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 Waikīkī 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 California’s control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry.

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

Acknowledgements

A Note on Hawaiian Language

Introduction

Prologue: California Beach Culture in the 1920s--The Decade of Duke

Part I. The Builders

1. The Dreamer
2. The Photographer
3. The Waterman
4. The Waterwoman
5. The Traveler
Part II. The Beaches
1. Palos Verdes
2. San Onofre
3. Malibu
Part III. The Dream
1. Hawaiian Surfboard and the Writing of Surf History
Epilogue: California Beach Culture during World War II

Notes

Bibliography

Index