"How America's Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai'i"

"In Hula, Heimann writes, “In art, printed matter and even tattoos …, it was common to confuse the imagery of South Sea island women with that of female Hawaiian hula dancers. Sailors’ accounts, as well as those of various writers and artists, described the dances of Polynesia as a series of sexually charged movements performed by topless dancers, which presumed relaxed sexual mores on the part of the native population. Thus, accounts of Hawaiian hula girls often blended with those from other South Pacific archipelagos and a muddled stereotype of the hula girl emerged... 

Cook and his men—and the merchants, whalers, artists, and writers who followed—mistook the hula’s sexually charged fertility rituals as a signal the Hawaiians’ youngest and loveliest women were both promiscuous and sexually available to anyone who set foot on their beaches. In her 2012 book Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire, historian Adria L. Imada explains how natural hospitality of “aloha” culture—the word used as a greeting that also means “love”—made Hawaiians vulnerable to outside exploitation. To Westerners, the fantasy of a hula girl willingly submitting to the sexual desires of a white man represented the convenient narrative of a people so generous they’d willing give up their land without a fight... 

Around 1879, three Portuguese men who happened to know how to play and make a four-string instrument called the machete arrived on the islands. Before long, the Hawaiians adopted the machete before creating the taro-patch fiddle and ‘ukulele. Then, in 1885, Joseph Kekuku, a musician and composer from Lā‘ie, developed the first steel guitar. As with the harmonies of the Christian hymns, Hawaiians readily integrated these new musical sounds into their hulas... 

Even as the hula was, again, on the verge of suppression in Hawaii, an American entrepreneur named Henry Foster saw an opportunity to cash in on every Westerner’s favorite fantasy: A gentle, alluring Polynesian woman who gives a welcoming smile as she shimmies her hips. According to Adria Imada in Aloha America, in 1892, just before the U.S.-supported overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, he convinced Kini Kapahu and two other women who’d been in Hui Lei Mamo to join the first-ever touring hula ensemble."

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-americas-obsession-with-hula-girls-almost-wrecked-hawaii/

FB:" “The turn-of-the-century was the beginning of the hula-girl thing,” Hale told me. “This exotic country of brown-skinned people had just been annexed into the United States. According to some scholars, there was a very self-conscious desire to make Hawai‘i comfortable and familiar. The government wanted white Americans to see Hawaiians as welcoming lovely people that the United States wanted to bring in, not as naked ‘savages’ or Indians.”"