The Hawaiian Renaissance and Hawaiian Surfers
The Hawaiian Renaissance and Hawaiian Surfers
Several Hawaiian historians have marked the 1970s as the beginning of a Hawaiian renaissance. However, many of the Hawaiian strategies of protests in the 1970s were born out of a 1960s environmental group called Save Our Surf (SOS). Organized by a Marxist-trained local-haole surfer named John Kelly and run by young local surfers, SOS was a grassroots movement that halted most coastal development and dredging projects proposed in Hawaii between 1960 and 1990. This chapter first expounds on the influence of SOS on the formation of a Hawaiian renaissance. It then analyzes two other prominent groups formed in the mid-1970s: the Polynesian Voyaging Society, which built a Hawaiian double-hulled voyaging canoe called Hōkūle'a; and the Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana, which protested the U.S. military bombings on the island of Kaho'olawe. The chapter not only examines how Hawaiian surfers contributed to, and were shaped by, the Hawaiian renaissance, but also analyzes connections between ka po'ina nalu (the surf zone) and Hawaiian resistance in the 1960s and 1970s.
Keywords: Hawaiian surfers, surf zone, Hawaiian resistance, renaissance activism, Save Our Surf, grassroots movements, Polynesian Voyaging Society
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