Marxist histories of surfing are few and far between. This may be the first, although it’s much more than that – an historical overview of early United States imperialism as a backdrop to contemporary opposition to corporate colonisation of the islands. The US’s annexation of Hawaii in 1893 was every bit as illegal as the invasion of Iraq. It started as a private seizure before its takeover by the state. A cabal of white colonial businessmen and descendants of missionaries, calling themselves the Committee of Safety, overthrew the monarchy in the face of an attempt by the queen to promulgate a new constitution that would reverse the subjection of Hawaiians by white settlers and restore power and authority to native Hawaiians, replacing a constitution imposed by armed force on the then king six years earlier. Without clearance from Washington, the US minister John Stevens supported the coup d’etat using American marines.
Naively, the Hawaiians expected President Grover Cleveland to restore the monarchy. Initially he came out in favour of Honolulu, but when the instigators of the coup refused to accept his decision and barricaded themselves inside Hawaiian government buildings, he refused to use force against fellow Americans and let the situation drift. By 1898, Cleveland had given way to the Republican President William McKinley who fomented war with Spain. The US moved aggressively to control Guam – which remains a US colony – and the Philippines. This expansionist administration saw Hawaii as an ideal military launch point and a suitable site – after the battles – for rest and recreation for brutalised troops. Consequently, Congress formally annexed Hawaii, resulting in Queen Lili’uokalani’s comment: “May heaven look down on these missionaries and punish them for their deeds.”
Over the 50 years, Hawaiians were marginalised in their own country, run as it was by US-appointed politicians and representatives of the blatantly racist Big 5 plantation companies. Territory leaders focused on plantation profits, servicing the burgeoning military establishment and tourism, with China, Japan and the Philippines supplying the labour to man the plantations as the native population declined in the face of foreign diseases while the survivors drifted into poverty.
Hawaiian women were easy conquests for tourists, military and civilian, while the men passively played the background music to which their women were seduced. The only remaining territory the Hawaiians continued to dominate was the surf zone. It was when this last refuge was threatened that Hawaiians began to react. In the 1930s, there were violent clashes between Waikiki surfers and US soldiers, but Pearl Harbor and the war overwhelmed them while post-war trade unionism was killed by Eugene McCarthy.
More recently, in the late 1970s, as multinational capital and the rise of the professional surfing industry threatened to drive the Hawaiians from their last redoubts on North Shore, they fought back by forming the Hui O He’e Nalu (Club of Wave Sliders) “to resist the corporate control of their space”. There were bloody confrontations between the Hui and the International Professional Surfers organisation that discriminated against Hawaiian surfers while “discovering”, privatising and selling to tourists and television the breaks that Hawaiians had surfed for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, corporate power fought back with denigration and incorporation using local media, such as the Honolulu Advertiser, to label the Hui “thugs” and “terrorists” involved in “crime and corruption”, while some of the Hui were employed by the IPS to police, safeguard and even participate in their events. Resistance is by no means over as the Defend Oahu Coalition of local residents, surfers and environmentalists today continue to battle the developers with their slogan “Keep the country country”
