ALEXANDRIA NEASON
‘Iolani Palace; Camp Smith, the headquarters of the United States Indo-Pacific Command; Pu‘uloa, referred to in English as Pearl Harbor; and Hanakēhau Learning Farm, in Waiawa. “We don’t have a website,” Kajihiro said. “There’s no regular schedule. If we do it at all, it has some intentionality of what we’re going to do and why.” I had found him after reading a book that borrows the “DeTours” name, a collection of essays called Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (2019). It aimed to counter a historically colonialist narrative that has shaped Western ideas about Hawai‘i for centuries. But there was a problem: since the book’s publication, Kajihiro had been inundated with requests, many of them from travel writers who now knew of his operation. The sudden interest gave him pause. “It’s this incessant nature of capitalism to always commodify and fetishize everything,” he said. “Even a tour like ours is now seen as something that people want to consume. And now it’s become a thing, this dark tourism.” In a sense, it was nice to hear that readers wanted to explore the inherent power imbalance between tourists and the toured. “But people want to come here, and now that they know that there’s some problematic aspect of tourism in Hawai‘i, they want to come here guilt-free,” Kajihiro went on. “They want permission in some way. And they see our tour as being a way to give them permission.” It made him uneasy. “I don’t know quite what to make of it, or how we deal with it. That’s the crucial problem, that Hawai‘i is seen as something that’s for somebody else. To play, extract pleasure, experiences, memories, from this place. It’s never about how you come and why and what you bring.” His point lingered heavily in the air between us. I spent half my childhood on O‘ahu—I’m an apologetic Army brat—and I have come to view the American presence on the island as a pyramid of destruction. At the base is the United States military, which colonized Hawai‘i with the reckless force of the world’s strongest power. The central block is capitalism: nowhere else is the uniquely hyperactive version more evident than on O‘ahu, home to 980,000 and visited last year by more than 6 million tourists. And at the top of the pyramid is the climate crisis, seen in the form of eroding coasts, furious storms, and endangered plants and animals—the same problems found around the world, in places that are the least responsible for disturbing their environment, places that have been taken over by outsiders. Since moving to New York, I’d followed the impact of climate change on Hawai‘i. Recently, I started collecting articles published in national news outlets that purported to inform readers about the consequences of the crisis there. A story in the Christian Science Monitor, about a University of Hawai‘i report that warned of climate change’s effects on the hospitality industry, ran with the headline “How climate change could ruin your Hawaii vacation.” Another article about the same study, which was paid for by the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority, ran in HuffPost under the headline “Climate Change Will Ruin Hawaii”; it made only passing mention of local residents. Last year, the San Francisco Chronicle published a slideshow: “Stunning vacation spots climate change may destroy.” A CNN report highlighted Hawai‘i lawmakers’ attempt to codify climate change resistance into law, but framed it as a response to the threat of lost tourism revenue in
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“Hawai‘i is seen as something that’s for somebody else. To play, extract pleasure, memories, from this place. It’s never about how you come and why and what you bring.”