Going Native

(Mis)Representing Indigeneity

The opening scenes of “Going Native” foreground the parody of white settlers going native by producing Hawaiian Indigeneity in racialized, gendered (mis)representations. I refer to this as a double articulation to emphasize South Park’s parody of “native Hawaiians” representing how white settlers misrepresent Hawaiian Indigeneity. The racialized, gendered (mis)representations that I show in this section, and sexualized (mis)representations I examine in the proceeding section, offer a scaffolding that shapes South Park’s satire.

While meeting with Butters’s school principal in South Park, Colorado, his father and mother reveal that their ancestral belonging to Hawai‘i links Butters to a biology of anger. To explain Butters’s behavior, his father somberly contends, “Our little Butters is flowering. He has reached the age of panua . . . It has to do with biology. You’ve maybe noticed that Butters isn’t exactly like other kids . . . It’s a cultural thing.” Reframing their geographic heritage, he continues by stating, “We’re not of this place.” After transitioning scenes to their house, he suggests, “You were born in our native land, Butters. A distant and very secluded island world called Hawai‘i.” By associating Butters’s culture with biology, his father entwines belonging as “native Hawaiian” with logics of scientific determinism wherein biological markers socially construct characteristics like anger. Butters then asks, “What does being Hawaiian have to do with me acting like an emo chick on her period?” His father retorts, “All Hawaiians feel it. It is called hapa hua opae loa, and it means it’s now your time to make your trip to our island home.” Although the scientific discourses racialize anger to determine it as innate to “native Hawaiians,” this racialized (mis)representation is also gendered through the feminizing of scientific discourses. Anger becomes equated to “acting like an emo chick on her period.” The representing of “native Hawaiians” as inherently angry portrays misrepresentations that pathologize(d) Hawaiian Indigeneity through a matrix of inferiority. For example, Silva (2004) argues that missionaries, on one hand, were sent to Hawai‘i in a racist project to civilize Kānaka Maoli who were considered heathens. On the other hand, as Merry (2000) identifies, missionaries disciplined Kānaka Maoli via Western gender norms and technologies of sexuality. Halualani (2002) observes that this racialization, gendering, and sexualization manufactured misrepresentations of Kānaka Maoli as both benevolent (feminine) and angry (masculine). As the narrative plays out, Butters must understand, relinquish, and resolve his savage state of anger to emerge as a proper subject.

In another (mis)representation of Indigeneity, “native Hawaiians” are differentiated from foreigners. Butters asks his father for clarification but mispronounces Hawai‘i, pronouncing it as “Hawaii” without the glottal stop of the ‘okina. His father replies, “Only haoles pronounce it “Hawaii.” Here, Butters’s father distances, distinguishes, and legitimates their claim as “native Hawaiians” against haole (foreigners). This exchange demonstrates how “native Hawaiians” represent racialized (mis)representations insofar as to ridicule the white supremacy of settler colonialism. In part, Indigeneity is marked through a racialized measure of authenticity whereby pronunciation essentializes Indigenous identity; that is, to truly be(come) Kanaka Maoli, one can’t mispronounce Hawai‘i. And it is the certainty over pronunciation and language that signifies performative haoleness, a form of whiteness, in which settlers arrogantly claim certainty over knowledge. Rohrer (2010) asserts, “Performative haoleness is founded in colonial attitudes of superiority and indifference to place and local cultures, attitudes that are certainly masculine in origin but espoused by women as well” (p. 80). Moreton-Robinson (2015) refers to this attitude as the white possessive, which is structured by patriarchal white sovereignty. Therefore, the distancing and distinguishing Butters’s father performs exposes going native as a practice of white supremacy and patriarchy. The “general resistance [by white settlers] to being called ‘haole’ and a desire to belong—a yearning to ‘go native’ or become ‘Hawaiian’” (Rohrer, 2010, p. 34) elucidates my point.

These (mis)representations, however, break down. The parody mocks white settlers that play Hawaiian by reproducing racist and sexist tropes about Kānaka Maoli. “Going Native’s” transformative potential via popular culture satire is only possible by abjecting Indigeneity. Consider two issues raised by South Park critics. First, “Going Native’s” parody falls flat. Nicholson (2012) writes:

The big problem with this Hawaii [sic] plot wasn’t so much the setting, but the fact that it solely relied on one in-joke. While I’m sure there are plenty of obnoxious Hawaiian “natives” like the ones depicted in this week’s episode, the premise just wasn’t broad enough to sell to an entire audience.

