From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
The Descendants, with George Clooney as a Hawaiian land dynasty’s 1/32nd-Polynesian scion, has fans asking where writer-director Alexander Payne has been since 2004’s Sideways, which dispatched Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church on one last trip to the Santa Ynez wine country. ... In Payne’s new dramedy The Descendants, Clooney plays Matt King, the great-great-great-grandson of a 19th-century Hawaiian princess who, rather than marry her brother in the incestuous royal Hawaiian way, eloped with a Yankee businessman. Her numerous, largely blue-eyed progeny hold in trust 40 undeveloped square miles of lovely Kauai.
The Descendants had me wondering: Where has Hawaii been since the 1960s? It’s hard to explain to somebody who wasn’t a kid back then just how large the Fiftieth State loomed. For instance, 1966’s top-grossing movie was an adaptation of James Michener’s Hawaii, with Julie Andrews as a New England Congregationalist missionary disembarking in 1820s Honolulu. ...
Famously, the Protestant preachers came to Hawaii to do good but wound up doing well. They married into the native nobility, then formed an endogamous ruling caste that still controls much of Hawaii’s acreage.
Read the whole thing there.
Hawaii's social structure is one of the more interesting in America, as Payne noted in an interview. In particular, it's interesting that the ancestry of the old landed gentry tend to be roughly 1/32nd Native Hawaiian aristocrat, 30/32nd Yankee WASP, and 1/32nd miscellaneous. I hadn't realized that Punahou prep school's earliest generations of elites tended to be WASP-Polynesian hybrids. For some reason, that never came up in Dreams from My Father.
Something similar happened in California under Spanish and Mexican rule. Yankee sailors would jump ship in Santa Barbara and Monterey, start businesses, then marry the daughters of Californio landowners. Rich Californios, however, liked to claim to be pure Castilian, which is different from Hawaii.
Similarly, lots of Southern whites claim to be descended from Princess Pocohontas.
Speaking of part-Hawaiian WASP landowners in a Hawaii, the biggest private holding, Parker Ranch on the Big Island, was left to six year old Richard Smart by his 3/4th Hawaiian great-grandfather who had been the last foreign minister of the Queen of Hawaii. He must have been a charming lad to have gotten his great-grandfather to cut most of his uncles and aunts out of the will. Dick Smart grew up to be a charming man, starring in Broadway musicals with Carol Channing and Nanette Fabray. But the gay toast of the great white way was an excellent ranch manager back home in Hawaii, too. He leased his worst agricultural land to Laurance Rockefeller for the landmark Mauna Kea resort on the volcanic Kona Coast.
There are a lot of strange stories like this from Hawaiian history. The Descendants opens a window into this world, but stays a little bland.
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50 comments:
Who is Hawaiian, What Begets Federal Recognition, and How Much Blood Matters
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1758956
Good read on Hawaii's current socio-political climate here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1758956
I am Lugash.
One of the smaller Hawaiian islands has been a white family for the past 140 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau
I am Lugash.
Lugash got there ahead of my, but I'll say the link is worth investigating, as is this documentary
Does the appearance of the name "Payne", in conjunction with a discussion of the state of Hawaii, not send a shiver down your spine?
As in Madeline Lee PAYNE Dunham?!?
Does the appearance of the name "Payne", in conjunction with a discussion of the state of Hawaii, not send a shiver down your spine?
As in Madeline Lee PAYNE Dunham?!?
Except this Payne is not a WASP. His family changed their name to appear WASPy.
You can buy shares in Alexander and Baldwin (ALEX) which owns a lot of Maui.
Maybe Hawaii stopped looming large in the cultural imagination when the Japanese tourist hordes took it over. Hawaii just doesn't appeal to SWPLs - neither exotic enough like Fiji or Nepal, nor sophisticated enough like Tuscany or Provence. It's a perfect beautiful middle class tourist destination, like a permanently moored cruise ship. And SWPLs hate cruises (and golf).
Reminds me of the Australian joke, "Every Kiwi (New Zealander) says his grandfather played for the All Blacks (the national rugby team) and his grandmother was a Maori princess".
