Hawaii Locals Share What They Want Travelers to Know About Their History and Culture

You may think you know Hawaii. But there’s more to these stunning islands than white-sand beaches and breezy palm trees. 

Beyond the surf breaks and world-class sunsets, Hawaii has a complex story. Navigators were born here. There's an unmatched reverence for the land. It's a place once—and still—filled with warriors, working hard to fight for their cultural preservation. And as our guests share, Hawaiian culture isn’t just alive on the islands—it touches the far corners of the world, too. 

In this week’s episode of Lost Cultures: Living Legacies, we’re exploring Hawaii through the voices of cultural practitioners, historians, and teachers, including Evan Mokuahi Hayes, a Hawaiian historian who returned to the islands in search of healing. He found it, unexpectedly, in a taro patch.

“Hawaii has this beautiful way of, even when you have nothing to give, it will meet you there,” he shares on the episode. “It has a way of healing broken parts of you, essentially, and filling those empty spaces.” 

That connection to ʻāina—to land and Earth—runs deep for many. As Dr. J. Uluwehi Hopkins, a professor of Hawaiian history, explains on the episode, “We have cosmogonic genealogies … that say we grew right out of the land here, that the land itself is our ancestors.” The result is a worldview built on stewardship, not ownership.

That view was almost shattered in the late 1700s, when Western contact reshaped the islands’ political and spiritual landscapes. 

“Our Hawaiian chiefs wanted to form a government that other nations would respect and therefore interact with in an equal way,” Hopkins explains. “And the Hawaiian people actually didn't want land ownership, but the government enacted it because they realized that if we established land in a way that had an owner, if another foreign power came and took us over, they had to respect the landowners.” 

This episode also explores the arrival of American missionaries in the 19th century, the rise of the sugar industry, and the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani. “She crafted this really wonderful, brilliant response in which she says, ‘I will yield my authority until the U.S. president realizes the illegality of his own minister,’” Hopkins shares. 

Through it all, Hawaiian culture has endured, especially in hula. “Hula is exactly what people see,” says Hokulani Holt, a kumu hula, or teacher of the art of hula. “It is the visual representation of the words that you are hearing. You cannot have hula without words.” Holt adds, hula is not merely a performance; it is history in movement. 

To get to know Hawai‘i on a new level, listen to this week’s episode of Lost Cultures: Living Legacies. It's available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Player FM, or wherever you get your podcasts.