When Texas Tangles with Tiki Gods: The Global Farce Behind Sam Houston vs Hawaiʻi

From the Deck of a Slowly Sinking Cruise Ship Somewhere Between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mariana Trench
by Our Correspondent-at-Large, still waiting for the Wi-Fi to load

The phrase “Sam Houston vs Hawaii” sounds like the kind of fever dream you’d get after eating too much poke washed down with lukewarm Lone Star beer. To the untrained ear it suggests a boxing match refereed by a confused TSA agent in flip-flops, or perhaps a Supreme Court case about the constitutional right to wear a lei inside a Houston strip mall. In reality, it is a tidy, almost allegorical spat that, viewed from abroad, tells you everything you need to know about the planet’s current trajectory toward self-parody.

Let us rewind. Last month, the University of Hawaiʻi’s Board of Regents filed a polite but lethal 47-page complaint against the Houston-based Sam Houston State University (now ambitiously rebranded as “Sam Houston University” because nothing says upward mobility like lopping off the word “State”). At issue: Sam Houston’s new athletics logo, which allegedly borrows the Hawaiian war god Kūkaʻilimoku and turns him into a kind of muscular armadillo wearing a football helmet. The regents call it “cultural appropriation”; Sam Houston’s lawyers call it “market differentiation.” The rest of the world calls it Tuesday.

From Lagos to Lisbon, observers recognize the template. A former colonial outpost (Hawaiʻi) protests that its sacred imagery is being strip-mined by a landlocked energy-state with more cattle than vowels (Texas). The spectacle is not new; it’s simply moved from the British Museum’s basement to the ESPN scroll. One half expects the European Court of Human Rights to weigh in on whether a flaming spear is protected under the Geneva Conventions on Good Taste.

Globally, the episode is being read like tea leaves at the bottom of a discarded boba cup. In Seoul, marketing executives watch nervously to see whether deities can be trademarked, because if Kū is off-limits, their upcoming campaign featuring a chubby, winking Buddha selling kimchi-flavored NFTs might be next. Meanwhile, in Geneva, WIPO bureaucrats update their flowcharts: step 3, subsection C—when indigenous iconography meets American gridiron, deploy the popcorn emoji.

The economic stakes are comically small but spiritually enormous. Sam Houston’s merchandising revenue—roughly the cost of a single Hawaiian parking ticket—wouldn’t keep Jeff Bezos in rocket fuel for one sub-orbital pout. Yet the university has already manufactured 40,000 foam “Kū fingers,” proving once again that late capitalism can monetize anything except shame. Hawaiʻi, for its part, is demanding the destruction of every offending foam digit, plus a ceremonial apology delivered on a surfboard made of recycled lawsuits. One imagines diplomats practicing their hang-ten dismounts between sessions on climate reparations.

What makes this quarrel internationally resonant is its perfect miniature of larger geopolitics. A Pacific archipelago, still coping with the radioactive souvenir of nuclear testing, squares off against a continental super-state that treats oceans as decorative moats. Replace “logo” with “lithium mine” or “naval base” and you have the next decade’s headlines, only with more explosions and fewer foam fingers.

And so the planet watches, half-amused, half-horrified. In Kyiv, a soldier scrolling on a cracked phone sees the story and laughs: at least his war has honest artillery. In Jakarta, a climate activist sighs: if only indigenous protests against rising seas got this much airtime. Somewhere above the Arctic Circle, a polar bear on the last ice floe flips a foam Kū finger at humanity, then sinks.

Conclusion: Sam Houston will likely settle, issue a carefully worded statement about “respecting indigenous partners,” and keep the merchandising profits in a lockbox labeled “Athletic Excellence.” Hawaiʻi will claim symbolic victory and return to fighting bigger colonial ghosts. The rest of us will bookmark the saga under “Future Museum Exhibits: 21st-Century Absurdities, Wing C.” And when the oceans finally finish their slow conquest of both Honolulu and Houston, the last surviving cockroach will crawl across a faded foam finger, wondering why the gods ever bothered with humans in the first place.