From the SSRN abstract: another important question – and one Justice Breyer raised in Rice v. Cayetano – is how much blood is necessary to distinguish ideological self-identification from legitimate racial identity.
But if race does not exist, Justice Breyer, there there is no such thing as a "legitimate racial identity", there is only "ideological self-identification" at best.
These poor liberals and liberal judges are absolutely schizophrenic on this question. Is race real or isn't it real?
For Breyer, the issue is the "race" of Hawaiians and not (oddly enough) current Hawaiians' identity as descendants of the original owners of the land.
By logical extension to the mainland, who is a true "racial" American, and not just an "ideological" American? The first immigrants from Asia some 15,000 years ago? The second wave of immigrants 400 years ago from England who actualy built the culture and law?
I imagine part of Payne's disappearance stems from his divorce.
"Similarly, lots of Southern whites claim to be descended from Princess Pocohontas."
Do you have a citation for that assertion, Steve? I lived in the South the majority of my life and, while a good deal of the lower classes like to claim a bit of Cherokee or Choctaw blood - most WASP's and upper class folks (of six or seven generations) like to lay claim to General Lee or Mr. Davis.
If you're really connected, your descended from both sides of the Lee-Custis (and thus Washington) lines!
We were in Hawaii a few weeks ago and took a helicopter tour of Kauai. We got a good view of the Robinson family's mountaintop hideaway as well as Niihau in the distance. The Robinsons own a big chunk of Kauai as well as all of Niihau, where the Hawaiian language is still spoken. It's really kind of a time warp. The links above are well worth reading.
Was magnum p.i. really so long ago?
Was magnum p.i. really so long ago?
Magnum (1980-1988) was just the last small wave of the corpus of Hawaii-mania that permeated American popular culture in the 60s and 70s. In addition to Michener, there was the Jack Lord Hawaii Five-O, which ran from 1968 to 1980--an eternity in TV terms for a police procedural (Magnum was launched partly to make use of remaindered sets built in Oahu for Five-O). Plus practically every series had Very Special Episodes where the gang took a trip to Hawaii--think The Brady Bunch and that cursed tiki story, but lots of other series from "Charlie's Angels" to "Sanford & Son" trotted to the islands. Even "Gilligan's Island" can be seen as sort of a Hawaiian story.
Plus mini-series like the 1979 re-make of "From Here To Eternity", a 1978 rip-off of the same ("Pearl"), and movies like "Blue Hawaii" (1962), "Diamond Head" (1963) and "Tora Tora Tora" (1970). Hawaii just loomed larger for people.
Plus Steve's point about multi-racialism is true. People forget that the considerable opposition to HI statehood from 1945 to 1959 came from segregationist Southern senators and congressmen who were aghast at what statehood might be construed as endorsing. I think a lot of the Hollywood/Madison Avenue promotion of Hawaii in the 1960s was a not-so-veiled attempt to say "see, Wallace, Maddox and the rest of you crackers...we were right--it works in Hawaii and it'll work in Dixie too!"
Almost everybody that I have met from the South, black and white, has said that they are of Cherokee ancestry.
W Baker, here is anecdotal corroboration. In Tennessee, it is de rigeur for every cute-ish SWPL girl to profess feather Indian descent. Only the men who do this (and they are relatively rare) are found in the lesser classes nowadays. By mentioning "Princess Pocohontas" Steve was probably indulging in hyperbole as a joke.
I got beat to this by Peter A, but it's Japanese vacationers that killed Hawaii as a dream vacation for middle America. The sometimes lopsided exchange rate made Hawaii simultaneously cheap for the Japanese AND expensive for Americans as the Japanese bid up the cost of rooms, meals and shopping.
My thoroughly middle-class, conventionally-liberal parents have traveled all over the world (mom was a travel agent). They first went to Hawaii in 1972 for a "dream vacation" (a time of comparatively expensive air travel), when they were just 29. They went back a few times, but each time got more expensive and more Japanese until they no longer saw the appeal.
Doesn't Chuck Norris claim to be half-Cherokee? To me he looks less Indian then Jessica Alba (who DNA tests showed was only 1/8th Indian).
"These poor liberals and liberal judges are absolutely schizophrenic on this question. Is race real or isn't it real?"
