"Hula" STI app offends indigenous Hawaiians, plans to carry on regardless

Via Wikimedia

It's getting to the point where marketers are being challenges to rethink our causal brand appropriation of cultures — even when we mean no harm.

Case in point: The Hula app, "a free way to find STD testing, get the results on your phone, and share your verified STD status," has made some native Hawaiians angry.

From Global News:

An online petition is asking for the “Hula” app to change its name.  

...

The three college students who started the petition say they are not opposed to the app’s functions but don’t want to see the hula dance – a beloved cultural art form – exploited. 

“My culture is more than a tourist destination,” said Kelly Luis, a student at Columbia University. “It is more than a place to go for the summer. It’s more than just sexy hula girls on the beach. There is a culture there.”

The Change.org petition, which so far has just over 1200 signatures, details how Hula was a sacred art form that was suppressed by colonial missionaries, and is now degraded by sexualized portayals in popular culture.

Some protestors on the Hula Facebook page also bring up the supreme irony in naming an STD app after a Polynesian sacred rite. Following European contact in the late 1700s, venereal diseases introduced by foreign sailors decimated indigenous Pacific island nations. From the time of Captain Cook's landing in Hawaii in 1778 to 1853, the population of the islands fell from an estimated 300,000 to just 71,019.

Screencaps via Hula

I have no doubt that the people developing the Hula app and brand bore no ill will towards the Hawaiian people.

Global reports that the company posted the following on their Facebook page:

“We are in the process of learning more from your community, discussing internally and hope to address your concerns shortly.”

I can't seem to find it, however.

The company's CEO and founder, Ramin Bastani, told AP that he is going ahead with the brand name, but will stop using puns like "getting lei'd" because he "didn't realize that it was offensive."

Here's his story about the brand evolution:

The app was originally named Qpid.me, but it sounded too similar to a dating site and was changed to "Hula" because the company wanted to evoke a "sense of beauty and being relaxed," Bastani said. "It was a pop culture sense of the name." 

"We loved the idea of calm and beauty of anything Hawaiian," he said, "which is the antithesis of anything having to do with health care." 

Learning about Hawaiian culture has taught him that dancing hula is a "communication tool" used to pass on information among generations, Bastani said. "That plays very well with what we actually believe as the core of the company."

To be honest, I could have made the same mistake. It's really easy to see cultural traditions, which have been treated so superficially for so long in popular culture, as nothing more. And indeed, Hawaii itself has marketed a sexy, silly, version of Hula for some time.

This instance is not easy to be judgemental about. Native Hawaiians have the right to define what their cultural and religious properties mean to them, and are more than justified in being offended. At the same time, "mainstream" western culture has a tradition of treating its own religions irreverently.

The Hula people most likely believe that the controversy will blow over. In the meantime, they will probably actually benefit from the publicity, since everyone now knows who they are.

Meanwhile, the Hawaiian students have an international stage on which to start to redefine the way we perceive and treat indigenous cultures and their best-known rituals.

In a weird, cynical, marketing-world way, everyone kind of wins this one.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water, water, everywhere?

Change.org|Start Petition

It's raining today in Ottawa. It's a reminder of how lucky we are here in Canada, where lakes are said to outnumber people and where up to 20% of the world's fresh water reserves remain.

Today, bloggers all over the world are speaking out about access to fresh water for Blog Action Day 2010.

You'll see stories about all the things we need to do to guarantee fresh water to people in the third world and poverty and conflict zones. But all far away from home, right?

Wrong.

For the past several months, we have been working with Amnesty International Canada on strategies to rally public support for the Lubicon Cree, a band of indigenous people who are living without land rights, stewardship of their traditional resources, or even drinkable water. In Canada.

You often hear about human rights horrors committed in the name of cheap oil. But once again, these stories tend to happen far away. This, however, is happening in Alberta.



This is a preview. You can watch the 20-minute documentary here.

The Lubicon, you see, have the misfortune of having their ancestral lands sitting on top of Canada's oil sands — a massive, if "dirty", reserve of petroleum.

Says Amnesty:

"More than 2,600 oil and gas wells have been drilled on Lubicon Cree land in northern Alberta, Canada. This intensive development has taken place against the wishes of the Lubicon people and has led to tragic consequences for their society. Even more destructive forms of development – including oil sands extraction – are planned for the future.

International human rights bodies have long been critical of the poverty, widespread ill-health and culture loss that has resulted from the near total destruction of the Lubicon economy and way of life.."

And it's not just Amnesty who have given this issue, and Canada's human rights record, world attention on this issue. In 1990, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Canada had failed to protect the Lubicon Cree's rights by allowing the development of logging, oil and gas on the community's traditional hunting and trapping lands. (not that Canada is showing the UN much respect these days...)

So why don't the Lubicon just move, you might ask? Would you leave your homeland to someone who was planning to rip it apart?

The Lubicon situation is further complicated by the fact that they never signed a treaty with the British Crown. The sad truth is that when Canadian government commissioners negotiated Treaty 8 with other northern Alberta "Indians" in 1899 they travelled down the the Athabasca and Peace rivers and missed the "isolated community" who were not on the route.

In the many years since, there have been some federal government attempts to reconcile this mistake, but no mutually satisfactory deal has been reached. In the meantime, the Province of Alberta, which manages its own oil and gas development, continues to grant licences to global oil companies to exploit these "Crown Lands".

And how does this all relate back to Blog Action Day? It's something in the water.

In 1992, Lubicon Cree Rose Ominayak read this statement to the Alberta Commission of Review:

"Our children are sick from drinking water that oil has spilled in. They are sick from breathing the poisoned and polluted air the pulp mill has made. We are sick from eating animals, animals that are sick from disease from poisoned plants and water. Our children have nothing–they can’t breathe–even that has been taken. Their culture, the bush life, has been destroyed by development. When we were young we lived in the bush–it was a good life. Now, we have no traplines, nothing to hunt. There are no jobs, no money to live a decent life. We see ourselves, our men and our children falling into despair, hopelessness, low self-esteem and drinking. Families are broken like never before. Drinking and violence rise as our spirits fall."

So what can you do about this injustice? First of all, you need to get informed. Visit Amnesty's Justice for the Lubicon Cree site, or join the Facebook Page Speak up for the rights of the Lubicon Cree. Then, whether you are Canadian or not, you can take action by making your voice heard.

For their — and for all of our — futures.