by J L Petriesan

Created on: December 23, 2008

Kill Haole Day: the last day of school before summer break in Hawai'i. Not a pleasant day to be a Haole in Hawai'i. Actually, most days as a Haole in the Island State of America were not good to me.

Haole? The only real slur for white people.

The literal meaning is "those who do not breathe", but can also refer to the dead. Both either in the physical sense or in a strange spiritual sense, and sometimes mixed together to refer to a god. So how does this become a slur? As many things in Hawai'i are, this is traced to Captain Cook.

The skin of the English was as white as the huge squares of bleached cloth tied to the masts of their ship. This was considered to be more proof that they were spirits, because only men who do not breathe could possibly be so pale. And so they were called "Haole."

Captain Cook had a little Captain Kirk in him, methinks. In the year 1778, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, er Cook, of the ship HMS Resolution, and his band of merry Englishmen came ashore at Kealakekua Bay on The Big Island of Hawai'i. And while there is no proof that this landing was planned as to timing and location, he was arriving at a sacred place whose name in Hawaiian meant "where-the-god-comes-and-goes", and that he was doing this in the middle of the annual festival to Lono-i-ka-makahiki, supreme head of the pantheon of Hawaiian gods. Lono himself had supposedly left the area a long time prior, but with a promise to return one day, on a floating island. Like the ship Cook sailed in on.

It gets more Kirk-like: Despite Cook forbidding it under severe punishment, many of his crew slipped ashore, and infected local wahines (females) with venereal disease they had picked up the year before from a Tahitian-French connection. The Hawaiians had no cure for this new sickness, and thousands eventually died horribly, decimating the native population. Thus, the Hawaiian Islands were totally and irrevocably changed, by the coming of the dead ones.

Here's another sense of the meaning of HAOLE. In the past, it was a broader label stuck on everyone who was not kanaka maoli, a true-person-from-here.

The problem was not just the venereal diseases that ravaged the islanders. As white people are wont to do almost everywhere they go, they begin to "civilize" the savages. And Hawai'i was no exception. The white people took over everything on the island and are said, by the kanaka maoli, to have essentially destroyed everything in their path.

The Eagles sang about the same thing in relation to California

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