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HOME FEATURES PHOTOGRAPHY INSTAGRAM PROOF FOUND PHENOMENA YOUR SHOT PUZZLES VIDEO ARCHIVES SUBSCRIBE
Feature Article | Photo Gallery | Map: Hawaii’s Surf Spots | Graphic: Riding the Waves
Photo Gallery
Dawn Surf Warmup
Nicklen Photography
The onetime sport of island chiefs, surfing binds Hawaiians to their cultural identity.
Graphic
Surf Graphic 160b
Riding the Waves
For centuries Hawaiians of all social classes participated in he‘e nalu, or wave sliding, a sport with social and ritual importance.
Map
Hawaii Map
Hawaii’s Surf Spots
Oral histories identify ancient surfing locations throughout the main Hawaiian Islands. Many of those places attract modern surfers.
Published: February 2015
Hawaiian Renaissance
Picture of female surfers diving under a wave near Makaha, Hawaii
Pure Hawaiian
Beyond the glitz of tourist beaches, locals cling to the spirit of the ocean.
By John Lancaster
Photographs by Paul Nicklen
In the islands where surfing began, the waves on that particular day were a disappointment—mushy, chest high, and annoyingly infrequent. Still, Hawaiians have never needed much of an excuse to grab a board and hit the ocean, and the takeoff zone was packed. Teens on shortboards. Moms on longboards. Grade-schoolers on bodyboards. A guy with a gray ponytail on a stand-up paddleboard. Some had tribal tattoos in the style of Polynesian warriors. Straddling my surfboard in the deep water beside the reef, I surveyed the crowd with a knot in my stomach, feeling that I didn’t belong.
Makaha has long been known as a beach where haoles, a Hawaiian term for white people and other outsiders, venture at their peril. Located on Oahu’s west coast, far from the glitzy North Shore crowds of Sunset Beach or Pipeline or the package tourists at Waikiki Beach, it has a reputation as a tightly cloistered community dominated by descendants of the ancient Polynesian seafarers who settled the islands.
Even those Makaha residents who have come to terms with the United States takeover of Hawaii in 1898—and some still have not—are determined to prevent the same thing from happening to their waves. Stories are legion of visiting surfers being chased from the water here, a few with broken noses, after breaching some unwritten rule. I was eager to avoid the same fate.
For half an hour I floated near the takeoff zone, waiting for my chance, before I finally spotted what appeared to be an unclaimed wave. I spun my board toward the beach and paddled hard. But just as I gained speed, a stone-faced teenager on a bodyboard finned up the same wave. He planted his hand firmly on my shoulder and pushed me off the wave, simultaneously propelling himself down its face. I gave up and paddled in. So much for “aloha,” I thought.
But over several weeks in Makaha I came to grasp that what looked like thuggish protectionism was in fact more complicated. Hawaiians, after all, are the original surfing fanatics, having embraced the sport since roughly the time of the Crusades. They are also, in some sense, survivors. Since the coming of the first white men in the late 18th century, their history has been colored by loss—first of numbers, as imported diseases burned through their ranks, then of land, nationhood, and culture. Even hula dancing all but vanished. For Hawaiians—an increasingly imprecise term after waves of immigration to the islands and generations of intermarriage—surfing is a tangible link to the precolonial past and a last remaining shard of cultural identity. It’s also a testament to Hawaiians’ almost mystical connection to the ocean. No wonder they can get a little prickly about their waves.
“We got nice people here, but if you treat them bad, they’ll treat you bad.” It wasn’t a threat, just a simple statement of fact. The man who uttered it was sitting on a tree limb that had washed up on the beach. Though well past retirement age, he looked like someone you didn’t want to cross, a thick-chested guy in board shorts, sunglasses, and a black sun visor. His hair was a luxuriant white, and the slablike planes of his face evoked the ancient Hawaiian alii, or chiefs, he counts among his forebears.
“The guys, if they tell you they’re going to do something to you, they will do something to you,” he said. “Just remember where you’re at.”
On the subject of Makaha and its customs, there is no higher authority than Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana, a rare full-blooded Hawaiian who has spent most of his 80 years on Oahu’s West Side. His standing in the community is closely linked to the ocean. Keaulana was a preternaturally gifted surfer as well as Makaha’s first full-time lifeguard and the founder of a well-known surfing competition called the Buffalo Big Board Surfing Classic. He remains the most prominent of Makaha’s famous “uncles”—the mostly Hawaiian elders who serve as guardians of the community—and is revered throughout the islands as the apotheosis of the “waterman,” an aquatic all-rounder who combines reverence for the ocean with deep knowledge, skill, and courage. “Last of the traditionalists,” one admirer told me.
