"Aloooohaaal" This jovial greeting marks the beginning of people's experiences with Hawai'i, Alani Apio's Kāmau Trilogy, and its incubator, Kumu Kahua Theatre (KKT). This trilogy of plays, written over twenty-five years, was united for the first time in KKT's sequential production of all three performances at the conclusion of its fifty-third season. The trilogy was presented from May 30 to June 30, 2024, during which patrons could see the plays in sequence—Kāmau (1994) on Thursday, Kāmau Aʻe (1997) on Friday, and Ua Pau (2019) on Saturday—or enjoy a full day of drama, seeing all three on Sunday from 1 p.m. until 9 p.m. Following three generations of a mixed-Hawaiian family who are directly impacted by US tourism development, the trilogy reflects playwright Apio's Native Hawaiian identity, his activism, and his deep engagement with the Native Hawaiian concept and practice of aloha.1 The titles of the three plays—which translate to "carry on," "carrying on," and "it is over"2—collectively assert that despite constant colonial warping, aloha must still be a communal responsibility that is shared and passed through generations. Through the displacement, cultural alienation, and immense suffering of the fictional Kealoha-Mahekona family, Apio warns that not caring for aloha in an Indigenous-minded way is detrimental and sometimes fatal. Meanwhile, the flexible and concurrent presentations of the trilogy at KKT model Apio's representation of aloha as a collective and consistent commitment of care.
The roots of KKT, whose name means "original stage," started with theatre graduate students at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa (UHM), who, during the late 1960s, wished to produce experimental plays about their experiences growing up in Hawai'i.3 In 1971, under the tutelage of their professor, Australian playwright-scholar and beloved Honolulu community member Dennis Carroll, these students founded the company with the mission to produce original "plays about life in Hawai'i, plays by Hawai′i's playwrights, plays for people of Hawai'i."4 Together they expanded Hawaii's theatre landscape, which at the time was limited to community theatres that exclusively produced popular Broadway musicals and Western canonical works and hosted touring productions from the US, Japan, China, and elsewhere.5 One of Carroll's students, Harry Wong III, became KKT's artistic director in 1997 and has maintained the company's vision of representing the local perspective and producing original work. The 2024 Kāmau Trilogy productions result directly from Carroll's teachings and Apio and Wong's thirty-year collaboration, with Wong serving as both its director and producing artistic director.
The creation of KKT was also an act of resistance against tourism, which had already overtaken Hawai'i in the 1970s, and against appropriative representations of Hawai'i that often reduce aloha to a corny greeting and kitschy aesthetic.6 The company is one of the few platforms that nurture both Native Hawaiian playwrights such as Apio and Hawai'i's theatre artists of color, and the company's commitment to depicting the realities of living in an Americanized Hawai'i often intersects with local activism. For instance, while involved with KKT as an undergraduate student, Apio also became an activist and member of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. In the 1990s, Apio felt compelled to write Kāmau as a means of remembering loved ones and honoring the value of aloha, writing in the original Kāmau program: "My family and my people taught me aloha. Aloha is not a trite cliche. This is the reason I kāmau, carry the burden and continue on. This story is dedicated to my son, Kuaihelani, and to my cousins who have left us, Bryan Apio and George Chong."7 Apio's continuous story development grew over time, with more collaborators ranging from original cast members and KKT board and community members to Hawaiian cultural practitioners and UHM educators.8 Indeed, Apio's original program notes identify this community and communal care as the foundation and impetus of the story and subsequent productions. In the Kāmau A'e program, for example, he names over thirty individuals, writing, "Kāmau A'e exists because many people care and give."9 His 2019 Ua Pau program also notes the story's development as a sustained practice of communal commitment: "Ua Pau is the summary of a lifetime of work. And, as theater is an intensely collaborative art, I did not create these plays on my own. I hope this story helps to cut down the distance that we've built between one another."10 Over the years, the Honolulu community has also supported the plays both as art and as a form of anticolonial protest that calls for an end to US occupation and the consequences of settler colonialism. Thus, the trilogy's staging in 2024 reflects a parallel between play development and alliance-building. It is only through the complete presentation of the trilogy and its multigenerational cast of Indigenous and settler characters that one can understand aloha as both conflict and resolution. For collective care to begin, it is necessary to conduct a collective assessment of colonial damage to the Hawaiian concept and practice of aloha inflicted over several generations.
