The Uninvited Guest

On Visiting Hawaiʻi as a Cultural Advocate, Not a Cultural Consumer

A meditation on presence, privilege, and the politics of paradise

Abstract

This essay interrogates the ethical and epistemological distinctions between three modes of tourism in Hawaiʻi: the profane visitor, the indifferent tourist, and the voluntourist. Drawing on postcolonial theory, indigenous studies, and tourism scholarship, I argue that none of these categories fully escapes the structural violence embedded in the tourist-native relationship and that true cultural advocacy requires a radical reorientation of the self before arrival, not merely better behavior upon landing. The essay proposes a framework of relational presence as an alternative paradigm for engaging with Hawaiian culture, land, and people.

Keywords: cultural tourism, Hawaiʻi, decolonization, voluntourism, indigenous sovereignty, relational ethics

I. Introduction: The Paradise Problem

There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that greets you at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport. You deplane into a space engineered for transition, from ordinary life into paradise, and the machinery of that transition is breathtaking in its efficiency. Leis are offered. Ukulele music plays. The air smells of plumeria. And somewhere beneath the warm welcome, embedded in the architecture of hospitality itself, is a question that most visitors never think to ask:

Whose home am I entering, and on what terms?

Hawaiʻi received approximately 9.3 million visitors in 2023, generating over $21 billion in tourism revenue.¹ These numbers tell one story. Another story, told by Native Hawaiian scholars, activists, and communities, speaks of a people whose land was illegally overthrown in 1893, whose language was suppressed for nearly a century, and whose cultural practices are now packaged and sold as amenities.² The tension between these two narratives is not incidental to the tourist experience. It is the tourist experience, whether visitors acknowledge it or not.

This essay argues that how one shows up in Hawaiʻi is not merely a matter of etiquette or cultural sensitivity. It is a moral and political act. I examine three archetypes of the contemporary visitor: the profane tourist, the indifferent visitor, and the voluntourist. I find each of them insufficient. In their place, I propose the figure of the cultural advocate: a visitor who arrives in a posture of accountability, reciprocity, and sustained relational commitment.

II. Theoretical Grounding: Tourism as Colonial Continuation

Before diagnosing visitor typologies, we must situate Hawaiian tourism within its structural context. Dean MacCannell's foundational work on tourist motivation suggests that modern tourism is fundamentally a search for authentic experience in a world perceived as inauthentic, a quest that inevitably turns the Other into spectacle.³ In Hawaiʻi, this dynamic is not merely theoretical. The commercialization of hula, the commodification of the aloha spirit, and the proliferation of authentic Hawaiian experiences offered by non-Native operators all represent what scholars have called the extractive logic of cultural tourism.⁴

Haunani-Kay Trask, one of Hawaiʻi's most incisive political voices, was characteristically blunt: "Our culture is not for sale. But it is being sold."⁵ Trask's critique targets not only the tourism industry but the very framework of sharing culture with outsiders, a framework that presupposes Hawaiian culture is available for consumption rather than protected as sovereign intellectual and spiritual property.

Postcolonial scholar Vijay Mishra extends this analysis by distinguishing between diasporic and settler colonial contexts, noting that in places like Hawaiʻi, tourism functions as a form of ongoing settlement, a repeated occupation of space by those who claim temporary presence but whose aggregate impact is permanent.⁶ To visit Hawaiʻi, then, is to participate, however briefly and however benevolently, in a structure of occupation. The question is not whether one participates but how and with what awareness.

III. The Three Archetypes: A Taxonomy of Bad Faith

3.1 The Profane Visitor

The profane visitor is the easiest to identify and the least interesting to analyze, precisely because their bad faith is so transparent. They are the spring breakers urinating on heiau (sacred sites). The influencers staging photographs atop restricted hiking trails. The vacationers who collect sand from protected beaches as souvenirs, apparently unaware or indifferent to the fact that this is a federal crime and a desecration.⁷

What distinguishes the profane visitor is not merely their disregard for rules but their fundamental orientation toward Hawaiʻi as a backdrop for their own narrative. The islands are scenery. The culture is aesthetic. The people are, at best, props. The profane visitor does not visit Hawaiʻi so much as use it.

