Introduction

We protest against the movement in favor of doing away with the independence of our country; we protest against the effort to force annexation to the United States without consulting the people. . . .

Memorial to President Cleveland from the Hui Aloha 'Aina (Hawaiian patri- ots) on the American overthrow of the Hawaiian government, 1893

I do not feel. . . we should forfeit the traditional rights and privileges of the natives of our islands for a mere thimbleful of votes in Congress; that we, the lovers of Hawai'i from long association with it should sacrifice our birthright for the greed of alien desires to remain on our shores.. . .

Kamokila Campbell before Congress on statehood for Hawai'i, 1946

Our country has been and is being plasticized, cheapened, and exploited. They're selling it in plastic leis, coconut ashtrays, and cans of "gen- uine, original Aloha." They've raped us, sold us,

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killed us, and still they expect us to behave. . . . Hawai'i is a colony of the imperialist United States.

Kehau Lee on evictions of Hawaiians from Native lands, 1970

The time has come to create a mechanism for self- government for the Hawaiian people. The question of Hawaiian sovereignty and self-determination needs to be dealt with now.

Mililani Trask before Congress on Hawaiian sovereignty, 19901

Spanning nearly a hundred years, these statements by Native Hawaiians stun most Americans who have come, over the course of their consumer society, First World lifetimes, to believe that Hawai'i is as American as hot dogs and CNN. Worse, Americans assume that if an opportunity arises, they too may make the trip to paradise, following along after the empire into the sweet and sunny land of palm trees and "hulahula" girls.

This predatory view of my Native land and culture is not only opposed by increasing numbers of us, it is angrily and resolutely defied: Hawaiians commemorated the centenary of the overthrow of our government with mass arrests and demonstrations against the denial of our human right to self-determination. For us, Hawaiian self- government has always been preferable to American foreign govern- ment. No matter what Americans believe, most of us in the colonies do not feel grateful that our country was stolen, along with our citizen- ship, our lands, and our independent place among the family of nations. We are not happy Natives.

On the ancient burial grounds of our ancestors, glass and steel shopping malls with layered parking lots stretch over what were once the most ingeniously irrigated taro lands, lands that fed millions of our people over thousands of years. Large bays, delicately ringed long ago with well-stocked fishponds, are now heavily silted and cluttered with jet skis, windsurfers, and sailboats. Multistory hotels disgorge over six

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million tourists a year onto stunningly beautiful (and easily polluted) beaches, closing off access to locals. On the major islands of Hawai'i, Maui, O'ahu, and Kaua'i, meanwhile, military airfields, training camps, weapons storage facilities, and exclusive housing and beach areas remind the Native Hawaiian who owns Hawai'i: the foreign, colonial country called the United States of America.

But American colonization has brought more than physical transformation to the lush and sacred islands of our ancestors. Visible in garish "Polynesian" revues, commercial ads using our dance and language to sell vacations and condominiums, and the trampling of sacred heiau (temples) and burial grounds as tourist recreation sites, a grotesque commercialization of everything Hawaiian has damaged Hawaiians psychologically, reducing our ability to control our lands and waters, our daily lives, and the expression and integrity of our cul- ture. The cheapening of Hawaiian culture (for example, the traditional value of aloha as reciprocal love and generosity now used to sell every- thing from cars and plumbing to securities and air conditioning) is so complete that non-Hawaiians, at the urging of the tourist industry and the politicians, are transformed into "Hawaiians at heart," a phrase that speaks worlds about how grotesque the theft of things Hawaiian has become. Economically, the statistic of thirty tourists for every Native means that land and water, public policy, law, and the general political attitude are shaped by the ebb and flow of tourist industry demands. For our Native people, the inundation of foreigners decrees marginalization in our own land.

The state of Hawai'i, meanwhile, pours millions of dollars into the tourism industry, even to the extent of funding a booster club—the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau—whose television and radio propaganda tells locals, "the more you give" to tourism, "the more you get."