Aloha State versus aloha 'āina; Or, How to Care in Hawai'i
Overall, the Kāmau Trilogy documents Apio and his collaborators' thirty-year community care project that questions how settler colonialism creates waves of generational trauma that linger and distance Hawaiians from their cultural understanding of aloha. Using a trilogy narrative structure, Apio connects the seemingly separate and simple meanings of aloha—hello, goodbye, I love you—and recasts it as an act of endurance and continuous ancestral connection. Apio shows how the concept of aloha that Hawaiians like the Kealoha-Mahekona family intrinsically carry becomes so heavy a burden that they feel tempted to release it. The characters in the play encounter various temptations to surrender their aloha to the settler state; however, elder Hawaiian ghosts urge them to hold onto it and each other.
The arc of the trilogy centers on the question: what does it mean to care (especially for family) in Hawai'i's settler-colonialist climate? In the first play, Kāmau, protagonist Alika Kealoha (Kahiau Machado in Kāmau and Kāmau A'e) has his understanding of aloha tested when he is informed that the hotel corporation that employs him is purchasing the land that he and his family have resided on for generations. Jim Mortensen, Alika's white boss (Iāsona Kaper in Kāmau and Ua Pau), presents him with a soul-crushing ultimatum: keep either his job or his land. After having witnessed his cousin George Mahekona (Joshua "Baba" Tavares throughout the trilogy) struggle with financial stress, depression, and die by suicide, leaving behind his white girlfriend Lisa (Alaura Ward in Kāmau and Kāmau A'e) and her daughter Stevie (Harper Steele in Kāmau), Alika assumes financial responsibility for these family members. Alika's choice sets the events of the trilogy and the family's undoing in motion: his forfeiting of the family home triggers his other cousin, Michael Mahekona (Stuart Featheran Jr. in Kāmau and Kāmau A'e), to defend and occupy the beach next to their home. This results in Michael's arrest and nine-year imprisonment, which starts at the end of Kāmau and concludes at the beginning of the second play, Kāmau A'e. Michael's desire for vengeance against Alika's employer transforms him into the protagonist of Kāmau A'e, during which he plans and executes a resistance effort with a Hawaiian sovereignty group. Alika, now a hotel executive in Kāmau A'e, opposes and stops the protest. In Ua Pau, we see how the years of loyalty Alika (Charles Timtim11) has devoted to the hotel sours his relationships with his wife Lisa (Carolyn Grace Corley), niece-turned-adopted-daughter Stevie (Maile Kapua'ala), and Michael (Wil Kāhele) and leads to his suicide, which closes Ua Pau and the trilogy. His death distances the family from the hotel and provides them with an opportunity to care for each other in ways that are more rooted in Hawaiian values.
The characters' struggles highlight a foundational tension within contemporary Hawai'i: the dissonance between the settler concept of the Aloha State and the Indigenous concept of aloha 'āina.12 Both connect to the core definition of aloha, which according to Hawaiian language specialists Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert encompasses "love, affection, compassion, mercy, sympathy, pity, kindness, sentiment, grace, charity."13 Although these qualities were foundational to Hawaiian society prior to colonization, they were increasingly appropriated for touristic profit after the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani by the land- and business-owning descendants of US Calvinist missionaries in 1893 and the United States' annexation of Hawai'i in 1898. After becoming the fiftieth state in 1959, Hawai'i's nickname and reputation as "the Aloha State" was formalized into the Aloha Spirit Law in 1986. These names exemplify a settler misinterpretation that promotes forced harmony; the law states, "Each person must think and emote good feelings to others."14 The legislation suggests that Hawaiian culture was given willingly, when it credits Native Hawaiians for providing "[this] working philosophy … as a gift to the people of Hawai'i."15 The definition of aloha featured—"mutual regard and affection and extend[ing] warmth in caring with no obligation in return"16—reflects its performative relationship with Native Hawaiians. Through this legislation, the Aloha State cares with no obligation in return. Significantly, under the Aloha State, Native Hawaiians have experienced displacement and discrimination, resulting in high rates of poverty, houselessness, disenfranchisement, incarceration, disease, and death, among other forms of systemic oppression.