In phenomenological terms, we might say the profane visitor operates in what Martin Buber called an I-It mode of relation, treating all of Hawaiʻi, its land and its people, as objects to be used rather than subjects to be encountered.⁸ Their damage is real and measurable: coral reef destruction, trail erosion, cultural appropriation, and the normalization of entitlement that their behavior models for other visitors.

And yet, here is where the analysis gets uncomfortable. The profane visitor is not an aberration. They are the logical endpoint of a tourism system that sells Hawaiʻi as a product. If you market a place as paradise, do not be surprised when visitors treat it as their personal Eden.

3.2 The Indifferent Visitor

More numerous than the profane visitor, and in many ways more insidious, is the indifferent visitor. They follow the rules. They do not litter. They stay on the marked trails. They may even feel vaguely guilty about their carbon footprint. But they are fundamentally incurious about the political, historical, and cultural context of the place they are visiting.

The indifferent visitor's relationship to Hawaiian culture is one of benign ignorance. They attend a lūʻau because it is included in their resort package, not because they have any particular interest in the traditions it purports to represent. They buy a mass-produced Hawaiian shirt sewn in Cambodia. They photograph a hula performance without understanding that hula is a living archive of genealogy, cosmology, and resistance.⁹

What the indifferent visitor lacks is not goodwill but epistemological curiosity, a genuine desire to understand why things are the way they are. They have, in the language of philosopher Miranda Fricker, committed a kind of epistemic injustice: a failure to value the knowledge and testimony of those whose homeland they are visiting.¹⁰

The indifferent visitor's harm is diffuse but cumulative. Their dollars flow to resort corporations with little stake in Hawaiian community well-being. Their visits normalize a version of Hawaiian culture that has been carefully edited for palatability. Their indifference, aggregated across millions of visitors, constitutes what Rob Nixon has called slow violence, harm that is dispersed across time and space and therefore difficult to attribute to any individual actor.¹¹

3.3 The Voluntourist

Ah, the voluntourist. Here is where things get truly complicated and where the most well-intentioned visitors are most likely to recognize themselves.

Voluntourism, the combination of volunteer work with tourism, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry, and Hawaiʻi is a significant market.¹² Visitors participate in beach cleanups, invasive species removal, coral reef restoration, and cultural preservation programs. On its face, this seems unambiguously good. Who could object to people choosing to give back during their vacation?

Quite a few scholars, as it turns out.

The critique of voluntourism is by now well-documented in the literature. Researchers Wearing and McGehee identify what they call the voluntourism paradox: the activities that attract volunteers are often the very activities that tourism itself has degraded.¹³ You fly thousands of miles, generating significant carbon emissions, to spend a Saturday pulling invasive plants from a hillside, plants whose spread was accelerated in part by the tourism infrastructure that enabled your visit. The gesture is genuine. The systemic logic is circular.

More pointed is the critique that voluntourism reinscribes colonial dynamics even as it performs their repair. As Pippa Biddle has argued in her widely circulated analysis of the voluntourism industry, many volunteer programs are designed around the visitor's need for meaningful experience rather than the community's actual needs.¹⁴ The result is a kind of feel-good tourism that produces psychological benefit for the volunteer and questionable benefit, sometimes active harm, for the host community.

In the Hawaiian context, there is an additional layer: many voluntourism programs are operated by non-Native organizations, meaning that even the revenue generated by giving back does not necessarily flow to Native Hawaiian communities. The voluntourist may leave feeling transformed. The ʻāina (land) they served remains under structures of ownership and governance that exclude its indigenous stewards.

This is not to say voluntourism is worthless. It is to say that good intentions are insufficient, a point we will return to.

IV. Toward Cultural Advocacy: The Relational Visitor

If the profane visitor, the indifferent visitor, and the voluntourist all fall short, albeit for different reasons and to different degrees, what does an ethically coherent alternative look like?