The waterman ethos dates to the first Hawaiians, who are believed to have sailed to the islands in double-hulled canoes from the Marquesas around A.D. 700, followed by similar mariners from Tahiti five centuries later. These settlers probably brought with them some familiarity with surfing, at least in rudimentary form, but only in their new homeland did the sport become an important part of the culture, embraced by chiefs and commoners of both genders on most of Hawaii’s eight major islands. There were surfing temples, surfing deities, surfing contests with crowds of onlookers gambling on the outcome. The royals rode massive olo boards hewed from the wood of the wiliwili or the koa tree, while their subjects typically surfed on shorter, thinner alaia boards. A new swell could empty a village for days.
New England missionaries, who followed the 1778 landing of British explorer James Cook, often have been blamed for putting a damper on the sport the natives called he‘e nalu. Their principal objection, it seems, was to the locals’ preference for surfing in the nude. Far more harmful to surfing, as to Hawaiian society itself, was the arrival of European diseases such as smallpox. By the time Congress formally annexed Hawaii in 1898, the native population had fallen to about 40,000 from as many as 800,000 at the time of Cook’s landing.
The bitter legacy of colonization left an indelible stamp on Hawaiians of Keaulana’s generation. He spent his childhood in poverty, much of it on state-provided “homestead” land—Hawaii’s version of an Indian reservation—in the West Side community of Nanakuli. The native language had been purged from public schools in favor of English, though in practice the locals spoke pidgin, an English-based creole still common in the area.
Keaulana ran away from home at the age of ten, after his abusive stepfather chased him into a taro plot with a knife. He bounced among relatives and friends, dropped out of school after the eighth grade, and endured periods of homelessness, sleeping in cardboard boxes and stealing chickens to survive.
The ocean proved his salvation—“a place to get away,” he called it. A powerful swimmer, he learned to fish with a speargun made from a sharpened coat hanger and a length of rubber tubing. As a teenager, he worked as a diver, unsnagging the nets of Filipino fishing sampans from coral reefs. Then he discovered surfing.
Of course Keaulana wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the sport that had so obsessed his ancestors. Since the turn of the century Hawaiian beachboys had been teaching tourists how to surf on the gentle breakers of Waikiki, and during Keaulana’s childhood a few Hawaiians could still be found riding V-bottom redwood boards on a break near Nanakuli. He learned to surf on a crude surfboard made from glued-together railroad ties. But he didn’t truly embrace the sport until he fell in with a handful of pioneering haole surfers, some from California, who arrived at Makaha in the early 1950s.
The newcomers rode light
ข้ามไปที่เนื้อหาของหน้านี้สมาคมภูมิศาสตร์แห่งชาติเชื่อมต่อ: ค้นหา เข้าสู่ระบบ หรือเข้าร่วมข่าววิดีโอวิดีโอหน้าแรกโทรทัศน์ Nat GeoNat Geo ป่าเด็กสัตว์ภาพยนตร์วิดีโอ Nat Geo วิดีโอ Nat Geoเรียกดูวิดีโอทางภูมิศาสตร์แห่งชาตินับพัน การถ่ายภาพถ่ายภาพบ้านเรื่องราวรูปภาพภาพถ่ายของวันถ่ายภาพของคุณวอลเปเปอร์แกลเลอรีสัตว์เคล็ดลับรูปช่างภาพซื้องานพิมพ์การถ่ายภาพ การถ่ายภาพแกลลอรี่ภาพถ่าย ภาพถ่ายของวัน ถ่าย... วารสารสิ่งแวดล้อมสภาพแวดล้อมที่บ้านพลังงานน้ำจืดภาวะโลกร้อนอยู่อาศัยภัยธรรมชาติมหาสมุทรอนุรักษ์สัตว์ความคิดริเริ่มของแมวใหญ่สภาพแวดล้อม สภาพแวดล้อมช่วยสร้างความตระหนักรู้เกี่ยวกับปัญหาสิ่งแวดล้อมผ่าน... เดินทางบ้านเดินทาง10 อันดับสถานที่ท่องเที่ยว A-Zการเดินทางความคิดบล็อกท่องเที่ยวนักท่องเที่ยวนิตยสารภาพถ่ายวิดีโอออกเดินทางลอดเราฝัน วางแผนการ ไป ใช้ร่วมกัน ฝัน วางแผนการ ไป ใช้ร่วมกันสำรวจโลกกับเราผ่านคุณเป็นมี... ผจญภัยผจญภัยบ้านเกียร์Adventurers ที่ดีที่สุดการเดินทางความคิดสวนสาธารณะภาพถ่ายวิดีโอบล็อกทริ Nat GeoAllTrailsเดินป่าที่ดีที่สุดในโลก เดินป่าที่ดีที่สุดในโลก20 น่าตื่นเต้นน่าที่จะได้แข่งหัวใจของคุณ โทรทัศน์บ้านโทรทัศน์Nat Geo ป่ากำหนดเวลารายการโทรทัศน์แสดงวิดีโอบล็อกสปอตไลท์ สปอตไลท์ความหมายของการ Rewild เด็กบ้านเด็กเกมวิดีโอสัตว์ภาพของฉันติดสัตว์การศึกษารับข้อเท็จจริงเกี่ยวกับสัตว์ รับข้อเท็จจริงเกี่ยวกับสัตว์หมีขั้วโลกหญิงให้เป็นกระปุกกลับ... สมัครเป็นสมาชิกนิตยสารภูมิศาสตร์แห่งชาติเด็กแห่งชาติทางภูมิศาสตร์เด็กน้อยแห่งชาติทางภูมิศาสตร์นักภูมิศาสตร์แห่งชาติประวัติศาสตร์ภูมิศาสตร์แห่งชาติสมัครสมาชิกนิตยสาร สมัครสมาชิก» ร้านบ้านร้านค้าชุด Genographicสินค้าขายดีใหม่เด็กร้านหาของขวัญร้านช่องขายซื้อตามแค็ตตาล็อกรวมแค็ตตาล็อกอีเมลมีเวลาจำกัด มีเวลาจำกัดร้าน» นิตยสารฉบับปัจจุบัน2015 มิถุนายนสารบัญ»ถ่ายภาพอินสตาแกรมพิสูจน์พบปรากฏการณ์เก็บวิดีโอของคุณปริศนายิงสมัครทำงานบ้านภายในบทความ | อัลบั้มภาพ | แผนที่: ฮาวายท่องเที่ยว | กราฟิก: ขี่คลื่นรูปภาพรุ่งอรุณเซิร์ฟ WarmupNicklen ถ่ายภาพกีฬา onetime ของเกาะรัว ท่อง binds ฮาวายเอี้ยนส์กับลักษณะเฉพาะของวัฒนธรรม กราฟิกกราฟิกเซิร์ฟ 160bขี่คลื่นศตวรรษ ฮาวายเอี้ยนส์ของสังคมทั้งหมดร่วม he'e ลูโอเชี่ยน ฟรอนท์ หรือคลื่นเลื่อน กีฬาที่ มีความสำคัญต่อสังคม และพิธีกรรม แผนที่แผนที่ฮาวายจุดคลื่นของฮาวายหากปากระบุสถานที่โบราณท่องทั่วเกาะฮาวาย หลายสถานเหล่านั้นดึงดูดทันสมัยเซิร์ฟเฟอร์ส เผยแพร่: 2015 กุมภาพันธ์โรงแรมเรอเนสซองซ์ที่ฮาวายรูปภาพของเซอร์เฟอร์หญิงดำภายใต้คลื่นใกล้ Makaha ฮาวายฮาวายบริสุทธิ์เกินนี่ชายหาดท่องเที่ยว ท้องถิ่นยึดเพื่อจิตวิญญาณของมหาสมุทรโดยจอห์นแลงคาสเตอร์ภาพถ่าย โดย Paul NicklenIn the islands where surfing began, the waves on that particular day were a disappointment—mushy, chest high, and annoyingly infrequent. Still, Hawaiians have never needed much of an excuse to grab a board and hit the ocean, and the takeoff zone was packed. Teens on shortboards. Moms on longboards. Grade-schoolers on bodyboards. A guy with a gray ponytail on a stand-up paddleboard. Some had tribal tattoos in the style of Polynesian warriors. Straddling my surfboard in the deep water beside the reef, I surveyed the crowd with a knot in my stomach, feeling that I didn’t belong.Makaha has long been known as a beach where haoles, a Hawaiian term for white people and other outsiders, venture at their peril. Located on Oahu’s west coast, far from the glitzy North Shore crowds of Sunset Beach or Pipeline or the package tourists at Waikiki Beach, it has a reputation as a tightly cloistered community dominated by descendants of the ancient Polynesian seafarers who settled the islands.Even those Makaha residents who have come to terms with the United States takeover of Hawaii in 1898—and some still have not—are determined to prevent the same thing from happening to their waves. Stories are legion of visiting surfers being chased from the water here, a few with broken noses, after breaching some unwritten rule. I was eager to avoid the same fate.For half an hour I floated near the takeoff zone, waiting for my chance, before I finally spotted what appeared to be an unclaimed wave. I spun my board toward the beach and paddled hard. But just as I gained speed, a stone-faced teenager on a bodyboard finned up the same wave. He planted his hand firmly on my shoulder and pushed me off the wave, simultaneously propelling himself down its face. I gave up and paddled in. So much for “aloha,” I thought.But over several weeks in Makaha I came to grasp that what looked like thuggish protectionism was in fact more complicated. Hawaiians, after all, are the original surfing fanatics, having embraced the sport since roughly the time of the Crusades. They are also, in some sense, survivors. Since the coming of the first white men in the late 18th century, their history has been colored by loss—first of numbers, as imported diseases burned through their ranks, then of land, nationhood, and culture. Even hula dancing all but vanished. For Hawaiians—an increasingly imprecise term after waves of immigration to the islands and generations of intermarriage—surfing is a tangible link to the precolonial past and a last remaining shard of cultural identity. It’s also a testament to Hawaiians’ almost mystical connection to the ocean. No wonder they can get a little prickly about their waves.“We got nice people here, but if you treat them bad, they’ll treat you bad.” It wasn’t a threat, just a simple statement of fact. The man who uttered it was sitting on a tree limb that had washed up on the beach. Though well past retirement age, he looked like someone you didn’t want to cross, a thick-chested guy in board shorts, sunglasses, and a black sun visor. His hair was a luxuriant white, and the slablike planes of his face evoked the ancient Hawaiian alii, or chiefs, he counts among his forebears.