Alohato you

Sources

Where this comes from

Every factual claim on this site traces to something below, or is marked as unresolved where it stands. If you find otherwise, tell us and we will fix it in public.

The standard biography

  • David Davis, Waterman: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). The spine of our account: his life set against dispossession, amateurism and American racism.

Hawaiian and critical scholarship

  • Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011). The anchor for Hui Nalu, the Outrigger, and Hawaiian authority in the surf.
  • Patrick Moser, Surf and Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2022). The corrective on who carried surfing to the American mainland first.
  • Scott Laderman, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing (University of California Press, 2014).

Primary and near-primary

  • Duke Kahanamoku with Joe Brennan, Duke Kahanamoku's World of Surfing (Grosset and Dunlap, 1968). His own voice, as told to Brennan. Also the first place to look for the three famous sayings this site is still withholding, on the sourcing grounds set out below.
  • Joseph L. Brennan, Duke: The Life Story of Hawaiʻi's Duke Kahanamoku (Ku Paʻa, 1994). Written by a friend; affectionate, and used with that in mind.
  • Sandra Kimberley Hall and Greg Ambrose, Memories of Duke (Bess Press, 1995). Oral history from people who knew him.
  • Grady Timmons, Waikiki Beachboy (Editions Limited, 1989). The trade Duke came from.

On the word aloha

  • Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary (University of Hawaiʻi Press).
  • Mary Kawena Pukui, ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings (Bishop Museum Press).
  • Pukui, Haertig and Lee, Nānā i ke Kumu: Look to the Source.

Reporting

  • Honolulu Magazine, “Who Owns the Duke?” The chain-of-ownership reporting behind the story of the name.

What we have not settled

Four open questions, kept here deliberately. If you can close one with a primary source, we would like to hear.

  1. The sheriff's start date. References give 1932, 1934 and 1935. Thirteen two-year terms ending in 1961 back-date to 1935, elected November 1934; the Hawaiʻi State Archives election returns would settle it.
  2. Hui Nalu's founding year. Sources give both 1908 and 1911.
  3. The Ambassador of Aloha appointment. Sources give both 1960 and 1961.
  4. The police chief's words after the 1925 rescue. The famous line is quoted everywhere and we have not seen the original newspaper. Until someone produces the clipping, we paraphrase.

And the standing one: the three sayings attributed to Duke that circulate on posters and quotation sites, unsourced. If one of them appears in Duke Kahanamoku's World of Surfing or in Brennan's biography, with a page number, it goes on this site with the citation. Until then it does not.

The rules this site is written under

  • Nothing is stated as fact without a source; where accounts conflict, we show the conflict.
  • No invented or inherited quotations. No opinions put in his mouth.
  • No photograph of Duke appears without written, per-image clearance from the collection that holds it.
  • No artificially generated likeness of him, no synthesised voice, no colourised footage, ever.
  • Corrections are made in public, dated, at changes and corrections.