[mduncs]

Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym, so saying the Aloha shirt is a 'Hawaiian Shirt' is implying the shirt as part of native Hawaiian culture. What you say is technically true at a certain level, people who live in Hawaii do have the demonym of 'Hawaiian', but that term is reserved for the indigenous Polynesian people of Hawaii. It would seem odd to say for someone to say they enjoy native American food as a means of expressing their like of hamburgers and french fries.

[drb91]

> Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym

I can understand this; at the same time, from my perspective, people use it to refer to the geographical state. So, not refering to a people at all, but a source of origin. Kind of like how I don’t assume Americans eat American food; i just assume I can find it in America.

That said, I did learn they are called aloha shirts and will make an effort to use that instead.

[verylittlemeat]

Anyone reading this article or talking about Hawaiian shirts is using Hawaiian colloquially. Maybe you live in a milieu where a distinction is necessary but for most people it just comes off as word policing.

[mduncs]

The distinction of Hawaiian as a colloquial reference to anything from the state of Hawaii is made only outside of the state itself.

I can't change the way English itself works so there will always be that meaning, but to anyone from Hawaii, that distinction reminds us that native Hawaiians are distinct from the people of Hawaii today.

The Hawaiian culture has had its fair share of erasure and suppression. To make the distinction is an attempt to honor and remember the unique identity of native Hawaiians.

[rustler]

As an aside, those you refer to as "indigenous Polynesian people" are actually a later wave of Tahitian colonists who conquered and oppressed the previous settlers from the Marquesas Islands.

http://www.waimea.com/people.html

So it's not automatic that this particular wave of settlers uniquely deserves to be called "Hawaiian".

[mduncs]

While again being technically true, I would love to see any white or asian immigrants noting the ethnography of the original Hawaiian people in the time where they first made contact with and lived among the Hawaiian people.

By the time of Kamehameha, I was taught there was a unified monolithic Hawaiian culture.

[rustler]

But it's not called a native Hawaiian shirt. Hawaiian culture didn't end in 1778.

[mduncs]

Hawaii post-Cook ended up losing a lot of its population, because of that and other immigration it began to lose its culture. Other culture loss came fron Westernization and Christianity (Missionaries), the Hawaiian language itself was on the decline because of suppression until a renaissance in the 1970s.

The distinction of Hawaiian in reference to native people is a only made off the islands. To anyone from Hawaii or familiar with it calling it a Hawaiian shirt literally is wrong in our understanding of the word.

To try and spread that understanding of Hawaiian as reference to native peoples is to spread the knowledge that Hawaii is a multiethnic place with distinct native culture alongside its American, Asian and other Polynesian influences.

[coldtea]

>Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym, so saying the Aloha shirt is a 'Hawaiian Shirt' is implying the shirt as part of native Hawaiian culture.

Well, they wear a lot in Hawaii, so... Native Hawaiian culture didn't stop with Columbus...

[dragonwriter]

> Hawaiian is primarily used as an ethnonym

Even if so (and I think that's iffy), “primarily” is not the same as “exclusively”.