26 Oct It’s OK To Move To Vegas. Just Carry Your Culture With You

civilbeat.org | Neil Miner | Oct. 26, 2023

Patrick Makuakane, the San Francisco kumu hula who was recently awarded a MacArthur Genius grant, describes himself as a “cultural preservationist.“

What he means by preservationist is very different from what people in Hawaii usually mean by that.

They talk about maintaining. Makuakane talks about innovation.

Preserving the culture, Makuakane says, is all about innovation. “Our ancestors were highly innovative people. What I’m doing,” he says, talking about his dances, “is keeping that innovative spirit of our ancestors.”

That’s not the common way people here think about culture and change. It should be.

We talk about aloha and ohana as if those are permanent values that never change and never should, as if Hawaii is still a pristine, isolated place in the middle of the ocean that needs to protect itself against those alien winds of change that come from somewhere else.

High walls to maintain the differences between Them and Us. Fragility and threat.

That’s Hawaii’s version of what the historian William Cronon, in his amazing environmental history of Chicago, “Nature’s Metropolis,” calls the pastoral myth.

That myth had been a part of American life since the country’s beginning and still lingers today.

The pastoral myth makes a clear distinction between urban and rural. Rural is good, urban is bad.

The countryside is the family farm — yeoman farmers, mom, pop, and the kinds living and working together self-sufficiently. Pristine, pure and isolated from the city. Splendid isolation. Keeping distance and keeping the faith

Urban life, on the other hand is noisy, crowded, corrupt and polluted morally, as well as industrially. The city is to be feared and to be avoided.

In Hawaii’s version of the pastoral myth, Hawaii is the pastoral, filled with unusually moral people living right while the outside world, particularly the mainland, is the equivalent of the wrong-living, morally questionable city.

The outside? Go there, but beware, and don’t stay long because if you stay, you will lose yourself and what you stand for by becoming one of “them.” Your home is here forever.

Cronon shows how the urban-rural barriers disappeared as railroads blanketed the country, farms changed, farm kids sought better opportunities in the cities, and people from rural areas began to find the city an attractive if still frightening place.

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