Second, whereas the parody is difficult to understand as a result of its geopolitical specificity and settler colonial complexity, the South Park satire becomes uncertain. Nicholson (2012) says:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there was a point in there somewhere, but overall, this week’s conflict was pretty low-concept, especially when compared to other episodes of this ilk . . . but the Hawaiian theme just didn’t really vibe with the format.

As South Park’s parodying breaks down, its satire fails. For a satire deploying grotesque realism to work, Bakhtin (1964) laments “the social phenomena that are being berated” (p. 305) must be known. To parse out the critique of white settlers enacting colonization, one must know Kānaka Maoli are misrepresented as pathologically angry and not represented authentically as such. If “Going Native’s” (mis)representations of Indigeneity as a satire of settler colonialism are untenable, South Park’s critique doesn’t gain traction, thus, potentially inverting its object of criticism. Byrd (2011) argues this inversion results from collapsing racialization into colonialism insofar as racist tropes provide a means to criticize settler colonialism. Groening (2008) asserts that South Park satire “raises potential difficulties for the audience in distinguishing between serious criticism (the exposition of hypocrisy in U.S. social discourse) and racist, sexist, and homophobic material” (p. 123). Furthermore, to critique white settlers going native, “native Hawaiians” actually go native in Hawai‘i thereby eliding serious criticism with racist, sexist, and colonialist material.

Specters of Settlement

In this section, I show how South Park’s satirical attempts to critique settler colonialism in Hawai‘i reify logics of dispossession and elimination. Put differently, South Park ridicules settler colonialism by reinstantiating Hawai‘i’s settlement. After traveling to Kaua‘i, Butters and his companion Kenny arrive at the “Lihue [sic] Airport” and engage with a character working at an “Aloha! Information Center.” His slight Hawaiian Creole English or pidgin accent potentially communicates identification, in South Park’s logic, as a settler of color or Kanaka Maoli. He asks, “Are you with a cruise ship or a land tour group?” Butters quickly states, “Oh, I’m not a tourist. I’m a native Hawaiian.” The welcome center laborer becomes silent. He appears confused. Suddenly, Butters’s “native Hawaiian” counterparts arrive to retrieve him from the airport at the request of his parents. When a “native Hawaiian” greets Butters with “welcome home, young keiki [child],” the welcome center worker blinks in disdain. His eyes follow the group of “native Hawaiians” as they exit. Although this interaction doesn’t intelligibly index his identity, his response signals a moment of rupture wherein silence and not laughter is the only conceivable reaction.

The appropriation of Indigeneity by “native Hawaiians” satirically invokes but simultaneously re-centers capitalist settlement of Hawai‘i. When Butters and Kenny join the group, the “native Hawaiians” disapprove of including Kenny as he gets identified as haole and not “native Hawaiian,” but Butters demands his company. “Very well, we shall speak with the chief of our island and see,” according to a “native Hawaiian.” While in transit, Butters inquires, “You folks are all native Hawaiians, too?” The driver of their vehicle answers, “Yes, my wife Patty and I have been coming to Kaua‘i for almost five years.” He elaborates that other passengers in their vehicle are “native Hawaiian” because they “own a timeshare in Poipu.” These “native Hawaiians” articulate their belonging to Hawai‘i via repetition of visits, length of stay, and ownership of private property, which flies in the face of Kanaka Maoli kinship systems based in mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy) to ‘āina (land) and our ancestors as Kauanui (2008) and others have established.

In South Park’s Creative Commentary for “Going Native,” the co-producers Matt Stone and Trey Parker discuss their inspiration for the episode and reveal the re-centering of capitalist settlement. Stone first identifies the parody as:

The “natives” are white people who sort of like have timeshares . . . we thought that was really funny, that these white people [have] lived there for five years and so now they can look down on all the tourists.

Next, Parker recodes the parody’s satire by remarking:

It was really more about that thing everyone could identify with, which is sort of like: you go anywhere and if you’ve been there a week and some people show up, you’re just kind of like “oh god, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

They suggest the parody critiques how belonging to a place, like Hawai‘i, is claimed through repeated tourist visits and nativist arguments premised in logics of ownership or possession. Parker goes on to mention, “We have all had human instinct to suddenly take ownership . . . It’s like: ‘oh come on, I’ve been to Hawai‘i ten times. I’m basically Hawaiian.’” Moreton-Robinson (2015) asserts that this possessive instinct to take ownership of Indigenous lands, nations, and identities is mired in the accumulation of capital and exploitation of Native peoples. By directing South Park’s criticism toward tourism and nativism via reproducing capitalist settlement, the satirical critique of Indigenous dispossession and elimination is sidestepped. After all, Parker flags his inspiration for “Going Native” by saying, “I have a vacation house in Hawai‘i.” Whereas the parody elides, replaces, and substitutes Kanaka Maoli kinship systems, its attempted criticism of tourism and nativism are primarily animated by “native Hawaiians” occupying Hawai‘i, which bolsters capitalist settlement instead of critiquing how capitalist relations shore up settler colonialism.

