This week’s SXSW Sydney event saw Hawai’i Tourism Oceania host a session around Indigenous Tourism. Karryon attended to learn more.
As ‘USA House’, based in Sydney venue Pumphouse, Hawai’i Tourism Oceania held a panel discussion during SXSW Sydney, moderated by Jacqui Walshe, Executive Chairman, The Walshe Group. Joining the panel was Micah Kamohoali‘i, kumu hula (hula teacher), traditional kapa (bark cloth) artist and fashion designer; and Matt Ammunson-Fyall, Director of Regions, Māori Tourism.
It follows the launch of Hawai’i Tourism Oceania’s new video series titled Mālama Adventures: Journey with Aloha, designed to encourage visitors to have a deeper and more diverse experience in Hawai’i.
The Panel was followed by a pau hana event with Hawaiian-inspired food, drinks and musical performances.
Walshe paid her respects to the traditional owners of the lands on which we were gathered, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. The panel was also due to include Aunty Margret Campbell, Managing Director, Dreamtime Southern X, however Campbell was unable to be with the group.
SXSW Hawai’i Tourism event
“This weekend’s referendum has obviously been a really devastating result for our First Nations people. So, unfortunately Aunty Magret who was going to be on the panel and do the Welcome to Country has had to take time out for silence and to reflect on the result and its implications for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
The event brought together the Hawaiian Islands and Aotearoa New Zealand, meeting in Australia — “three nations with extraordinarily rich indigenous cultures and traditions,” said Walshe.
Aloha from Hawai’i
The lively Micah Kamohoali‘i encouraged a warm ‘Aloha’ from the group of gathered trade and media.
“Aloha of course means love, hello, goodbye and all the things that you think it is. Our language has so many multiple meanings for one word, but really aloha is this action of exchanging breath with someone. If you break down the word aloha, the beginning of the word ‘alo’ means space, and ‘ha’ means breath,” said Kamohoali‘i
“So if you see native people greet each other, we press our faces on their face, or our nose on theirs or our forehead on theirs. And we have this moment where we exchange breath from one to another. And what it signifies is that I give my lifeforce to you and you give yours to me,” he said.
Kamohoali‘i, who comes from Hawai’i Island, admitted he was initially against tourism.
Matt Ammunson Fyall and Micah Kamohoali‘i at the SXSW Sydney Hawaii Tourism event
“I think there was a time in Hawai’i ….when maybe the authorities that were running tourism were selling a facade. When people were coming to Hawai’i, they were very disappointed that they didn’t get the wacky lūʻau show or the pig on the spit with the limbo at the beach. I thought it’s because that’s what our tourism authority is feeding them — and so I was against tourism for a long time.”
“I come from a very native Hawaiian family. I come from a long genealogy of kumu hula, and that means, hula masters. My grandmother was a hula master….and she danced for King David Kalākaua, the last king that we had. I feel like we became sort of old- school knowledge keepers and that we’re fighting for authenticity…. being as true as we can to our culture.”
Dismayed further with tourism after working at a local hotel, he was surprised about 15 years ago to be invited to talk at a large Hawai’i Tourism Authority Conference.
“I had no idea what that was…. but they asked. They said, ‘oh, we need to bring in some real Hawaiian practitioners’. And I thought ‘ooh, be careful what you ask for!’”
Hilo, Hawaii Island
“I think they thought I was going to praise them. But instead, I went the opposite way. They were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s slamming us on stage!’ I tried to do it, you know, nicely, but when we were done, andI told them if you’re going to send people from Hawai’i or if you’re going to represent Hawai’i in the world, wouldn’t it be smarter if you just send the Hawaiians to do it?
“Why would you hire somebody from Illinois with red hair and send her to New York to dance Hula when people know that we don’t look that way? Why would you send people to tell our story that they have to rehearse, when it would be better if you just sent us? This is our life, this is our story….so why wouldn’t you just send us to go tell our stories?”
He felt that the shift would work to help hook “more responsible tourists”.
“You want tourists to come that want to hear our story and be respectful. I think the way you bait the hook determines what type of fish you catch — and so maybe we have to use better bait,” he said.
