The Aloha Spirit: How Hawai’i’s Local Culture Is an Example of the Bridge Culture

In the Bridge community, we often talk about how we can create a culture of constructive and respectful engagement in politics, but we often struggle with what this type of society looks like. Many of our usual examples are historical, in that since we have identified many polarizing factors to have come from social media and mass media, we look to periods before those things to see versions of “Bridge Culture.” However, at the same time, we have to acknowledge that the times before mass and social media were not at all perfect, and in fact mass and social media have also brought with them many positive outcomes such as awareness of various social events and injustices and the ability to create many socio-political movements responding to those injustices. Thus, we continue our search for examples of the ideals of Bridge working elsewhere/elsewhen.

After learning about the Bridge mission from the various other Georgetown students in the BridgeUSA - D.C. chapter, various leaders of other college Bridge chapters, and many of the leaders of the national organization BridgeUSA including CEO Manu Meel, I have returned for the summer to my home in Hawai’i with the Bridge values still fresh in my mind. And I have noticed quite quickly how Hawai’i’s local culture, the culture I proudly grew up in, encaptures many of Bridge’s values, particularly respect for diversity in culture, experience, and viewpoint.

Image Source: Library of Congress

Hawai’i has a history of being a place where cultures have met in an environment of mutual respect. During the days when sugarcane plantation owners brutally dominated the islands’ exporting industry, most of the plantation workers were either Native Hawaiian or Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Okinawan, or Filipino immigrants, with their supervisors typically being Portuguese immigrants. These people’s descendants now comprise a large portion of the population in Hawai’i today. These workers, despite speaking different languages, found ways to communicate with each other by blending the accents, terms, and linguistic tendencies of their mother languages with English. As a result, they created the creole language known locally as pidgin. In a similar way, these workers, being from different parts of the world, developed an open and respectful environment where they could share their cultures. As a result, they shared, exchanged, and fused their foods, belief systems, and daily practices to create the ever-shifting local culture unique to Hawai’i.

Foods like saimin, poke, spam musubis, malasadas, and (my favorite) pork adobo fried rice can be found all over the islands, with classics like Rainbow Drive-In being a great spot among many others which casually showcase local Hawaiian food culture. Going to a potluck in Hawai’i is absolutely necessary to get the full Hawai’i experience. In them, we draw from the tradition set by those plantation workers who would bring a large portion of a dish from their culture to their jobs for lunch and then would proceed to sit together and share their lunches; and one can draw a direct line from that sharing of lunches to the amazing spread found at a local potluck. Similarly with the fusion of traditions, at New Years, every household has its own way of celebrating, with friends and families, mochi and tangerines, and a wonderfully illegal amount of fireworks being popped during the countdown.

However, it is the environment that those sugarcane plantation workers created that is at the core of local culture. Without that initial respect and openness–and the continued respect and openness that people have portrayed and continue to portray since then–the ‘ono grindz and the pidgin I experienced growing up would not be possible.

In Hawai’i, we respect difference and even interest ourselves in those differences. We understand that people are supposed to be different, that those differences are natural, and that the interaction of those differences is beautiful. In fact, the only difference we don’t respect is when people aren’t respectful of others’ differences–when people are ignorant of other peoples’ viewpoints and then when told of their ignorance, nonetheless choose not to respect other people’s viewpoints.

There is a reason why Hawai’i is a particularly suitable place for tourism, not just because of the good weather and beautiful landscape and oceans, but because the culture in Hawai’i is uniquely and more importantly fundamentally open to “others”. As a result of Hawai’i’s culture of respect and openness, the islands are not only a tourist destination for the rest of America but for people from every continent. And as long as tourists understand and embrace the idea of respecting the culture of Hawai’i, Hawai’i will respect tourists.

Thinking back, there is one last idea that is culturally and historically important in Hawai’i that happens to be one of the Bridge ideals. The idea of “talk story” is something that has long been an incredibly important aspect of Native Hawaiian and local Hawaiian culture. Sitting with friends and strangers and opening yourself up to them is something that seems so simple. However, when I have seen people open up to others on the mainland, it has either been among close friends or in a strong environment where people feel just comfortable enough to do so. In Hawai’i, that comfortable environment is more or less assumed. People are a lot more comfortable opening up to strangers because we feel a common sense of trust among each other; we respect each other and we know everyone around us respects us, and so we feel we can trust each other. It is a beautiful environment that allows something as simple as “talk story” to be so integral to the full experience of local Hawaiian culture and so common in a world where it is not.

I will not lie that, similar to how historical examples we at Bridge have come up with are not perfect examples of the Bridge mission in action, Hawai’i too has its issues in comparison to the Bridge ideal, such as its own cases of biases toward certain peoples and cultures, particularly peoples the islands have not had significant migrations from.

Nonetheless, I do affirm that Hawai’i is so far the best example in practice of the Bridge ideal of a broad culture of diversity, respect, openness, and interaction. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged the beauty of the interaction between the people in Hawai’i, after his visit to the newest state saying, “As I looked at all of these various faces and various colors mingled together like the waters of the sea, I could see only one face– the face of the future!” (November 4, 1959, Hawai’i State Archives).

Written by:

Wyatt Nako, CAS ‘26

BridgeUSA DC VP 23'-24'

Disclaimer: any views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the perspective of any other persons or organizations. The authors welcome any feedback or response pieces from the mentioned parties in the article. Thank you!