Waikiki Dreams: How California Appropriated Hawaiian Beach Culture

Despite a genuine admiration for Native Hawaiian culture, white Californians of the 1930s ignored authentic relationships with Native Hawaiians. Surfing became a central part of what emerged instead: a beach culture of dressing, dancing, and acting like an Indigenous people whites idealized.

Patrick Moser uses surfing to open a door on the cultural appropriation practiced by Depression-era Californians against a backdrop of settler colonialism and white nationalism. Recreating the imagined leisure and romance of life in Waikk attracted people buffeted by economic crisis and dislocation. California-manufactured objects like surfboards became a physical manifestation of a dream that, for all its charms, emerged from a white impulse to both remove and replace Indigenous peoples. Moser traces the rise of beach culture through the lives of trendsetters Tom Blake, John Doc Ball, Preston Pete Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin Whitey Harrison while also delving into Californias control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry.

Compelling and innovative, Waikk Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.