In the 1970s, Native Hawaiians brought forth a cultural renaissance, a lively sovereignty movement, and an overall anticolonial stance that revived important Hawaiian ontologies to help Native Hawaiians care for themselves, each other, and most importantly the 'āina (land). Contrary to the settler term Aloha State, the Hawaiian term aloha positions the land as central to relationship-building. Native Hawaiian scholar and activist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio describes aloha 'āina as one's "love for the land" that results in a "shared intimacy and connection [to each other and] to our land."17 In two 2001 editorials, "A Thousand Little Cuts to Genocide" and "Kanaka Lament," Apio also stresses the importance of land and asserts that legislation that divorces Indigenous culture and lives from the land poses a foundational threat to Native Hawaiian community-building and well-being.18 If Native Hawaiians must have a "shared intimacy" with the land to be connected to it and each other, then the severed connection to the land resulting from the Aloha State and other settler-colonial legislation, policies, and programs is the direct imperial problem at the heart of US occupation in Hawai'i, and the one Apio most vividly depicts in the trilogy.
Apio's trilogy thoroughly outlines these interconnected issues by dramatizing the harsh interpersonal realities of being systemically unsettled. The conflict between Alika and Michael and Alika's fateful downfall exemplify how land is the central line in the destructive tug-of-war between Aloha State and aloha 'āina. Native Hawaiian families such as the Kealoha-Mahekona family are expected to care for themselves and for settlers and tourists whose presence and privilege in Hawai'i effect anti-Indigenous legislation and in turn an anti-Indigenous consciousness. Through Alika's journey from loving family man to corrupt hotel executive, Apio suggests that separation from the land is the central source of violence in Hawai'i. When Alika's relationship with the land changes from sacred to commercial, he loses his empathy and regards himself and his family as disposable. His relationship with the land as a courier deepens his dissociative disorders, increases his dependency on drugs, alcohol, and extramarital sex, and distorts his morals and reality. With little empathy left for himself and his family, Alika inevitably becomes a hostile and destructive force.
In both its writing and its staging, the Kāmau Trilogy also aligns with scholars Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese's observation that radical care plays a significant and collective "way forward" in tending to those affected by settler-colonial systems.19 Hobart and Kneese assert that collective care propels important changes for settler-colonial communities:
Theorized as an affective connective tissue between an inner self and an outer world, care constitutes a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others. When mobilized, it offers visceral, material, and emotional heft to acts of preservation that span a breadth of localities: selves, communities, and social worlds.20
Apio and his trilogy have catalyzed important rooted changes that echo this conceptualization of care. Separate productions over the past thirty years have brought slow but deep reflection about colonial impacts. But when produced together in 2024, a flowering effect happened: Apio, Wong, the design team, and the cast mobilize thought-provoking depictions about generational trauma in Hawai'i and how challenging the burden to carry on is after witnessing such emotional heft. Witnessing all three plays together viscerally reflects the heavy burden faced by the characters as well as all Native Hawaiians.
Staging the Aloha State: Hawaiian Tragedy and the Sacrificial Ritual of US Tourism
In the 2024 KKT production of the Kāmau Trilogy, Apio, Wong, costume designer Iris Kim, and set designer Brian Lee Sackett also visually present aloha as conflict and resolution through the use of a ritualistic space and costuming that highlight the tensions between tourist, local, and Indigenous cultures of the past and present.21 These technical elements become just as important to the overall effect of the trilogy as the script. The sets for the trilogy and individual plays all use a thrust stage configuration, enabling seamless transitions between multiple time periods and locations, dialogues between living and dead, actor and audience. The set consists of a three-tiered, low black platform surrounded by three sections of audience seating, a wood bench with a rich brown stain, and a fishing net draped on the upstage wall under the stage lights. The performance space is configured for the ritual purpose of acting out the tragic action of the Hawaiian hero Alika Kealoha, who must fall so that those in the audience can fully understand the loss.
