Nalu

Introduction

In Hawaiʻi, November is known as ʻIkuā, the month of deafening noise. ʻIkuā (which means noisy, din, clamorous) is the time of year when the voices of the gods resound across the islands through the elements. Storms churn the sea into enormous waves that pound the shore, filling villages with their rumbling. Howling winds, drumming rains, and booming thunder rattle people’s homes.

The people of Niʻihau celebrated the arrival of ʻIkuā, because it meant big-wave season had arrived. They held a pāʻina (feast) on the beach. Before they ate, an elder said a prayer and gave a food bundle to a man, who paddled his board past the surf break. He opened the bundle, and as he fed the ocean its share of food, the ocean calmed. But after it fed, the ocean would send a large wave so the man could surf back to shore. Only then could everyone eat and play in the water. The celebration lasted from one to three weeks—day and night, they ate, sang, swam, and surfed in the ocean. After all, ua piʻi ka nalu (surf was up)!

Every culture has spring and harvest festivals, but how many can say they have a festival for good surf season? Hawaiians didn’t call it surfing, though. The entire culture of surfing, as Westerners know it today, has only been around for about a hundred years. Even the word surfing is a Western invention created by early visitors to Hawaiʻi in the late 1800s, when they tried to describe Hawaiians riding waves. They didn’t know Hawaiians already had a name for it—heʻe nalu, wave sliding.

Heʻe nalu is an ancient sport, at least a thousand years old. But for Hawaiians, it is more than just a sport or recreation. It is an integral part of their society. Heʻe nalu has its own holidays, rituals, altars, and mythology. When the waves were right (and in Hawaiʻi, they’re right more often than anywhere else), entire villages abandoned their duties to play in the ocean. Men, women, and children would dive in to ride, compete, socialize, and flirt. Kings and queens claimed the best waves for themselves. Crafting a board was surrounded by ritual.

Polynesian cultures are the only ones in the world with gods who surf, and Hawaiian gods could totally rip. They challenged each other to surf competitions and surfed to seduce mortals. One goddess caught waves by riding her tongue!

For a thousand years, Hawaiians lived the philosophy every surfer knows to be true: When the waves are good, why would you want to do anything else?

Over a millennium, Hawaiians have built a vast body of surfing lore—language, proverbs, stories, and advice. It is indisputably the greatest surfing culture in history. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at modern surfing culture. Sure, films and magazines pay tribute to Hawaiʻi and its famous waves. Every surfer in the world throws the Hawaiian shaka hand gesture.

Beyond that, though, how much “Hawaiian-ness” is actually in Western surfing culture? Almost none.

How did this ancient indigenous sport come to be associated with blond Southern Californians? Surfing is an immigrant story. It came to America from a foreign land with a foreign name: It arrived as heʻe nalu in the early 1900s, introduced by Hawaiians who found themselves in places like Santa Cruz and San Diego and who missed the aquatic joys of home. But modern surfing culture truly began in post–World War II Southern California, when it exploded into pop culture (movies, music, magazines) and spread to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, when heʻe nalu transitioned into surfing, a lot was lost in translation.

This wasn’t entirely deliberate. Much of Hawaiʻi’s cultural knowledge just wasn’t available to anyone outside the islands. Hawaiʻi has a rich storytelling tradition, but to know the stories, you had to hear them firsthand, and you had to understand Hawaiian. Once the Hawaiian Kingdom began publishing newspapers, Hawaiians filled the pages with knowledge on every topic, including surfing. But you had to be able to read Hawaiian. Since then, only a fraction of that knowledge has been translated into English. Whatever is floating around on the internet today about Hawaiian culture, including surfing, is based on endless rehashing of what little has been translated.

If you were a kid living in San Diego in the 1950s and you picked up a surfboard for the first time, you had no history or deeper culture to look to for guidance. In the absence of Hawaiian knowledge, surfing became American. The first generation of American surfers created their own culture with their own values, sometimes for the worse. Some of modern surfing’s most toxic traits are Western inventions. One of the most glaring divides between Hawaiian and Westernized surfing culture is the past century’s notion that “girls can’t surf.”

Thankfully, that idea has been dying off in recent because it goes completely against Hawaiian culture. Hawaiians celebrated the exceptional skills and style of female surfers. In fact, in their myths, it was goddesses who laid the smackdown on men who thought they could surf better.

In modern surfing culture, fighting over waves is a constant conflict. But the Hawaiians of old loved sharing waves. When multiple people rode a wave, they often raised their arms like wings to resemble a flock of birds skimming the water. When kāne (man, men) and wāhine (women; singular wahine) found someone attractive, they rode the same wave to flirt with them.

The biggest difference between surfing’s Hawaiian roots and its modern American version is that modern surfers became a variation of the

American icon—photos show the rugged individual, the lone ocean cowboy, sun-soaked or storm-tossed, staring out to sea (although every surfer knows that just out of the photo’s frame, there are about thirty other people in the lineup).

In 1950s America, if you spent your life on the water rather than joining the rat race and “getting ahead,” you were bohemian, living outside the bounds of society.

But in Hawaiʻi, a life dedicated to the ocean didn’t mean separating yourself from society. It was society. Heʻe nalu was a joyous, communal, family activity. It was born out of one of the greatest water cultures in human history.