Surfing’s Hawaiian Origins Were Suppressed by Missionaries; Its Commercial Revival Was Controlled by Mainlanders
The Indigenous Practice That Became a Global Industry Through Colonial Appropriation Has Unresolved Restitution Questions
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Surfing’s Colonial History and the Libertarian Case for Recognizing It
HAWAII — Surfing was practiced in Hawaii for centuries before European contact, was documented by Captain Cook’s expedition in 1778, and was subsequently suppressed by Christian missionaries who viewed it as decadent and incompatible with the moral framework they were imposing on Hawaiian society alongside the commercial and political annexation that followed. The suppression reduced the practice from a central cultural institution to a marginal survival. The twentieth-century commercial revival of surfing was organized and dominated by white mainland American entrepreneurs who developed the industry, the media, and the competitive structures around a practice they had not originated and from which its originators had been displaced.
This history is not commonly centered in surf culture’s self-presentation, which tends to trace its origins to Duke Kahanamoku’s early twentieth-century surf ambassadorship and the Waikiki beach boys rather than to the colonial suppression that preceded it. Duke Kahanamoku was a Hawaiian who reclaimed and popularized a Hawaiian practice despite the suppression his culture had faced. The commercial surf industry that developed after him was built by people who were mostly not Hawaiian on land that was not acquired without coercion.
The Property Rights Analysis
The libertarian tradition has an underappreciated history of engaging with indigenous land rights through the property rights framework. Murray Rothbard and other libertarian theorists argued that the dispossession of indigenous peoples through conquest and colonial settlement was a violation of property rights that created legitimate claims to restitution. Applied to surfing’s Hawaiian context: the suppression of surfing by colonial authorities, the seizure of Hawaiian land through political mechanisms that denied Hawaiian sovereignty, and the subsequent commercial development of surf culture on that land without Hawaiian participation in ownership structures created property rights claims that the surf industry has not addressed.
The Libertarian Institute’s analysis of indigenous land rights provides the framework; the surf industry’s commercial structure provides the application. Managing historical injustice through property rights frameworks is the libertarian approach that is more intellectually consistent than most libertarians acknowledge. The surf industry owes more engagement with its origins than the Duke Kahanamoku statue provides. The ocean is free. The history is not simple. Both things are true.