Subsequently, the group stops to purchase food at a restaurant wherein another inversion occurs. They pull up to the restaurant’s roadside window, which frames a character wearing a green “UH Warriors” shirt. The driver places an order for saimin noodles. When the restaurant worker attempts to distribute their food, the driver mentions, “Oh, I get 20% off. I’m a native.” The worker raises one eyebrow expressing suspicion over the driver’s claim. In a move to legitimate a monetary discount on their food and authenticate his identity, the driver interjects with “here’s my mahalo rewards card.” This works to parody the “special relations” and political economic rights granted by settler state governments to Native peoples. I suggest the mahalo rewards card stands in for rights provided to Kānaka Maoli as well as a legitimating criteria established in racist notions of authenticity. Barker’s (2011) critique of cultural authenticity being imposed on Indigenous peoples illustrates that “Going Native’s” parody rests on an assumption that Indigeneity is an economic possession instead of a form of ancestral belonging or political status. This, again, attempts to critique settler colonialism by exaggerating white settler performances albeit through re-performing the racist, colonial misrepresentation that Indigenous people unfairly receive special treatment.

The restaurant worker is left dazed, and the scene hovers momentarily presenting a specter of settlement. Although this particular character fails to speak, goods and services are still provided to his patrons. In her critique of U.S. empire, Imada (2012) suggests male Hawaiian hula dancers working with female Hawaiian hula dancers, performing on the U.S. continent in the 1940s to entertain American military forces, are queered within an imagined intimacy. She identifies them as voiceless, sidelined, and always invisible laborers. The U.S. empire’s erotic gaze on Kanaka Maoli female subjects, thus, constructs a colonial heteropatriarchal grid of intelligibility in which Kanaka Maoli males are out of place, odd, or unusual. By placing Imada’s queer reading in conversation with Halberstam’s (2011) theorizing of the queer art of failure, the male airport and restaurant laborers fail to have their subjectivities apprehended in a normative system of identity; namely, they register as nonnormative within the larger storyline. It is as Huhndorf (2001) writes, “They remain more or less incidental to the story [of settlement]” (p. 3). By failing this way, we can read these characters as Kanaka Maoli insofar as Indigenous male subjects are “queered when put in the care of a white heteropatriarchal nation-state” (Finley, 2011, p. 35). They become specters that haunt South Park’s satire and trouble “Going Native’s” parody. Deloria (1998) notes that although Indigenous peoples “have lived out a collection of historical nightmares in the material world, they have also haunted a long night of American dreams” (p. 191). These characters are abjected, silenced, and alienated in their parodistic production but nevertheless, from their nonnormative representations, are (un)intelligibly Kanaka Maoli. I argue it is possible, here, that “Going Native” disables us from laughing at Kānaka Maoli by shifting the mockery solely onto white settlers, which maintains a discursive capacity to show that settler colonialism hasn’t succeeded but is, in fact, a failing project.

Decolonial (Im)Possibilities

I read a final scene of “Going Native” to demonstrate how South Park fashions an impasse, which cultural studies mirrors. After arriving at their “Sheraton Residences,” the “native Hawaiian” “chief” warmly receives Butters and presides over Butters’s “hapa noa” ceremony instantiated to resolve his anger. The “chief” presents Butters with a shark-tooth necklace and demands he drink, what Kenny marks as primary to a “native Hawaiian” diet, an alcoholic drink called “the chi-chi.” The ceremony ends abruptly, however, when the “native Hawaiians” discover their mahalo reward cards are being eliminated. “The haoles are trying to do away with us,” according to the “chief.” Another “native Hawaiian” says to Kenny, “Why can’t your people respect our island?” The scene changes to depict a large cruise ship of tourists encroaching on the bay adjacent to the Sheraton Residence. The chief stands in front of his people on the sandy shoreline facing out to the bay and yells “stop ruining our island, haoles” before instructing the “native Hawaiians” to hit golf balls at the cruise ship. “Tap into that anger inside,” Butters is told. Then, Butters launches a shot that penetrates the ship’s command deck, piercing its captain in the eye causing him to fall and disrupt the control system, which ultimately sinks the ship and kills its tourist passengers. This scene shows how “native Hawaiians” secure their “home” in the face of, as one character alleges, “Nothing short of genocide.” Later, at a meeting to unite the “native Hawaiian tribes,” the “chief” venerates Butters’s victory and Butters exclaims, “The fucking haoles have to ruin everything.” His words energize the “tribes,” and Butters yells, “The only good haole’s a dead haole!” The “native Hawaiians” deflect their status as white settlers by avowing themselves as “native tribes” and ascribing others, whether it is Kenny, tourists, or the U.S. Coast Guard, as real colonizers. Yet, the satire fails insofar as they occupy Hawai‘i and reproduce settler colonialism vis-à-vis claiming and defending Kaua‘i.

