Brady Bunch Hawai'i

You know the episode, don't you? I was only very small at the time, and it is the only one I remember. It's the one where they're in Hawai'i and they dig up a little indigenous carving, and get cursed. Terrible things happen, and the women get black magic in their bellies.

I've heard a lot of theories about this, and read a lot of freudian and feminist analyses of the episode. The consensus seems to be that the episode is exposing the fragility of "society's" psycho-sexual norms. Yeah, whatever.

There is an assumption in that statement about what "society" means here. It certainly doesn't refer to my cultural framework.

Here's what I think the episode is all about, whether or not it was intended this way.

I think it's all about colonial guilt about aboriginal genocide and displacement. Digging up the carving is like unearthing the bloody past - the first nations who were destroyed to make way for a Brady-Bunch-world. All the psycho-sexual guilt and manifestations of sublimated erotic longings are merely an acting out of colonial guilt at the rape and sexual abuse inflicted upon native peoples by western invaders.

Pain in the belly has always been a reaction to trespassing on traditional storyplaces or sacred sites, and this is why the middle child is struck down bellysick. The episode represents white society's attempt to reconcile itself with its own sacrelige and profanity.

Click here to read about the ongoing violent colonisation of Hawai'i.