It's not schizophrenia, it's rank hypocrisy. Race is real when it suits their agenda and not real when it doesn't.
Hawaii just doesn't appeal to SWPLs
The last thing that I can think of which would even approximate a SWPL infatuation with Hawaii would be 1987's Black Widow.
Magnum (1980-1988) was just the last small wave of the corpus of Hawaii-mania
Right - Black Widow was another part of that bookend.
I think a lot of the Hollywood/Madison Avenue promotion of Hawaii in the 1960s was a not-so-veiled attempt to say "see, Wallace, Maddox and the rest of you crackers...we were right--it works in Hawaii and it'll work in Dixie too!"
From the Black Widow credits:
Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Ronald Bass
Producer: Laurence Mark
Etc etc etc
So yeah, that would pretty much conform to your theory.
Being Hawaiʻi'ian helped Barack because mainlanders never think about them but when they do, it's positive (appeal of Alaska is much less generic, by contrast). He'd be a failure as an island-machine politico like Hiram Fong, Patsy Mink, Inouye, because HI has never been more than a few percent black and many of those being military. I doubt whether local whites would be so enamored of a biracial wannabe Huey Newton.
David: Actually, authentic (or at least claimed) descendants of Pocahontas have always been present among the Virginia elite , from John Randolph to Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. They were specifically exempted from the otherwise one-drop-based law against interracial marriage that Virginia passed in the 1920s.
OK, if the blue eyed Hawaiians are actually part Hawaiian then why wouldn't it also be possible that lower class whites, not too interested in pedigrees historically, might also be most all carrying a bit of native american DNA?
Why on earth wouldn't we want to claim our lineage from Europe (as well) if we could trace it very far?
Otherwise, you're suggesting that we've somehow managed to remain racially pure after all these centuries.
BTW, I've never understood the fascination with Hawaii. I like Native American stuff predating this urge to create a New Age religion promoting world peace and brotherly love but Hawaiian, not so much. Feather wearing Indians seem to embody resourcefulness, resilience, independence and a rather egalitarian sociopolitical structure. Hawaiians seem more hierarchical, more dependent, more prone to pathological self-indulgence (historically) with a society more rife with corruption.
I'm also pretty sure that we'd be better off giving Hawaii it's independence along with:
California
Puerto Rico
Mexico
the Dominican Republic. Virgin Isles
Oregon
Washington State
Africa
i tried to watch a few episodes of hawaii 5-0 to see how often i would be seeing grace park, and the answer was, not nearly enough. the grace park factor was way, way too low to bother watching that show.
i'll stick to battlestar galactica DVDs.
@ W. Baker - re "Similarly, lots of Southern whites claim to be descended from Princess Pocohontas."
Such "claims" are in many cases well documented. Descent from Pocahontas is largely a Virginian phenomenon, and not so general across the South. The Virginia statesman John Randolph of Roanoke was a descendant of Pocahontas, and the Randolphs were very prominent, on the same social level as the Custis and Lee families.
The "Red" Bollings are so called because of their descent from Pocahontas. Mary Jefferson, sister of Thomas, married John Bolling (III), a great-great-great-grandson of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Edith Bolling, great-great-granddaughter of this John Bolling, married Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States. A Bolling is currently lieutenant governor of Virginia, but I am not sure whether he is of this line. Not all Bollings are.
Whee does Dogg the Bounty Hunter fit in them?
I've noticed that in general East Coasters and Midwesterners prefer the Gulf (Florida, Gulf Coast and Carribean) while West Coasters prefer Hawaii and not just for geographic/cost considerations.
It's strange to meet Easterners who dislike a place like Hawaii. Yet, it's taken me years to partially overcome my bias against Florida and the Caribean.
"Do you have a citation for that assertion, Steve? I lived in the South the majority of my life and, while a good deal of the lower classes like to claim a bit of Cherokee or Choctaw blood - most WASP's and upper class folks (of six or seven generations) like to lay claim to General Lee or Mr. Davis."
I've never heard of rich people around here claiming descent to Lee or Davis. If they did they would probably be legit descendants, considering there probably aren't a whole lot- since both men were in their prime only 150 or so years ago. It would be pretty hard to prove in comparison to a random Indian ancestor. People of all backgrounds claim the Indian blood, regardless if they actually have it or not. My guess is most don't.
