Land Back

Here’s a few sources on the topic:

How America’s Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai’i (the site is weird but the research is legitimate, gives a good overview of the issue and references a lot of sources that are harder to get your hands on read: books)

“Pop” Goes Hawai’i: The Twentieth Century Origins of Tourism in Hawai’i and the Impact of U.S. Pop Culture on Women in the Islands of Aloha (this one is very long but a really good read)

Please do not interfere with nature!

For the last few years we have received quite a few calls from people that scared a hawk or snake away from what it was eating.

These calls always go something like, “I save a ___ from a hawk that was trying to eat it”, which means these people know what they stopped. These people then want us to save what the hawk was trying to eat. We’ve gotten in anything from a turtle with three legs already removed by the hawk, to small song birds to bunnies and the outcome is almost always the same….death, though more slowly and painfully than it would have been had people not interfered.

I want to remind you all, when a hawk captures its prey, it typically crushes it at least to a point. A snake will do the same. This means that the internal injuries are typically such that nobody could possibly save the animal. The most humane thing would have been to leave hawk or snake to its meal and NOT interfere.

Also, hawks are only successful in about 1 in 10 hunts. Meaning you don’t know how long that hawk or that hawk’s babies have been without food and now will go without food even longer.

Hawks have to eat and feed their young as well. It isn’t really fair for a human to decide what a proper meal may be.

We realize this may not be the most pleasant thing for you to watch, so we suggest you turn away. Chasing them away from a meal only does two things; 1. whatever they were trying to eat will now suffer until it dies, when dying would have been much faster had it been left, and 2. it leaves the hawk without a meal, meaning it is going to now go kill something that it wouldn’t have if the person hadn’t interfered.

Please, respect nature and let her do what she is supposed to do!

Hey, its Australia day! Aka the day a bunch of English arrived in Australia and began two centuries worth of genocide and cultural erasure.

How many things do I suffer though because of the greed of European “explorers” and American imperialism.

I leave the ‘āina. I leave my ‘ohana. I leave my heart. And I suffer at a job I hate. And I spent years wearing a fakey costume and smiling for tourists and pretending I felt anything other than empty.

I colonized myself. Made myself palatable for tourists. Made myself palatable for tips and a paycheck. And I ate popcorn for dinner bc that’s what we could afford and I spent my extra money making sure my siblings didn’t feel the crushing weight of poverty. And every extra cent was spent trying to save them from how I felt.

Humiliated. Colonized. A joke.

And now I live on the mainland because we cannot afford to live on sacred land. Because haoles move there for paradise, and they kill us as they buy up beautiful houses and pave the road for resorts. Our land. Our ‘āina. And I’m now a walking attraction. And I can do the hula style smile and I can make my eyes shine like diamonds. And people ask me if I picked coconuts from trees and I think about my elders who live in concrete apartments and I miss my grandfather and his warm smile. And I never know if I will see them again.

I used to stare at the statue of Kamehameha. His arm stretched out in a loving greeting. His other hand holding a spear to defend his people. But he leads with the hand. He leads with aloha.

Because that’s what we do. It is what we are born to do. We are born to aloha. To love. To compassion. Even now, even after everything, all I want to do is be kind.

I need everyone to understand this is how it feels to be Kānaka Maoli in this day and age.

We are hanging on here, but everyday it feels harder. And cultural revitalization has made huge steps, and we have come so far.

But they still pave roads for hotels. And most Kānaka are homeless. And we work so hard but the economy is in shambles. And they bulldoze my people for a telescope. And the Navy poisons the water again and again and again and then dumps it into the ocean.

And we try and we try and we try and we try. And I am so tired.

America has perfectly trapped us in an eternal hell.

Tomorrow marks the annexation of The Hawaiian Kingdom. The turning point.

im really not trying to be mean here but this one tag from a reblog just so colossally missed the point i cant let it go unacknowledged

the whole message of this post is that the clothes are being made regardless of whether anybody is going to be purchasing them. they’re made in sweatshops, shipped to the other side of the globe, put on racks in thousands of stores, and whatever doesn’t sell is dumped in the fucking desert to make room on those racks for the next shipment.

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.