And what Hawaiians "get" is population densities like Hong Kong in some areas; a housing shortage owing to staggering numbers of migrants from the continental United States and Asia; a soaring crime rate, as impoverished locals prey on flauntingly rich tourists; and environmental crises, including water depletion, which threaten the entire archipelago. Rather than stem the flood, the state is projecting a tidal wave of twelve million tourists by the year 2010 and encouraging rocket launching facilities and battleship homeporting as added eco- nomic "security."

For my people, this latest degradation is but another stage in the agony that began with the first footfall of European explorers in 1778,

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similarities with Whyte

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shattering two millennia of Hawaiian civilization characterized by an indigenous way of caring for the land, called malama 'aina.

iH istory

Before there existed an England, an English language, or an Anglo-Saxon people, our Native culture was forming. And it was as antithetical to the European developments of Christianity, capitalism, and predatory individualism as any society could have been. But in several respects, Hawaiian society had remarkably much in common with indigenous societies throughout the world.

The economy of pre-haole Hawai'i depended primarily on a bal- anced use of the products of the land and sea.2 Each of the eight inhab- ited islands was divided into separate districts (known as 'okana), run- ning from the mountains to the sea. Each 'okana was then subdivided into ahupua'a, which themselves ran in wedge-shaped pieces from the mountains to the sea. Each ahupua'a was then fashioned into 'ili, on which resided the 'ohana (extended families), who cultivated the land. The 'ohana was the core economic unit in Hawaiian society.

As in most indigenous societies, there was no money, no idea or practice of surplus appropriation, value storing, or payment deferral because there was no idea of financial profit from exchange. In other words, there was no basis for economic exploitation in pr e-haole Hawai'i.

Exchange between 'ohana who lived near the sea with 'ohana who lived inland constituted the economic life of the multitudes of commu- nities which densely populated the Hawaiian islands. Ahupua'a were economically independent. As local anthropologist Marion Kelly has written, "Under the Hawaiian system of land-use rights, the people liv- ing in each ahupua'a had access to all the necessities of life," thus estab- lishing an independence founded upon the availability of "forest land, taro and sweet potato areas, and fishing grounds."3

If kinship formed the economic base of Hawaiian society, it also established the complex network of ali'i (chiefs), who competed in terms of rank (established by mana, or spiritual power derived from chiefly genealogies or from conquest in war) and ability to create order and prosperity on the land. The highest ranking ali'i were advised by a

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council of chiefs and a kahuna (priestly) class who were themselves quite powerful.

The maka'ainana (people of the land) made up the great bulk of the population and, although subordinate to their ali'i caretakers, were independent in many ways. Unlike feudal European economic and political arrangements—to which the ancient Hawaiian system has often been erroneously compared—the maka'ainana neither owed mili- tary service to the ali'i nor were they bound to the land.

The genius of the mutually beneficial political system of pre- haole Hawai'i was simply that an interdependence was created where- by the maka'ainana were free to move with their 'ohana to live under an ali'i of their choosing while the ali'i increased their status and material prosperity by having more people living within their moku, or "domain." The result was an incentive for the society's leaders to pro- vide for all their constituents' well-being and contentment. To fail to do so meant the loss of status and thus of mana for the ali'i.

Moral order, or the code upon which determinations of "right" and "wrong" were based, inhered in the kapu, or system of sacred law. It was the kapu that determined everything from the time for farming and war-making to correct mating behavior among ali'i and maka-

'ainana alike. My people believed that all living things had spirit and, indeed, consciousness and that gods were many and not singular. Since the land was an ancestor, no living thing could be foreign. The cosmos, like the natural world, was a universe of familial relations. And human beings were but one constituent link in the larger family. Thus gods had human as well as animal form and human ancestors inhabited different physical forms after death. Nature was not objecti- fied but personified, resulting in an extraordinary respect (when com- pared to Western ideas of nature) for the life of the sea, the heavens, and the earth. Our poetry and dance reveal this great depth of sensu- ous feeling—of love—for the beautiful world we inhabited.