And is six or seven generations supposed to indicate upper class old south ancestry? I mean, some of my ancestors have been over here six generations now, they came over from Ireland during the 1850s. On the other hand some southern families have been in the Virginia Tidewater area since Jamestown or shortly thereafter. That's at least ten or eleven generations, not 6/7.
I was there in 1972, when I was 22, and I thought it was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. Maui in those days truly resembled paradise.
But it is too long a plane trip when you lose the supple slimness of youth and you live on the mainland (especially the East Coast).
The Japanese are small. They fit better into modern airline seats. Chinese too.
Reply to Big Bill:
I don't know the answer to your last question, but why exacerbate the problem by creating a third group of people coming here today.
Jumped ship and married the daughters of rich Hispanic Californians? Today Mexicans are marrying the daughters of white ranchers and small business men in Arizona.
Anecdotal, but I have seen it happen.
Pocahontas's descendants are not of the same ilk as Cherokee and Choctaw descendants on the frontier. She's the ancestress of many Virginia bluebloods, and of two First Ladies, Mrs Wilson and Mrs Reagan.
"Something similar happened in California under Spanish and Mexican rule. Yankee sailors would jump ship in Santa Barbara and Monterey, start businesses, then marry the daughters of Californio landowners. Rich Californios, however, liked to claim to be pure Castilian, which is different from Hawaii."
This is an interesting comment. In Florida, the Cuban-Americans, who are mostly of more or less pure Castilian ancestry, often marry Anglos, but seldom marry brown Latinos because they consider them to be beneath them. I used to work for a company that manufactured Zinc and Copper alloys for industry, and one of our customers was a rich Cuban-American who bought large quantities for his business of home appliances. Anyways, his son was milky white and had green eyes, as the father. His girlfriend from college was a blonde Anglo girl. If I didn't know that both his parents were Cuban-Americans and if it weren't for the fact that he spoke perfect Spanish without an accent, I would have mistaken him for a white boy from Kansas or so. The fact that they often marry Anglos but not brown Latinos goes to show that ethnicity seems to be more important than language or culture.
"Anonymous said...
Plus mini-series like the 1979 re-make of "From Here To Eternity", a 1978 rip-off of the same ("Pearl"), and movies like "Blue Hawaii" (1962), "Diamond Head" (1963) and "Tora Tora Tora" (1970). Hawaii just loomed larger for people."
Also, in the 70s, it seemed like the grand prize in every game-show and sweepstakes was an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii. It was seen as an almost magical place. Hawaii did indeed loom large on the american scene. That's all just a distant memory now.
I got told we had a Maori princess in our ancestry, and I am an Australian cf. FelixM. Just family mythmaking.
I assume this [...] princess meme is an attempt at exoticism with the princess tagged on to make it more socially acceptable.
BTW, Steve, if you are interested in island communities with WASPs intermingling with the natives, check out the Cocos Islands off Australia some time. I ran into a nurse, a Mrs Clunies-Ross, recently, who married into the family that used to rule the Cocos Islands as a private fiefdom.
It's a bit of a simplification, Steve. Yes, there are some of the old landed gentry who have Hawaiian roots, but for the most part, these aren't descended from the missionary caste who developed into the premiere economic powers in Kingdom and later the Territory of Hawaii. The missionary families wouldn't even let their children marry non New England descended whites until the 1880s. Most of the mixed "landholders" did not live in Honolulu or send their children to Punahou. They sent them to board at Kamehameha Schools (with some exceptions). The Christianized and mercantile Asians sent their kids to Iolani School, the better off working class Asians and poorer whites and Portuguese sent their to the Catholic schools and most of the rest went to trades or later the public schools.
