Compare and Contrast: Hawaiian Hula Kahiko and Native American Dance

While traditional Native American dance and the Hawaiian hula kahiko are both unique to their cultures, an educated comparison reveals they share many similarities in technique and meaning. In this essay, I will explore these similarities along with the differences that make each dance exclusive to its people.

Both the hula kahiko and Native American dance are rooted in the spiritual realm. The Native Americans used dance to ask for the Creator's blessings in several areas such as agriculture, fertility, and war. Likewise, the hula was a prayer that was so powerful that, when done wrong, the people believed it could lead to disaster. Both cultures saw dance as directly tied to their gods and, therefore, very important.

However, while until recently dancing in the Native American culture was entirely spiritual, Hula was not a tool for religious fulfillment alone. Though it was always performed in a blessed space by a dancer who had undergone extensive training, it communicated poetry, history, and held other entertainment merits in addition to its spirituality. In this way, Native American dance acted as a means to communicate with the gods while the hula spoke to both the audience and the gods.

Hula kahiko also held in high regard the inner intelligence of the dancer. In order to understand the dance's power and meaning, the dancer had to enroll in a hula halau (dance school) where she'd be separated from the community while receiving extensive training and thus earning the right to dance. There is no difficult work requirement for one's right to dance in the Native American culture. In a sense, this makes Native American dance seem more communal since the dance was not reserved for a limited few and was not preformed for individual aristocrats (as hula often was) but for a shared deity.

Both the Hula kahiko and traditional Native American dance involve full body movement: bent knees, head, arms, and legs all moving. Additionally, drums act as the central instrument and both implement chanting along with the movement and music. Furthermore, both dance styles integrate symbolic actions that often represent natural elements (moving arms to mimic the waves; spreading arms out and circling like an eagle.)

While each incorporates symbolic movements that drive the meaning of the dance, Hula is much more gestural, bordering on a form of sign language. The motion of the hands plays a large role in the dance, and occasionally hula dancers will be seated, moving just their hands during a performance. This would not be seen during a Native American performance because there is a stronger emphasis on foot movement, especially stomping.

Because of this gestural emphasis, hula tends to use more fluid and sustained hand movements where Native American dance is always sudden and strong. Granted, there are also plenty of sudden and strong actions in the hula-- for example, in this men's hula kihiko performance available on YouTube-- but in hula, the hands can be sudden or sustained and light or strong depending on what is being depicted in the dance.

An interesting similarity between both the hula and Native American dances is their cultures' response to the West. For different reasons, Western settlers feared both these styles of dance: the hula because the dancer's body was exposed and seemed sinful; and the Native American dances because the settlers assumed the drumming meant hostility. Instead of ending the dancing as the Westerners would have preferred, the societies responded by creating secular dances that showed the West the dances were safe. Out of this bloomed the Native American grass dance (prerequisite to the modern powwow) and the hula 'auana, the dance Hawaiian tourists expect to see on vacation today.

Sources:

Doolittle, Lisa and Heather Elton; Medicine of the Brave: A Look at the Changing Role of Dance in Native Culture from the Buffalo Days to the Modern Pow Wow

Kealiinohomoku, Joann W; Hula Space and Its Transmutations

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