When Captain James Cook stumbled upon this interdependent and wise society in 1778, he brought an entirely foreign system into the lives of my ancestors, a system based on a view of the world that could not coexist with that of Hawaiians. He brought capitalism, Western political ideas (such as predatory individualism), and Christianity. Most destructive of all, he brought diseases that ravaged my people until we were but a remnant of what we had been on contact with his pestilential crew.4

In less than a hundred years after Cook's arrival, my people had been dispossessed of our religion, our moral order, our form of chiefly

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government, many of our cultural practices, and our lands and waters. Introduced diseases, from syphilis and gonorrhea to tuberculosis, small pox, measles, leprosy, and typhoid fever, killed Hawaiians by the hundreds of thousands, reducing our Native population (from an esti- mated one million at contact) to less than 40,000 by 1890.5

Upon the heels of British explorers and their diseases, Ameri- cans came to dominate the sandalwood trade in the 1820s. Coincident with this early capitalism was the arrival of Calvinist missionaries who introduced a religious imperialism that was as devastating a scourge as any venereal pox. Conveniently for the missionaries, the Hawaiian uni- verse had collapsed under the impact of mass death. The fertile field of conversion was littered with the remnants of holocaust, a holocaust created by white foreigners and celebrated by their later counterparts as the will of a Christian god. By the 1840s, Hawaiians numbered less than 100,000, a population collapse of nearly 90 percent in less than seventy years. Missionary imperialism had been successful in convert- ing our dying people who believed that the Christian promise of ever- lasting life meant the everlasting physical life of our nation.

A combination of religious and economic forces enabled aggres- sive Americans to enter the government, where they pressured the chiefs and King unceasingly for private property land tenure. In the meantime, whaling had come briefly to control the economy, while in the United States, President John Tyler enunciated the infamous Tyler Doctrine of 1842, which asserted to European powers that Hawai'i was in the "U.S. sphere of influence" and therefore off-limits to European interventions. The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, mean- while, replied to the Tyler Doctrine with a Manifest Destiny statement suggesting that "Americans should acknowledge their own interests" in Hawai'i as a "virtual right of conquest" over the "mind and heart" of the Hawaiian people.

Gunboat diplomacy by Western powers and missionary duplic- ity against the Hawaiian chiefs forced the transformation of Hawaiian land tenure from communal use to private property by the middle of the nineteenth century. After a five-month British takeover of the gov- ernment in 1843, a weary and frightened King Kamehameha III gave in to haole advisers for a division of the lands, called the Mahele. This dispossession of the Hawaiians' birthright—our one hanau, or birth- sands—allowed foreigners to own land. Through the unrelenting efforts of missionaries like Gerrit P. Judd, the Mahele was attained in 1848-1850.6 Our disease-ridden ancestors, confused by Christianity and preyed upon by capitalists, were thereby dispossessed. Traditional

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lands were quickly transferred to foreign ownership and burgeoning sugar plantations. By 1888, three-quarters of all arable land was con- trolled by haole.7 In this way, as one haole legal scholar has remarked, "Western imperialism had been accomplished without the usual both- ersome wars and costly colonial administration."8

The decade of the 1850s witnessed a struggle between those planters seeking annexation to avoid U.S. sugar tariffs and a monarchy attempting to preserve its sovereignty while fending off military inter- ventions and a growing foreign element in the Kingdom. The first annexation treaty was drafted by Americans in the King's government, and it sought Hawai'i's admission as a state in order to guarantee Na- tive rights.9 But Kamehameha III was opposed to annexation, and the treaty remained unsigned at his death. His successor, Prince Alexander Liholiho, ascended the throne in 1854. He terminated ongoing negoti- ations for annexation to the United States, substituting a policy of "sov- ereignty with reciprocity." Concerned that American sugar planters in Hawai'i would agitate for annexation to circumvent both the high U.S. sugar tariff and competition with sugar from the Philippines and other foreign markets, Liholiho attempted to ease their fears through a reci- procity treaty that would satisfy the planters' demand for profit. To protect Hawaiian independence, meanwhile, he coupled his reciproci- ty position with an independence policy. Under this plan, the United States, France, and Britain would agree to respect and maintain the independence of Hawai'i.

