Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 10, Number 9, 1 September 1993 — Hawaiʻi Visitors Bureau: Keeping it "Hawaiian" [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Hawaiʻi Visitors Bureau: Keeping it "Hawaiian"

by Patrick Johnston Should businesses and organizations in Hawai'i be encouraged to incorporate the aloha spirit into their operations in order to keep Hawai'i "Hawaiian" and ensure that visitors keep coming? The Hawai'i Visitors Bureau thinks so. For three years the office has been giving awards to islands enterprises that actively promote Hawaiian culture in the day-to-day running of their operation. The Keep it Hawai'i program began in 1990 and has had two stated goals: to keep Hawai'i a unique vacation spot so visitors will choose it over closer less expensive alternatives, and to preserve the culture for the loeal community and future generations to enjoy. Explains Gail Ann Chew, vicepresident of communications at the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau, "The program is dedicated to fostering what is unique about our community, our environment, and our cultural activities. ... Unless you do something to protect what is here, people will have no reason to visit." This year's Keep it Hawai'i offers approximately 26 different awards in 13 different categories. These include environmental and

historic preservation, aeeommodations, visual and performing arts, retail, and restaurants. Finalists receive one of two Kāhili awards whieh aeknowledge both business sense and respect for Hawaiian heritage.

Winners in the past have included the Hawai'i Botanical Society on the Big Island for their preservation of rare Hawaiian vegetation, Nana Veary for her book, Change We Mus t, and Mamo Howell, a fashion designer who pulled Hawaiian quilts out of the museum and applied the designs to formal and casual wear. Hotel winners have included the Hotel Hāna Maui for the attention it pays to Hawaiian-style hospitali-

ty"You ean find things here that you can't find anywhere else," Chew points out. "Tourism has the opportunity to perpetuate eulture and protect it. That is what we are trying to do." Reactions to the HVB program have been mixed. "There has to be an emphasis on culture in the visitor industry," argues OHA trustee and former HVB board member Kamaki Kanahele. "This allows tourists to be more aware of Hawai'i's eultural and natural environment and be sensitive to issues like sovereignty." George Kanahele, co-founder of the Waiaha Foundation, a long-time advocate of culturallysensitive hotel management, echoes these sentiments when he says, "Anything anyone does to get industry more sensitive to the culture is good." "Conceptually it's a great idea," says Manu Boyd, OHA culture specialist, who spent three years at the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau and was there when the project began. "It focuses attention on the product and gets a commitment from industry to look at what they're offering and make sure they have a cultural component."

Others are not so supportive. UH marketing professor Robert Rees comments in the July 19 Pacific Business News that HVB's policy trivializes Hawaiian culture, "as surely as if HVB were to award gold crosses or stars of David to those motels and fast-food chains whieh represent the spirit of the Good Samaritan." Rees feels the only way to safeguard Hawaiian culture is by restoring sovereignty and empowering Hawaiians to revive

their customs and language. OHA eeonomie development officer Linda Colburn criticizes HVB for being too removed from the culture itself. She argues the Keep it Hawai'i program is just a token measure masking the bureau's cultural ignorance, and that it doesn't go nearly far enough in establishing Hawaiian values in the industry. "Recognition is a passive activity," she says. "The way to make things happen is by fermenting continued on paee 16

"The program is dedicated to fostering what is unique about our community, our environment, and our cultural activities." - Gail Ann Chew

HVB Kāhili award winner Hotel Hāna Maui.

HVB

continued from page 5 opportunities, by working proactively. ... HVB needs to establish a partnership with the Hawaiian cultural community to create a climate that makes the industry more educated about, and sensitive to, Hawaiian culture." Boyd agrees that HVB should spend more time practicing what it preaches. "The Keep it Hawai'i program would be more effective if Hawai'i Visitors Bureau applied the same principles to themselves." Boyd would like to see the

bureau become more "Hawaiian" itself so it could better understand the society it says it is working so hard to preserve. Chew feels the negative feelings generated by the program are more just a reaction to tourism as a whole than to what they are doing specifically. "I don't expect that everyone will love tourism. ... But the reality is that until Hawai'i has a diversified economy tourism will have to stay."