Wong begins each play well before the house opens, and he expands Apio's opening stage directions with pantomimes that provide insight into the Alika's troubled interiority. At the top of Kāmau, for instance, Apio's script notes that "Alika is sleeping on a bench,"22 and Wong stages this by having Machado lying restlessly on the bench as audiences enter the theatre before the show. A staff member initiates a grapevine chain to spread word that the show will begin. The message passes from mouth to ear as people find their way to their seats. By starting the action of each play prior to the house opening, Wong intentionally motivates the space for the characters, not the audience. This act disrupts the Aloha State definition of aloha of inviting guests in to make them comfortable and feel welcome and instead invites the audience into a space that is already fraught with trauma and anxiety, much like Hawai'i's settler-colonial reality. Some of us look at Alika with concern and curiosity, wondering what is to come. Wong seems to use our presence to amplify the voices and thoughts that haunt Alika. We and people of Alika's past, present, and future simultaneously surround him and startle him awake.
One of those people is his mom (Lelea'e "Buffy" Kahalepuna-Wong), who dies before the events of the trilogy and appears throughout as an ancestral spirit. Alika's restlessness comes from the challenging advice she gives to him during another workday as a tour guide. When Alika's mom challenges him to continue working in the US tourist industry, she explains that he must be different: "E kāmau 'oe. Pono 'oe e kāmau. You have to carry the burden, and to do that you have to keep your aloha for life. I know it sounds stupid, our aloha's been sold and used, but for us Hawaiians it's all we got."23 This message seems conflicting coming from his mom, as it appears as if she is complicit in perpetuating an imperial understanding of aloha; but by the end of the trilogy, it becomes clear that Alika didn't fully understand the lesson his mother was trying to teach him. How could he? Apio portrays a young man who is asked to carry on in a tourist-driven US society by a ghostly figure who provides only the snippets of lessons left in his memory of her. Therefore, Alika is without any cultural anchor to help him forge a positive understanding of the Hawaiian concept of aloha. In performance, it is apparent that Apio sets up the heart of the conflict—aloha is a cultural requirement, mandatory, but detached from cultural rootedness when considered from generational disconnection and the leeching and deceitful system of tourism. The conflict is clear, and the resolution becomes inevitable.
Just as the set creates a space of conflict and resolution that holds those who are alive and those, though dead, who cannot fully leave, so too do the costumes. Alika's tacky, vibrant red Hawaiian uniform shirt is reminiscent of merchandise from an ABC Store, a chain of convenience goods stores scattered around Waikiki, and symbolic of the artificiality of the Aloha State. For tourists in Waikiki, ABC Stores have served as one-stop shops. The logic behind the store's name, bestowed in 1964 by the store's founder, Japanese immigrant Sidney Kosasa, was that it would be easy for customers to remember.24 The store's history reflects the prominence of Asian settlers in Hawai'i and a commitment to maintaining Hawai'i's image as a place of ease and convenience. The shirt's synthetic-looking fabric showcases a fiery beach sunset, with steady tide, shadowy palm trees, and large white hibiscus flowers framed with green leaves.25 This cluttered and overcolored design is a wearable postcard that enduringly preserves the Aloha State's manufactured beauty. When Alika dons this loaded shirt and performs the forcibly friendly tour guide persona for Aloha Tours, he becomes implicated in the Aloha State and embodies the immense difficulty of cultural survival in a systemically oppressive environment.
Alika's costuming across the trilogy portrays how Aloha Tours traps him in a parasitic relationship that sucks the aloha from his soul. In Kāmau, for instance, Alika repeatedly takes the shirt on and off, designating a shift in the space from the tours he conducts to his home with his family. Taking off the shirt marks the transition from work to home while also suggesting a separation between Alika's aloha for his job and his aloha for his family. Putting the shirt on, though, is performed as a burden of effort that becomes heavier and more challenging throughout the play. The final time he puts on his shirt mirrors the opening scene described above; however, after having witnessed the continued effort of taking it on and off, the audience perceives this action as more traumatic than the first time. The juxtapositions of Alika's costume throughout the three plays are emphasized by the tight space of the stage and how Alika must navigate being different personas to each of the other characters, doing his best to practice aloha in each instance, clearly without a strong cultural anchor. Aloha, then, is dramatized as a concept that takes. Or, conversely, it is dramatized as the practice of constantly giving without ever receiving.