This is our life, this is our story….so why wouldn’t you just send us to go tell our stories?”
Not surprisingly, he was tapped on the shoulder by the tourism board, but he was working at the time at a Hawaiian University as a professor of archaeology. However, he was soon convinced and agreed to be the “guinea pig”
He was “sent to the wolves in New York” where he was given a station from which to talk about his fabrics and his work as an Hawaiian fashion designer.
“I felt like in the middle of the room, I needed to just break out into a story. So I asked for the mic. I started chanting very dramatically and I started moving and people stopped… and then I broke into a story, the way my grandmother would tell us a story.”
The panel at USA House at SXSW Sydney
“It was just so fascinating for people in New York, they’d never seen that and I told them, ‘this is Hawai’i — what you’re feeling is Hawai’i. That kind of exciting energy is what you feel when you come to Hawaii. That’s what you feel when you meet Hawaiian people,”
“My point was that if you come respectfully, that we welcome you into our own homes and we feed you. We welcome, we give lei, we tell people with our lei that there’s love and aloha in this day, and it’s in a circle and it goes around and around and they give it to you with all of the love that we have.”
“It’s not just a tourist destination. It’s a kuleana, it’s a responsibility now. So when you come to visit our shores, you understand when we say mālama, which means to take care of you, and kuleana our responsibility….. that we weren’t created just for a show, that we were put here to take care of this piece of Earth. We believe that the land is our family, and that we welcome you to be a part of it, and respect it, and be a part of that story, of our landscape.”
Micah Kamohoali‘i extended this philosophy into the world of fashion, becoming the first native Hawaiian designer to have a show at New York Fashion Week — which led to shows in London, Paris and Milan too.
“It was never my dream to be in a fashion show or to go that far in fashion. My dream was to just get my people to wear our own stories. I took native Hawaiians, 40 of us, and we travelled to New York Fashion Week. I said, ‘we’re telling the story of our culture and of humanity, and the love we have for the world, really. And so it doesn’t come in a size zero — it comes in whatever size you are.’”
“I said ‘we’re different, we’re Hawaiians. I’m gonna take us the way we are: short, fat, tall, wide, skinny, whatever…. and we’re going to smile. Nobody smiles on the runway in New York, they give you fierce and the flying hair! I told everybody, ‘use your teeth while you’ve still got them’! We’re not from New York, so we’re not going to ‘be’ New York. We’re from Hawai’i. Give them Hawai’i’. And so we did it.”
Kia ora from Maori Tourism
Māori Tourism is set up as a separate organisation to Tourism New Zealand. It’s a membership advocacy body and industry association whose role it is to represent in the non-marketing space.
Matt Ammunson-Fyall, Director of Regions, Māori Tourism, has observed similarities to what Micah Kamohoali‘i described.
“What the world saw about Māori culture almost never shifted from those early days,” said Ammunson-Fyall.
Rotorua, New Zealand
“What we hear in places like Rotorua and Queenstown is we’ve got some over-tourism. This is common across the world and it’s not a bad thing — you need visitors to come in and experience culture … it helps share messages. But we need to make sure that it’s done in a way that suits us and respects our communities that we serve,” said Ammunson-Fyall.
“So the work for us at the moment is to make sure as the tourism trade, that the journalists are sharing what New Zealand is about, or actually the wider Polynesia, and that we’re so much more than just a cultural dance show. Come and talk with us, meet us, hear our whakapapa, our stories.”
“We’ve always wondered, if the consumer wants this, then this is what we’re going to deliver. We’re quite keen to flip the script — going back to the idea of how do we support our people to achieve their aspirations? Does it mean we should be asking, and we are starting to ask the question, how will visitors benefit our community?”
“One of the questions that we get is what are some of the barriers or some of the challenges to engage with Indigenous cultures. For tourism and trade that we have in the audience, what it shows there is that you need to go out and engage.
“One part of it is for those businesses themselves to be their authentic selves. We do know from consumer through to supplier, there are about four or five steps in between. We need to make sure that if we’re being authentic on this side, we’re also being authentic on that side — and that’s going to take time,” concluded Ammunson-Fyall.