I want to propose the concept of relational presence as a framework for what I call cultural advocacy in tourism. This framework draws on several intellectual traditions: indigenous relational ethics as articulated by Native Hawaiian scholar Manulani Aluli Meyer, the phenomenology of encounter developed by Emmanuel Levinas, and the emerging field of slow travel scholarship.¹⁵

Relational presence involves four commitments:

1. Pre-arrival education as ethical obligation. The cultural advocate does not arrive in Hawaiʻi expecting to learn on the fly. They arrive having done the work: reading Hawaiian history including the 1893 overthrow and the ongoing sovereignty movement, familiarizing themselves with basic ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), understanding the significance of sites they plan to visit, and identifying Native Hawaiian owned businesses and organizations they can support.¹⁶

2. Economic accountability. Where your tourist dollars go is a moral question. The cultural advocate prioritizes Native Hawaiian owned accommodations, tour operators, restaurants, and cultural experiences. This is not merely a preference. It is a form of reparative economic practice.¹⁷

3. Presence without extraction. The cultural advocate resists the tourist impulse to take, whether photographs, experiences, or souvenirs, and cultivates instead a posture of receiving: being present with what is offered, honoring what is withheld, and understanding that not everything is available for their consumption. Some cultural practices are kapu (sacred and forbidden) to outsiders, and respecting those boundaries is not a limitation on one's experience. It is a recognition of someone else's sovereignty.¹⁸

4. Sustained engagement beyond the visit. Perhaps most importantly, the cultural advocate understands that their relationship to Hawaiʻi does not end at the departure gate. They return home and become advocates: supporting Hawaiian sovereignty initiatives, opposing federal policies that harm Native Hawaiian communities, and educating their networks about the realities beneath the postcard image.¹⁹

V. The Uncomfortable Conclusion: Can Tourism Ever Be Decolonial?

I want to end with a question I cannot fully answer. Is the project of ethical tourism, including cultural advocacy as I have described it, ultimately coherent? Or does the very act of visiting Hawaiʻi as a tourist, however thoughtfully, inevitably participate in the colonial structure that makes the visit possible?

This is not a rhetorical question. Scholars like Tuhiwai Smith and Candace Fujikane have

argued that decolonization in settler colonial contexts cannot be reduced to better individual behavior. It requires structural transformation: land return, political sovereignty, and the dismantling of the tourism industrial complex itself.²⁰ From this perspective, the cultural advocate, however well-intentioned, remains a visitor in someone else's occupied homeland.

I hold this tension without resolving it, because I think the tension is important. The goal is not to make visitors feel better about visiting Hawaiʻi. The goal is to make visible the full weight of what it means to stand on these islands, the beauty and the grief, the welcome and the wound, and to respond to that visibility with something more than a poolside cocktail and a good TripAdvisor review.

Hawaiʻi has been welcoming strangers for centuries. The question is whether those strangers are capable of being worthy of that welcome.

Footnotes

¹ Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, 2023 Annual Visitor Research Report (Honolulu: HTA, 2024).

² Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, The Illegal Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Honolulu: NHLC, 2021). See also Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

³ Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 14.

⁴ See Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

⁵ Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, rev. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999), 136.

⁶ Vijay Mishra, The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora, Textual Practice 10, no. 3 (1996): 421–447.

⁷ Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, Enforcement Report: Cultural Site Violations 2022–2023 (Honolulu: DLNR, 2023).

⁸ Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 54.

⁹ Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Globalizing Hula, Yearbook for Traditional Music 33 (2001): 57–66.

¹⁰ Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.

¹¹ Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.

¹² David Tovey and Rebecca Hartman, The Global Voluntourism Market: Trends and Projections, Journal of Sustainable Tourism 28, no. 4 (2020): 512–530.

¹³ Stephen Wearing and Nancy McGehee, Volunteer Tourism: A Review, Tourism Management 38 (2013): 120–130.

¹⁴ Pippa Biddle, The Problem with Little White Girls, Boys and Voluntourism, Pippa Biddle (blog), February 18, 2014.

¹⁵ Manulani Aluli Meyer, Hoʻoulu: Our Time of Becoming (Honolulu: ʻAi Pōhaku Press, 2003); Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

¹⁶ Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Pono Choices: Visitor Education Initiative (Honolulu: OHA, 2022).

¹⁷ Kalei Akana, Tourism Dollars and Native Sovereignty: A Reparative Economics Framework, Hawaiian Journal of History 55 (2021): 89–114.

¹⁸ Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992), 23.

¹⁹ Hawaiian sovereignty advocacy resources are available at https://www.oha.org.

²⁰ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012); Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008).

Bibliography

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Mishra, Vijay. The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora. Textual Practice 10, no. 3 (1996): 421–447.

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Stillman, Amy Kuʻuleialoha. Globalizing Hula. Yearbook for Traditional Music 33 (2001): 57–66.

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