In Kāmau A'e, Alika wears a white button-up shirt and red Hawaiian patterned tie, which his boss Jim wore in Kāmau. In this play, Kim keeps Alika in this neatly coiffed uniform for the entirety of the play, suggesting that this is Alika's new performed aloha, that which is now fully defined by Aloha Tours. As the only character wearing the button-up uniform and red patterned tie, Alika's costume also contrasts with those of Michael and his fellow activists. They occupy the land while wearing attire with more muted colors and made with more natural fabrics that are more closely connected to local culture, such as Michael's baggy, worn cotton-blend tank tops with tapa patterns,26 and the female activists' pareos (sarongs) in versatile, often cotton- or Polynesian-based fabrics that are draped around the body. These garments often singularly feature a Polynesian aesthetic or image that celebrates the ocean or land. The contrasts in design and fabric between Alika, Michael, and the activists' costumes emphasize the divide between them and visualize where each stand on the spectrum between Aloha State and aloha 'āina. To Michael and the activists, Alika shouts, "Stop running around saying you represent us! You don't represent me or the majority of Hawaiians. Nobody does. And you know why? Because the majority of Hawaiians don't care."27 The contrast of Alika's attire with that of the activist group signifies the various ways in which Hawaiians address the conflict of caring for each other and the land.
During the play's intermission, Apio and Wong again break the fourth wall and utilize the set to initiate actor-audience interaction. Michael and the activists invite audience members at random to participate in their protest. I—Jenna Gerdsen—was one of those randomly selected audience members. I was asked to hold a sign that read "Keep Hawaiian Lands in Hawaiian Hands" in preparation for the activists' occupying a beach as a protest. This slogan is a lyric from the Hawaiian reggae song "Hawaiian Lands" by Bruddah Waltah and Island Afternoon. Originally written in 1985 and released in 2007, the song and this particular lyric have been used as rallying calls for Hawaiian sovereignty. The song is also reflective of the central Hawaiian value of aloha 'āina and insists that Native Hawaiians are best equipped to care for Hawai'i. I agree that Hawaiian lands do indeed belong in Hawaiian hands, and in that actor-audience engagement, I stood up, cheered, and waved the sign. Although the protest in the play ultimately fails and Michael is arrested again, Alika and Michael reach a compromise in the time between it and Ua Pau in which Michael will live in the family's ancestral cave that holds an altar and looks out on the family's former land and the hotel's property. Michael's ability to live on some part of the land and in proximity to his ancestors allows him to continue to survive and heal, unlike Alika, whose mental state worsens throughout Kāmau 'Ae and into Ua Pau.28
In Ua Pau, Alika's once tidy uniform becomes disarrayed, suggesting the toll Aloha Tours' notion of aloha has had on him. We first see Alika wearing an unbuttoned shirt with a slack tie and his dress pants pulled down to his thighs, with his assistant's head bobbing between his legs. Stevie, who has just returned home from the mainland, is shocked to find her father cheating on her mother. Apio writes this scene to show how far Alika's aloha for family has shifted away from his mother's cultural teaching. In performance, seeing the same red pattern on the Hawaiian shirt and ties that Alika wears throughout the three plays shows the deterioration of aloha sartorially and semiotically, dramaturgically signifying how tourism devastates authentic aloha.
Machado's and Timtim's performances of Alika demonstrate how Apio identifies settler colonialism and tourism as drying out the ontological rootedness of aloha, creating a debilitating fear for the future. Alika's aloha in the trilogy sequence's powerful final story dramatizes the rigidity and cruelty created from the aloha state definition. In Ua Pau, Stevie questions her Hawaiianness and is encouraged by her uncle Michael to take a genetic ancestry test. She learns that she is neither biologically Hawaiian nor related to the Kealoha-Mahekona family. In Kāmau, Stevie is introduced as the biological daughter of Alika's cousin George and Lisa, a white woman who has fled her ultra-conservative family and relocated to Hawai'i. When George commits suicide, Alika marries Lisa and becomes Stevie's adopted father. The DNA test reveals that Stevie is actually the offspring of Lisa and a Native North American man Lisa dated before relocating to Hawai'i. This revelation tears Alika's soul apart and is manifested physically when Alika punches Lisa and shouts at Stevie.