Most of the Hawaiian chiefly caste went extinct, long ago. Bernice Pauahi Bishop had no children and was the last of the Kamehameha line, this the Bishop Estate trustees who managed the properties were men from missionary families who were social associates of Charles Bishop. If memory serves, there wasn't a part-Hawaiian on the board until well into the 20th century. The Kalakaua line also died out, leaving only the Kawanakoa branch family, which are pretty much the only ones to marry into the old missionary families (in this case, the Campbells and the Damons, but this wasn't until the 20th century when the Hawaiians and white elite made alliances to keep the Japanese from gaining too much political and economic power). The other "white" royal branch are the Wilcoxes (descended from the deposed kings of Kaua'i), but they're not properly missionary, nor particularly landed. The rest of the royal claimants stand on much shakier ground. In other words it was the remnants of the nobility marrying into the rich land owning whites since there wasn't any nobility around to marry anymore.
As for the Parkers, that's a very long story there, suffice to say there are white Parkers and there are Hawaiian Parkers. Neither of them are from that old missionary stock.
Since the 1940s the missionary families started being a lot less strict about their marriage requirements, so they started allowing more marriage with part-Hawaiian landed families, and that's where most of the current "mixed" descendants comes about. Before then they didn't cross over much. It why they have bunches of Punahou grad toenail Hawaiians writing sob story novels about their part-Hawaiian grandma now, and not 60 or 100 years ago.
I'd really like to write more on Hawaii from this perspective, but I'm a musician and I really don't want my interest in this stuff to ever get out widely.
All NZ’ers who claim a teaspoon of Maori blood have princesses for ancestors. I have never heard one say that they are descended from a Maori slave.
It makes sense though that high chiefs would have had more wives and thus more daughters to form political and trading alliances.
My second cousin has two Scots/Shetland grandfathers and two Maori (princess) grandmothers.
He jokes that one half of him wants to get drunk and the other half doesn’t want to pay for it!
Hawaii is now filled up with Wal-Marts, K-marts, Home Depots, Costcos, Targets, every imaginable chain restaurant, malls that have exactly the same shops as everywhere else in the country, endless suburban sprawl and development and terrible traffic jams.
Spike:
Thanks. Most informative.
All NZ’ers who claim a teaspoon of Maori blood have princesses for ancestors. I have never heard one say that they are descended from a Maori slave.
I thought that New Zealand has a one-drop rule for Maori ancestry.
Peter
I'd really like to write more on Hawaii from this perspective, but I'm a musician and I really don't want my interest in this stuff to ever get out widely.
Dude - in the stories you just described, you've outlined multiple albums' worth of song lyrics.
I imagine those histories have all sorts of Romeo-N-Juliet-ish heartbreak and Macbeth-ish bloodlust; they'd be perfect for sorrowful/wistful/melancholy folk music.
"Whee does Dogg the Bounty Hunter fit in them?"
LOL. Whenever I see Dogg and his lovely wife, I think straight off the boat, the Hengist and Horsa boat.
Lugash, thanks for the link.
"As under his predecessors, Robinson has kept Niʻihau largely closed to outside visitors, though a few hunters and other tourists are admitted each year—though with limited or no contact with the islanders. Robinson continues to ban radios, televisions and mobile phones on the island, in an effort to preserve as much of the indigenous island culture as possible."
Wow. A swipple king. Not literally, but in in most other ways. About 130 native Hawaiian subjects. But why this:
"In 2004 President George W. Bush received all but one of the 40 votes cast on the island. The remaining vote was cast for Green Party nominee David Cobb."
"In 2008, Niʻihau's precinct was one of only 3 of Hawaiʻi's 538 precincts to vote for John McCain over Barack Obama. McCain received 35 votes, Obama received 4, and Cynthia McKinney received 1."
Why are Native Hawaiians voting for the GOP? Could Robinson be a Republican? This is so weird.
"Niʻihau has approximately 130 permanent inhabitants,[6] nearly all of whom are Native Hawaiians who live in the island's main settlement of Puʻuwai. Some support themselves largely by subsistence fishing and farming, others depend on welfare,[24] and generally lead a rural, low-tech life. All residents live rent-free, and meat is free.[6] Niʻihau has no telephone service and no automobiles. Horses are the main form of transportation; bicycles are also used. There are no power lines; solar power provides all electricity. Water comes from rainwater catchment. The Robinson family established most of these conditions. "
OK, this Robinson fellow isn't a SWPL. He called himself a Christian fundamentalist in the documentary and he destroys others' marijuana plants. What a fascinating man. He has a weird accent. The outs and abouts are kind of Canadian.
