« Facebook and Google, so the saying goes, make their users into their products | Main | The world has lost a truly great entomologist, perhaps its greatest collector of beetles, with the death of David A. Rockefeller »
March 22, 2017
How America’s Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai’i
“Hula was the history book, children’s literature, and sacred text of a people with no written language,” Hale writes in The Natives Are Restless. “It maintained the relationship between gods and mortals. It preserved the greatness of the chiefly lines. It honored the race and encouraged procreation, and it traced the subtleties of the natural world: the rolling of waves onshore; the tumbling of waterfalls; the distinctions between tropical mists, showers, and rains.” According to Hale, the hula “is said to have originated with the goddess Laka, who is identified with hula, fertility, the forest, and various blossoms and ferns.” Before performing their ritual, the dancers would build an altar to Laka in the sacred space known as a hālau, a long meeting house where Hawaiians would also study canoe-making, featherwork, and other traditional arts. | Collectors Weekly
Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 22, 2017 7:04 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.