed for speed, not necessarily comfort.
Essential ingredients of those early mariners included physical prowess, a sense of play and adventure with nature, elevated instincts and a zest for a life lived on the edge; based on a fundamental philosophical and spiritual notion that it is better to work with nature than against it.
Aloha per se is a sense of spirit which alludes to faith in self, life, the universe and fundamentally an acceptance that nature is bigger than the sum of the whole of humanities collective thoughts and concerns. Just how it relates to outrigger canoe racing is ultimately what you make of it.
In the context of present day Hawai`i, Aloha is endemic, yet fundamentally elusive; a worn out clichéd anachronism for the most part, with little real meaning being that the tourist industry and many locals, have embraced, branded, commercialised and abused the term to the point of non-sense. Competitive sport and the notion of aloha, is a concept diametrically opposed and while some paddlers certainly live and race with the aloha spirit, I have witnessed many who do not.
On July 28th 2018, Hawaiian activist, Kalamaokaaina Niheu received in her in-box a distressing message. It concerned Aloha Poke Co., a Chicago based restaurant chain based specialising in fast-casual versions of poke, a traditional Hawaiian dish made of chunks of seasoned raw fish.
Niheu, a representative in Hawaii in the Pacific Caucus at the United Nations and lives in Honolulu, had had previously heard from Hawaiian business owners who had received cease-and-desist letters from the Chicago company, claiming use of the phrases “Aloha” and “Aloha Poke” infringed on its federal trademark.
To Niheu and other kanaka maoli—native Hawaiians—Aloha Poke Co.’s claim was ludicrous: How could a business, let alone a non-Hawaiian one, claim a right to something as fundamental to Hawaiian culture as the word “aloha”?
The term, which can mean “hello” and “goodbye,” also signifies a spiritual connection between the Hawaiian people and the world around them, Niheu explained. Now it was being used as “a legal, blunt hammer for profit, so that Aloha Poke Co. can compete in a market that was never theirs to begin with,” she said. Several shops had already been forced to rebrand their poke businesses, and front the cost of doing so—redesigning their logos, tossing infringing merchandise and menus, and changing their social-media handles. One restaurant owner in Anchorage, Alaska, changed her business name from Aloha Poke Stop to Lei’s Poke Stop after receiving a cease-and-desist letter. “We just weren’t prepared to do that,” she told Eater. “We were already struggling as a small family business.”
Aloha Poke Co. has owned its federal trademark for two years, but Niheu’s Facebook comments made people suddenly take notice. Her video went viral, and, rallying around the hashtags #NoAlohaPokeCo and #AlohaNotForSale, Niheu organized a petition demanding that the company take both “aloha” and “poke” out of its brand name. Kaniela Ing, a Hawaii state legislator who is running for Congress, posted a video accusing Aloha Poke Co. of failing to embody the Hawaiian value of pono, or righteousness. Some called for a boycott.
In response to the outcry, Aloha Poke Co., on July 30th, posted an apology on its Facebook page, saying that it sought only to protect its trademarks, “a very common practice,” and that it had attempted to do so in a “cooperative manner.” “This really just comes down to business and protecting the Aloha Poke Co. entity,” the company’s founder, Zach Friedlander, wrote.
Hawaiian poke traditionally consists of cubes of fish mixed with sea salt, seaweed, and inamona, a ground component of the kukui nut. In Hawaii, it originated as a snack consumed on fishing trips and has since become a ubiquitous national dish, available pre-seasoned in gas stations and grocery stores with proteins like marlin, cured octopus, and raw beef liver. “Poke is like pizza,” a Honolulu shop owner told the Chicago Sun-Times. “There’s a million poke shops out here.”
Mainland poke chains often trade in stereotypical Hawaiian imagery—hula dancers, surfboards, shaka signs—and tend to use ingredients that have little to do with the traditional Hawaiian preparation: mango, asparagus, pineapple, or, at Aloha Poke Co., yuzu ranch dressing. (“Honestly, the poke is really frightening in other places,” Niheu said in her Facebook video.) In 2017, Business Insider called poke the “next phenomenon in fast-casual food.”
Aloha Poke Co. wrote that it intended merely to “celebrate Hawaiian culture and what makes it so wonderful.” But the brand’s corporate strong-arming has struck many observers as the most blatant kind of cultural appropriation—an effort not to celebrate another tradition but to own it.
For many native Hawaiians, Aloha Poke Co.’s actions also have a bitter resonance with their broader struggles to preserve their cultural autonomy within the United States, which some islanders still see as an occupying force.
Modern-day Hawaii has the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, while resorts exercise de-facto ownership over bigger and bigger tracts of property on the islands. As Niheu pointed out in her petition, Hawaiians, for nearly a century, until 1987, were forbidden from using their native language in schools.
To have a mainland corporation trademark native Hawaiians’ own words, in 2018, feels like more of the same silencing, but with an ironic twist: this time, their language is something to be commodified rather than erased.