Alika's aggression and violence toward Lisa and Stevie exemplify how his understanding of care has become conditional and dependent on exclusionary blood quantum politics. Their lack of Hawaiian blood motivates Alika to withdraw his obligation and care for them. Alika cannot enact the love and care he had for Stevie after this revelation because aloha is something that Alika was conditioned to abide by and perform for economic gain. Michael's understanding of aloha, on the other hand, expresses itself as care for all people who are in relationship with him and the land, regardless of their racial identity, dramatizing a version of Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio's ideas about aloha 'āina. Horrified by his actions that brought fear and pain to Lisa and Stevie, Alika realizes that he is the sprawling plague that must be stopped. In this moment, his spirit and body have become irreversibly poisoned by the artificiality of the Aloha State. Alika returns to the bench where his journey began, consumes a large handful of pills, and finally removes the tie, freeing himself from Aloha Tours and the Aloha State. Stevie, conversely, is the resolution; she remains as Michael's hānai (adopted) family, dramatized by Wong's blocking of her sitting alongside her uncle and mother on the bench and patching a fishing net, a symbol of the family's connection to the ocean.
Staging aloha 'āina: Hawaiian Fishing Tradition as Decolonial Possibility
Pinned to the back of the thrust stage, looming large, is the family's fishing net. Light filters through the threaded strands, leaving shadows scattered across the floor. The prominent display of the fishing net on the wall and at times in the hands of the actors as a central prop reminds the audience that the story is a rich and oxymoronic tapestry of authenticity and artificiality, subconscious and reality, losses and gains. Although the message is disjointed with the characters' loss and flawed memories, at the beginning and at the heart of the story is fishing. Throughout each play's tragic events, Apio weaves joyful memories of fishing, flashing back to Alika, Michael, and George's childhood that consisted of time spent together on the family beach and of moments that exemplify aloha 'āina and Hawaiian sovereignty.
In these scenes, Apio and Wong transport the audience to the healing and redeeming ocean, where Alika and his cousins are best able to practice their aloha. At one point in Kāmau A'e, Alika, Michael, and George use the onstage bench as a canoe and chant as they paddle, transporting themselves back to their boyhood, and a moment that feels like a time of precolonization, where they peacefully and innocently spent their time in the water fishing.29
For an instant, the audience catches a glimpse of a Hawai'i untouched by tourism. Alika, George, and Michael chant:
Hoe aku i kou wa'a
Hoe, hoe
Nānā i ka Hōkūpua'a
Hahai i ka Hōkūle'a
Auwē! O Hawai'i keia!30
Paddle your canoe
Paddle, paddle,
Look at the north star
Follow Hokule'a
Oh! This is Hawai'i!31
Meaning "star of gladness," the Hawaiian word and canoe name Hokule'a signifies Hawaiian joy and centuries worth of Polynesian seafaring accomplishments.32 Apio and Wong's stagings of the ocean temporarily suspend the stranglehold that tourism has on Hawai'i. For a moment, three Hawaiian men feel optimism and confidently declare, "This is Hawai'i!" and they get to experience a Hawai'i that is theirs.
The moments in which George, Alika, and Michael canoe indicate fishing as a source of (dis)connection between them. Through flashbacks to their youth, we initially see how in tune the boys are with each other—the water, the fish, their ancestors, the land, and how their traditions are practiced. But as the story progresses, fishing becomes a source of money, and money becomes a necessity. George convinces the cousins to buy a motorboat so they could travel further in anticipation of bigger catches and greater profits. The motorboat takes up all their inheritance, leaving them penniless and without options, which leads to George's suicide and Alika's working for Aloha Tours. However, when Alika and Michael are separated from the beach, fishing, and their kuleana (responsibility) to the land, they break. But when they rely on Western practices to survive in a capitalist tourist trap, they are untethered from each other as much as they are from their fishing nets. Through these images in performance, we see how aloha is lost and deteriorates. Collectively, the trilogy showcases how aloha has simultaneously harmed and healed Native Hawaiians. At the conclusion of Ua Pau, we observe Stevie and Michael sitting next to the family's fishing shrine and patching a fishing net. Their return and commitment to the family's cultural practice of fishing optimistically signals that their family and other Hawaiian families will heal and have access to their waters and lands again.