“The guys, if they tell you they’re going to do something to you, they will do something to you,” he said. “Just remember where you’re at.”On the subject of Makaha and its customs, there is no higher authority than Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana, a rare full-blooded Hawaiian who has spent most of his 80 years on Oahu’s West Side. His standing in the community is closely linked to the ocean. Keaulana was a preternaturally gifted surfer as well as Makaha’s first full-time lifeguard and the founder of a well-known surfing competition called the Buffalo Big Board Surfing Classic. He remains the most prominent of Makaha’s famous “uncles”—the mostly Hawaiian elders who serve as guardians of the community—and is revered throughout the islands as the apotheosis of the “waterman,” an aquatic all-rounder who combines reverence for the ocean with deep knowledge, skill, and courage. “Last of the traditionalists,” one admirer told me.The waterman ethos dates to the first Hawaiians, who are believed to have sailed to the islands in double-hulled canoes from the Marquesas around A.D. 700, followed by similar mariners from Tahiti five centuries later. These settlers probably brought with them some familiarity with surfing, at least in rudimentary form, but only in their new homeland did the sport become an important part of the culture, embraced by chiefs and commoners of both genders on most of Hawaii’s eight major islands. There were surfing temples, surfing deities, surfing contests with crowds of onlookers gambling on the outcome. The royals rode massive olo boards hewed from the wood of the wiliwili or the koa tree, while their subjects typically surfed on shorter, thinner alaia boards. A new swell could empty a village for days.New England missionaries, who followed the 1778 landing of British explorer James Cook, often have been blamed for putting a damper on the sport the natives called he‘e nalu. Their principal objection, it seems, was to the locals’ preference for surfing in the nude. Far more harmful to surfing, as to Hawaiian society itself, was the arrival of European diseases such as smallpox. By the time Congress formally annexed Hawaii in 1898, the native population had fallen to about 40,000 from as many as 800,000 at the time of Cook’s landing.The bitter legacy of colonization left an indelible stamp on Hawaiians of Keaulana’s generation. He spent his childhood in poverty, much of it on state-provided “homestead” land—Hawaii’s version of an Indian reservation—in the West Side community of Nanakuli. The native language had been purged from public schools in favor of English, though in practice the locals spoke pidgin, an English-based creole still common in the area.Keaulana ran away from home at the age of ten, after his abusive stepfather chased him into a taro plot with a knife. He bounced among relatives and friends, dropped out of school after the eighth grade, and endured periods of homelessness, sleeping in cardboard boxes and stealing chickens to survive.The ocean proved his salvation—“a place to get away,” he called it. A powerful swimmer, he learned to fish with a speargun made from a sharpened coat hanger and a length of rubber tubing. As a teenager, he worked as a diver, unsnagging the nets of Filipino fishing sampans from coral reefs. Then he discovered surfing.Of course Keaulana wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the sport that had so obsessed his ancestors. Since the turn of the century Hawaiian beachboys had been teaching tourists how to surf on the gentle breakers of Waikiki, and during Keaulana’s childhood a few Hawaiians could still be found riding V-bottom redwood boards on a break near Nanakuli. He learned to surf on a crude surfboard made from glued-together railroad ties. But he didn’t truly embrace the sport until he fell in with a handful of pioneering haole surfers, some from California, who arrived at Makaha in the early 1950s.The newcomers rode light
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