King David Kalakaua and the Hula Revival

When the first Calvinist missionaries arrived in Hawaii in eighteen twenty, hula was among the first practices they moved against. The missionaries classified it as heathen, a word they used with precision: they meant that it was not Christian, and in their framework, what was not Christian was dangerous. Over the following fifty years, through their influence with Hawaiian converts and their increasing presence in the Hawaiian government, the missionaries succeeded in suppressing hula to the point where its public performance had largely ceased.

King David Kalakaua came to the throne in eighteen seventy-four with a deliberate program. He called himself the Merrie Monarch. He believed that the suppression of hula had been an act of cultural violence and that its revival was an obligation of governance. He ordered hula performed at his coronation in eighteen eighty-three in a deliberate public statement. He funded the preservation of Hawaiian chant and oral history. He promoted Hawaiian identity against the pressure of an increasingly foreign-dominated political and economic culture.

The Merrie Monarch Festival, established in nineteen sixty-four in Hilo and held annually in the week following Easter, takes its name from Kalakaua. It is now the most prestigious hula competition in the world, drawing competitors from across the Hawaiian Islands and from Hawaiian diaspora communities throughout the Pacific and the mainland United States. The standard of performance it requires is rigorous enough that preparation for a single year's competition often begins the year before.

Kalakaua died in eighteen ninety-one, two years before the overthrow. What he built, the documented survival of the practice he revived, is one of the most durable acts of cultural resistance in the Hawaiian record.