When the actors take their final bows, a staff member once again initiates a word-of-mouth chain reminding audiences about a post-show talkback. One talkback that Jenna attended exemplified how contentious land is within Hawai'i's settler society. An audience member asked Apio, who has also worked very closely with Honolulu's unhoused Hawaiian community, about ways to end Hawaiian houselessness. Apio informed us that, like Michael, many Hawaiian individuals attempt to live off the land as a means of maintaining cultural identity, but that many struggle to do so. Honolulu's overdevelopment has left very little sustainable land, and overpolicing has made it unsafe for people to live off the land using traditional means. Apio proposed a solution to rethink the issue of houselessness from an Indigenous perspective. The patron disagreed and a brief argument ensued between them. While Apio felt Ha-waiians should have access to sustainable lands and practice ancient and traditional means of living, the audience member felt that houselessness threatened society and that houseless individuals should be offered affordable housing. This position clearly unearths the deep roots settler colonialism has in Hawai'i. They are so deep that even the idea or choice to live as an Indigenous Hawaiian by and from the land is considered a threat to "civilized" US society. The stigma that all houseless individuals are disenfranchised by drugs and alcohol, or have mental health issues and are a "danger to society," occludes any acknowledgment that Native Hawaiians want to live on the land, their oldest ancestor.33 In contrast, Apio's trilogy demands that we be mindful of our relationships with the land and the cultural practices such as fishing that connect Hawaiians to the land. Caring for the land and Indigenous Hawaiians related to the land is a collective care act of aloha. It is a care act that, according to Apio through Alika, has been appropriated, abused, and misused to the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Hawaiians. Aloha, in the Kāmau Trilogy, is seen as the glue designed to hold Hawaiians together, but through tourism and settler-colonial sentiments that still complicate Indigenous rights, aloha is no longer the connective tissue it once was more than a thousand years ago.
Footnotes
1. Although the Hawaiian word aloha is familiar to most and does not need to be formatted in italics, we are italicizing it to emphasize its importance in our essay and in Hawaiian culture. In our essay, italicization is intended to critically distance the word (and related phrases) from an English and touristic lexicon where it is often reduced in meaning as well as to reorient the term more firmly in an Indigenous context.
2. Translations provided by Alani Apio in interviews with Stefani Overman-Tsai.
3. "Mission & History," Kumu Kahua Theatre, https://www.kumukahua.org/mission-history.
4. Ibid.
5. Since its founding in 1971, the company has produced over 250 original works. Ibid.
6. For more information about touristic depictions of Hawaiians, see Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
7. Alani Apio, "Playwright's Notes," Kāmau, Kurnu Kahua Theatre, Honolulu, 1994.
8. In his "Playwright's Notes" in the program for the 1997 production of Kāmau A'e, Apio thanks the following individuals: "Mom, Dad, Pima, Renee and Steve Bonnet, Pont Kamau'u, Rodan Valmoja, David Kalama Jr., Puakea Nogelmeier, Victoria Racimo, Liana Honda, Lilinoe Andrews, Christine Flanagan, April Ho'opai, Maile Meyer and her 'ohana, Dwight Damon, my NBI and NBBT 'ohana, Hokulani Holt-Padilla, Margaret Jones and John Wat, the cast and crew, Gene, Dennis and the Kumu Board, BullDog, Cheryl, Bryan, and Charles, and most especially Harry Wong III." Alani Apio, "Playwright's Notes," Kāmau A'e, Kumu Kahua Theatre, Honolulu, 1997.
9. Ibid.
10. Alani Apio, "Playwright's Notes," Ua Pau, Kumu Kahua Theatre, Honolulu, 2019.
11. Timtim played young Alika in the original 1994 and 1997 productions of Kamau and Kamau A'e.
12. Our capitalization of "Aloha State" references the Aloha Spirit Law of 1986. The lack of capitalization in aloha 'āina reflects how Osorio writes the term in analytical sections of her work. See Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha 'Āina, and. Ea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
13. Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian (1964; Honolulu: University Press of Hawai'i, 1986), 21.
