Perpetuating Culture through Community Tourism
By Peter Apo
Without culture, the term Hawaiian has little meaning. We need to nurture our living keepers of the culture—kumu hula, chanters, navigators, and practitioners in all the arts and sciences that define us as a people. One way to do that is through Community Tourism.
Hawaiʻi struggles with its love-hate relationship with tourism because it often comes at the expense of our places and people in what seems like an unequal exchange of value. The good news is there are models of tourism that actually vibrate well with communities—that support and nurture cultural spaces, traditions, and shared prosperity. Community Tourism is small-scale tourism that springs directly out of a community willing to share itself with visitors. It is home-town tourism with all the rough edges, which is what gives it compelling charm and authenticity. It is up-close and personal, yet it is a daytime activity. Visitors return to their resorts at night, leaving the community to breathe.
Community Tourism is a mix of experiences created and operated by local, traditional, or indigenous peoples to enhance their quality of life, protect and restore their environmental and cultural assets, and engage visitors in meaningful ways. It often includes walking tours, home and farm visits, storefront museums, recreational offerings, craft cooperatives, nature and wildlife treks, cultural performances, food experiences, lectures on local culture and history, healing and health services, storytelling, and more. In urban neighborhoods, rural communities, and wilderness areas, Community Tourism can provide a powerful economic development strategy to generate more revenue for local people.
Community Tourism invites far more intimacy in the relationship between host and guest than is normally afforded. It features authentic and genuine experiences for the guest, because it is activity that exists for its own sake and is not constructed specifically to entertain a stranger. It is a community sharing its real culture by the people who practice it. The very nature of Community Tourism places boundaries and limitations on how many visitors can be accommodated so that the sense of place is not overwhelmed, and the ratio between the local population and the visitors remains in balance.
Community Tourism is a sustainable activity. Large-scale tourism often results in creating more problems for a community than it solves and can be particularly damaging to its culture, traditions, customs, and sense of place. Community Tourism is about creating a direct connection between the place, the people who live there, and the visitor. It bypasses gate-keeper systems of travel desks and destination management companies that separate the host from the hosted. Community Tourism makes the place, not the visitor, the center of care and attention, recognizing this as the best way to honor the visitor.
Community Tourism is a community celebrating its own greatness and inviting strangers to join the celebration. While it is about preserving heritage, it is also about the evolution of a heritage. It need not freeze landscapes or cultural practices and traditions. It is about honoring the past and connecting it to the future in a dynamic evolution of the living culture of the local population—celebrating where we came from, defining who we are in the present, and crafting new dreams that transition us into the future. In the end, Community Tourism is about preserving the dignity of a people willing to open their hearts to strangers from other places. As the ʻolelo noʻeau says, “O ke aloha ke kuleana o kahi malihini” – love is the host in strange lands