Fourth International Conference on Tourism and Leisure Studies

Abstract

This study is an exploration related to the historical interpretation of the material culture of the tourism industry in late-nineteenth-century Alaska and Hawaii and focuses on the development of the cruise industry in those areas and the commodification of indigenous culture for mass appropriation and consumption. It also focuses on the difference in cultural appropriation in Alaska and Hawaii based upon the selling of atmosphere and landscape versus the selling of cultural items. One of the key research questions is to uncover how the propagation of indigenous crafts as well as performance of dance, rituals, etc. either supported the preservation of said cultures or harmed it though the projection of a false identity and the creation of “imagined communities” through the marketing of the exotic and the other. The study examines the “white gaze,” how the tourist industry, collecting, and cruise trips informed the white perspective of “Nativeness” and how this in turn informed Indigenous people of themselves. It also uncovers the process of settler colonialism, how tourism worked to not just promote the exotic but to promote land acquisition and settlement in newly acquired American lands in order to cede white settlement. Through participating in the capitalism of the tourist trade, indigenous people were invited to not only promote aspects of their own culture but to become a remote part of the wider colonial world, though much of the culture promoted in the tourist space, even if staged by indigenous people themselves, remains anachronistic and ahistorical.