The Shaka Demonstration by a Valley Isle Excursions Maui Guide
Valley Isle Excursion's Maui guides are very entertaining. Their stories are full of history, mystery, fun and adventure. They love a good joke and while they are out showing visitors the incredible island we live on, are out to have some fun too. This Maui tour guide demonstrates the types of Shaka greetings as seen from different walks of life and backgrounds. Some of the greetings between the Hawaiian's range from rude and funny to just plain bad. The greeting styles between friends and family include the Hawaiian, Italian, the crab, the fisherman and just the plain old flash that you see in pictures and on the street. This is definitely not an all inclusive list but it gives you an idea of the fun we have with it and with life here on the Hawaiian Islands.
The Shaka Story
There are many stories out there about how the shaka (thumb and pinky finger up while the rest of the fingers are down) wave or greeting came to be.
The one that I am most familiar with is this one. A man, because of an accident, was missing three of his fingers still would wave to friends, family and others in the usual way. His wave would be just the thumb and the pinky extended because he had no other fingers to extend. I am not quite sure of how that came to be. It could have been from a shark bite while surfing, working in the sugar cane fields or some other accident. That's a question to ask a Maui Guide while you are visiting Hawaii.
This man was seen often walking on the local beaches and was well liked by the surf kids. The kids in the surf would wave to him and he would wave back in his distinctive style. After a while, they began to copy his wave and as sort of an underground, in the know joke, greet each other and him with what we know as the shaka greeting today.
The shaka then quickly spread throughout the Hawaiian islands and became the unofficial greeting to friends and between locals. So when you see the wave, you know it's just our way of saying hello, thank you or Aloha!