The remaining scenes of “Going Native” sketch out how “native Hawaiians” accomplish their so-called liberation. When the U.S. Coast Guard sails into the bay to quell “native Hawaiian” resistance, the unified “native Hawaiians” launch their defenses. Yet, the Coast Guard fires gun turrets in response killing multiple “native Hawaiians.” While it would appear submission to haole forces is imminent, Kenny discovers a secret cave containing supplies to make chi-chi drinks, which reinvigorate the “native Hawaiians” to fight. They face-off a final time with the Coast Guard whereby the “chief” remarks, “We are not surrendering today. Go back and tell your leaders that we will fight them until the end.” Afterwards, Kenny writes a letter to the main characters in South Park, Colorado saying:

My dear friends of the mainland, what adventures I have found on the tiny island of Kauai [sic]. I have truly become one with the natives, who found new courage to fight their oppressors. The American government finally gave into the natives and had the Mahalo Rewards cards reinstated. Our two cultures, it appears, will live in peace once again.

Kenny’s letter shows how (de)colonization is discursively (im)possible for Kānaka Maoli. The satire illustrates an impasse for Kānaka Maoli whereas only “native Hawaiians” maintain agency, exercise sovereign self-determination, and realize decolonization. This parodying of white settlers going native seals off the possibility for Kanaka Maoli self-determination, sovereignty, and decolonization, which exempts white settlers from enacting colonization. According to Huhndorf (2001), one of the main impulses behind going native is “European Americans’ desire to distance themselves from the conquest” (p. 3). It is here in which “Going Native’s” satire, aspiring to decode, transform, and jam popular culture, fails entirely by parodying the materiality of decolonization. As Tuck and Yang (2012) claim, decolonization is not a metaphor. Furthermore, decolonization is not a satire, especially when its symbol is ripped away by, and repurposed for, white settlers. It is as Byrd (2011) points out, “There is a fine line, then, between deconstructing a process of signification and reinscribing the discourses that continue to justify the codification of knowledge production that orders the native as colonized” (p. 51).

Finally, I suggest cultural studies reimagine its scholarship to exercise an alliance politics that interrupts knowledge produced by popular culture satire attempting critiques of settler colonialism that simultaneously naturalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples. In part, cultural studies has a legacy of settler colonialism. Byrd (2011) shows how poststructuralism produces and transits Indigeneity as an “ontological prior” (p. xxxv), which abjects Indigenous peoples as a “past tense presence” (p. xx). Similarly, South Park’s satire in “Going Native” functions only through appropriations of Indigeneity that render Kānaka Maoli an ontological prior by presenting white settlers as “native Hawaiians” and making Kānaka Maoli a spectral past tense presence. The two laborer characters illuminate this point. Although they can be read as antagonizing the coherence of settler colonialism, they’re neither present nor absent, according to Derrida’s (1994) hauntology, and fail overall to refuse the satirical activation of settler colonialism. Compounding this further, female-bodied Kānaka Maoli are entirely disappeared in the episode.

Cultural studies, thus, should be more genuinely accountable to Indigeneity as a form of life and analytic. First, not only should scholarship engaging cultural studies account for its complicity in dispossessing and eliminating Indigenous peoples, but it also must not divorce analysis from material struggles. This is precisely why I’ve used an Indigenous-centered approach to critical theory to critique how South Park’s “Going Native” undermines Kānaka Maoli as we encounter and actively resist various struggles. Second, such an alliance politics ought to be attuned to formations of settler colonialism in popular culture satire. While Weinstock (2008) argues that cultural studies must take South Park seriously, coding the (mis)representations of Hawaiian Indigeneity in “Going Native” as wholly transformative risks re-naturalizing settler colonialism in Hawai‘i. As I’ve demonstrated, cultural studies shouldn’t take South Park satire too serious, or not take it serious at all. Therefore, cultural studies should interrupt knowledge produced by popular culture satire, which attempts to construct critiques of settler colonialism that actually naturalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples. The politics and practice of Indigenous peoples’ decolonization are only possible if the structures of settler colonialism are denaturalized, the violence against Native peoples unsettled, and the laughter to South Park’s satire that fails to subvert power but instead reverts to settler colonization stops.