Spike Gomes, very interesting. I am a haole who went to Iolani, and I never heard it described as the school for Christianized, mercantile Asians. I always thought that it was more of the well-off working class Asians and/or those that whose parents were teachers/government bureaucrat types. A good number of the kids were kind of rough around the edges, lots of pidgin, etc.
You should write more, but your fears are probably well-founded. I would be interested in your opinion of how the state has changed racially and politically over the past 25 years - my sense is that it's more haole and less local/Asian than it was due to migration patterns with the mainland (I've been away for a long time, so don't have much firsthand knowledge).
Also, the sovereignty movement seemed to be big 10-20 years ago - what is the status of that now?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729685-3,00.html
"At the time, 19% of white women in Hawaii married Chinese men . . ."
WGWAG!
"I thought that New Zealand has a one-drop rule for Maori ancestry."
Yes pretty much.
I was being facetious about 'white' NZ'ers who claim some Maori DNA...it's getting harder to tell and with ever more generous treaty settlement payouts, some tribes have gotten very large.
First Anonymous:
Pretty much, but this state is a small town. Too much stuff resembling living people or their descendants could get me in hot water. I have written a song about Myles Fukunaga, a sorta Japanese Raskolnikov figure from Hawaiian history.
Moreover what I meant is I'd like to write HBD stuff about the state from an insider's perspective. Yes, this place is both post-racial and incredibly racist, sometimes in the same breath. In fact, some of the post-racial stuff comes from the strong tradition of ethnic humor that was alive here until fairly recently. Frex, Frank DeLima and Rap Replinger or this song here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS2YLvGGtwY
Now since this sort of stuff is becoming outre, race tensions are rising. I'd like to think it's not coincidental.
Second Anonymous:
The Niihau Hawaiians stay on Niihau because they want to be there and live that lifestyle. The majority of the youth born and raised there actually leave for life in the main islands. For example, the most famous modern Hawaiian musician, Israel Kamakawio'ole (you know that cover of somewhere over the rainbow, right?) had one of his parents from there. They have a fairly high birthrate, so the community replenishes itself. They're also extremely conservative hyper-Calvinists, hence the Republican vote.
Third Anonymous:
The situation I'm describing is pre-1960s. It's broken down a lot since then. Iolani is just another prep school for kids with parents who can afford it nowadays. Heck, nowadays they're even breaking down the system at Kamehameha via the court system (a school of which I got booted from for behavioral problems and grades, I got a bit too much of the bad share of the Hawaiian blood in me).
As for your intuition about this state changing, it is, for the worse. SWPLs from the mainland are really fucking this place up. The old-school kama'aina haoles basically bought into the system, and the military just wanted off this rock as soon as they could get it (with some exceptions that I could write whole pages about, starting with why blacks here do so well). The professional educated white folks who started coming in with the 60s wanted to dismantle what they felt was "The old-boy network". But you see, the only way we had some measure of racial harmony here was through a very complicated unspoken kabuki dance of push and pull and give and take from the political and economic level to the individual level that had developed over decades worth of change and tumult. Smashing that in the name of multiculturalism and floating all boats means we're back to where we started 100 years ago, if not worse.
As for the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, it's still around and still as fragmented and ineffectual as ever. It'll never go away, but it'll never really accomplish anything either. Still, I'm passively affiliated with it, mostly for sentimental reasons as a Hawaiian. I'm not one of those rabid anti-colonialist types who blame the white man for all that ails Hawaii. If I was, you think I'd be posting amiably here?
Famously, the Protestant preachers came to Hawaii to do good but wound up doing well. They married into the native nobility, then formed an endogamous ruling caste that still controls much of Hawaii’s acreage... Hawaii's social structure is one of the more interesting in America, as Payne noted in an interview. In particular, it's interesting that the ancestry of the old landed gentry tend to be roughly 1/32nd Native Hawaiian aristocrat, 30/32nd Yankee WASP, and 1/32nd miscellaneous.
Don't look now, but THE SCOTS-IRISH ARE COMING!!!.
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