Isaiah Walker at ESPN ActionSports, the HIC Pro

Isaiah Walker; photo by Daniel ItoLast week Isaiah Helekunihi Walker was featured at ESPN ActionSports, where he spoke about the inspiration behind his book Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i:

“I was born and raised in Hilo, and growing up in Hilo I always had an image of these surfers called ‘The Hui,’ so when I was on the North Shore, going to school, somebody told me ‘there is a guy [the late Imbert Soren] who works here, and he started the club and you gotta go meet him. . . . [Soren] was so cool to me—a lot of aloha and hugs. . . . [Meeting him] was a really different vibe of what I thought and what I imagined as a child. It started me off on this journey of interviewing more surfers, and from those interviews and stories, it led to a deeper analysis of how much deeper we had to look to understand some of these voices.”

Read the full post: http://espn.go.com/action/surfing/blog/_/post/7224826/shedding-light-hawaiian-culture

Walker was also interviewed at the 2011 HIC Pro, held earlier this month at Sunset Beach. Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwYThrsIbVE

Photo by Daniel Ikaika Ito