Cultural Appropriation

Aloha kākou,

By now many of you have seen the article I recently posted, which was a direct satirical response to the original article posted last week on the Pure Wow website, 11 Hawaiian Baby Names That Are the Absolute Cutest.

Hereʻs the link to the original post http://www.purewow.com/family/hawaiian-baby-names however, it has since been removed.

If you read the original post, you would see that some of the captions in the article that I posted are meant to mirror those in the previous one. For example, the original post on purewow.com read as follows:

Kapueo - owl

get ready for a smarty-pants

I wrote:

Kūkae

get ready for a farty-pants, I mean smarty-pants

Yes, it is a joke.

For those of you who are unaware, kūkae means excrement, feces, poop, shit. You can find the actual definitions of the real Hawaiian words I used at http://wehewehe.org and I strongly suggest that you do. Kyle-lani is not a real Hawaiian word. Also, the word shishi is Hawaiian Creole adopted from Japanese during the plantation era.

For shit sake, I hope you donʻt name your child Kūkae, which brings me to the point of this satirical blog post.

Iʻve seen so many of these "oh so trendy" baby name blogs over the years, and like many of you, I get irritated and offended by the blatant cultural appropriation and lack of genuine interest in the culture from which these names derive. We are an actual people with an actual living language, not just some vacation destination, or place to retire, or a cutesy culture to commodify.

Most of the time, the people who are writing these articles have never lived in Hawaiʻi, but went there for their honeymoon and loved it so much that they wanted to name the child they conceived on Holiday something that would commemorate their time spend in the islands. Most of the people writing these articles have no attachment to Hawaiʻi beyond the superficial, they have not stood calf-deep in a loʻi planting kalo, theyʻve never stood in a line passing pōhaku to build an ahu, and theyʻve never bothered to even attempt to learn ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.

Never mind actually learning the language to obtain fluency, most of the people writing these articles couldnʻt even be bothered to look up the definition of the words they were claiming to understand in a dictionary. There is a very comprehensive online Hawaiian dictionary posted above. The very least you could do before you decide to give your child a "Hawaiian" name is to look it up for yourself. Do your research!

Believe it or not, even though I am familiar with all of the words that I chose (very deliberately) for my own satirical blog post, I STILL did research. I checked wehewehe.org to make sure that I got my diacritical marks correct! And that was just so that I could write a comedic blog. So if you are planning to name your child, you might want to put in a little more effort.

Do not take the previous article seriously, and you might want to consider this advice for any baby name blog post you come across in the future.

For everyone else, mahalo for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

Shoots!

Kaʻiulani