14. Hawai'i Law of the Aloha Spirit, Hawai'i Revised Statutes, chapter 5 (1986), https://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/home/lawaloha.html.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Osorio, Remembering Our Intimacies, 13. Osorio's work is inspired from and a continuation of the late activist Haunani-Kay Trask's scholarship and activism.
18. Alani Apio, "A Thousand Little Cuts to Genocide," Honolulu Advertiser, February 25, 2001; Alani Apio, "Kanaka Lament: Once a Proud Nation, Hawaiians Today Are Defined as Just a Race," Honolulu Advertiser, March 25, 2001.
19. Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, "Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times," Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 2.
20. Ibid.
21. Our observations of the cultural meanings of the Aloha shirt (also known as a Hawaiian shirt) are drawn from Jenna's experiences growing up in Hawai'i as well as Hawai'i fashion historian Andrew Reilly's work on Honolulu street style, which includes but is not limited to the following: Andrew Reilly, "Haoles in Hawaiian Shirts," in Fashion in American Life, ed. Hazel Clark and Lauren Downing Peters (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2024); Youngjin Bahng and Andrew Reilly, "Comparison of Design Preferences in the Hawaiian Shirt and Current Market," Fashion and Textile Research Journal 20, no. 4 (2018): 379-88.
22. Alani Apio, Kāmau: The Trilogy (Honolulu: Kamehameha, 2024), 5.
23. Ibid., 44.
24. Kevin Bumgarner, "Most Influential Companies," Pacific BusinessNews, September 27, 2013, https://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/print-edition/2013/09/27/pbn-50th-anniversary-most-influential.html.
25. Designated as the territorial flower in the 1920s and later the state flower in 1959, the hibiscus is especially emblematic of the Aloha State and how it seizes Native land and culture and repurposes it for quick and cheap economic gain. Charles Black, "The Hibiscus Revolution," Pacific Horticulture 61, no. 2 (2000): 29-33, https://pacifichorticulture.org/articles/the-hibiscus-revolution.
26. Ancient Polynesian form of cloth- and pattern-making. For more on pareos and tapa, refer to "Ethnology Database," Bishop Museum, 2024, https://data.bishopmuseum.org/ethnologydb/entire.php. Our insights on these garments also come from Jenna's lived experiences in Hawai'i.
27. Apio, Kāmau: The Trilogy, 123.
28. All beaches in Hawafi are open to the public, except in cases where the federal government has denied specific access. State legislation in 1968, 1975, and 2010 has preserved this right. For more, see "Beach Access," Hawai'i Department of Land and Natural Resources, Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, 2024, https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/occl/beach-access.
29. Since 1975, Hawaiian crews have conducted circum-pacific voyages aboard two traditional Polynesian double-hulled canoes and replicated traditional wayfinding practices, Hōkūle'a and Hikianalia. This use of the bench also alludes to these voyages and their symbolism of Hawaiian cultural preservation and pride. For more, see "Voyaging Canoes," Hōkūle'a: Polynesian Voyaging Society, May 15, 2023, https://hokulea.com/voyaging-canoes.
30. Apio, Kāmau: The Trilogy, 16.
31. Ibid., 192; translated by Apio.
32. According to Hawai'i's Bishop Museum, the designer of the Hōkūle'a, Hawaiian artist and historian Herb Kawainui Kāne, said the star appeared to him in a dream. The canoe is representative of ancient and contemporary Polynesian exploration and settlement and symbolic of Polynesian belonging. For more, see "Hōkūle'a," Bishop Museum, April 1, 2020, https://blog.bishopmuseum.org/history/hokulea.
33. Hāloa was the first-born child of Wakea and Ho'ohokukalani. He was stillborn; the staple food on the islands, kale (taro), sprouted from the earth where he was buried. Hence, the first child becomes the very land that sustains Indigenous Hawaiians. The second child born from these two gods was also named Hāloa and became the ancestor to the Hawaiian people. From this connection between the siblings, both named Hāloa, Hawaiians understand that they are related to the land. For more, see Martha Warren Beckwith, ed. and trans., The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (1951; Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000).