The Reciprocity Treaty died in the U.S. Senate, while all three Euro-American powers proclaimed their lack of interest in annexing Hawai'i. Of course, sugar planters were unhappy at the failure of the treaty, but the boom in sugar profits (1857-1867) caused by the ban on southern sugar in the northern states during the Civil War delayed the cries for another treaty. A post-Civil War depression, however, rekin- dled agitation for reciprocity in Hawai'i.

In the meantime, Liholiho died, quite suddenly, in 1863. His brother, Prince Lot, succeeded him as Kamehameha V. He, too, was a strong advocate of Hawaiian independence, and he continued his brother's policy of seeking a reciprocity treaty and a quadripartite treaty with France, Britain, and the United States ensuring the inde- pendence and neutrality of Hawai'i.

But while the King's government sought to protect Hawaiian sovereignty, the new U.S. Minister to Hawai'i, James McBride, was suggesting that cession of a port at Honolulu should be a condition of any reciprocity treaty. He also urged the permanent stationing of a U.S.

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warship in Hawaiian waters to guard American interests. This became a reality in 1866 when the U.S.S. Lackawanna was assigned to the islands for an indefinite period.

Protecting economic interests with military might was but an extension of the Manifest Destiny policy that Americans had practiced on the continent. Indeed, after the American imperium had spread to the Pacific Coast (California and Oregon were part of the United States by 1848), bellwether newspapers like the New York Times stated on July 22, 1868, that the United States was "bound within a short time to become the great commercial, and controlling, and civilizing power of the Pacific." This sentiment accurately reflected the policy of the American government whose Secretary of State, William H. Seward, had been an advocate of annexation since before the Civil War and who had considered "purchasing" Hawai'i as Alaska had been "pur- chased" in 1867.

The biggest push toward annexation, however, did not come from the continent but from haole sugar planters in Hawai'i. Each downswing in the sugar industry resulted in familiar cries for closer union. Heated controversies broke out in the press and the legislature as Hawaiians responded to planter demands for "reciprocity or annex- ation" with intensely nationalistic statements opposed to American control and intervention. The feverish atmosphere was exacerbated when Henry Pierce assumed his post as Minister to Hawai'i in 1869 and immediately urged the cession of Pearl River Lagoon as a naval station in exchange for a reciprocity treaty. The haole newspapers, such as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, supported cession of Pearl River as a quid pro quo for reciprocity. But they also supported annexation, as did Pierce, seeing in reciprocity the first step toward union.

The Advertiser's pronouncements coincided with a change in sovereign. Kamehameha V had died in 1872. His successor, William Lunalilo, was greatly loved by his people, who overwhelmingly elect- ed him as sovereign. Once elected, however, Lunalilo gave in to his Ministers' urging and reluctantly agreed to negotiate a reciprocity treaty that included the cession of Pearl River Lagoon.

Lunalilo's position on cession had been encouraged by local haole

banker and Cabinet Minister Charles Bishop who, with U.S. General Schofield, had discussed the American desire for a military base at Pearl River. Later, Schofield would tell Congress that the Hawaiian Islands constituted the only natural outpost to defenses of the Pacific Coast, implying support for annexation by the United States.

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Both Bishop and Schofield were disappointed, however, when Lunalilo reversed himself. The Native public outcry against any ces- sion of Hawaiian land convinced the King he would receive no support for his actions. To a person, Hawaiians viewed cession as a prelude to annexation, which they vigorously and vehemently opposed, arguing in the Hawaiian newspapers that annexation would be national death.

Keenly aware of American racism because of haole treatment of American Indians and enslaved African peoples on the continent, Hawaiians understood they would be classified with other "colored races," like Liholiho had been when, as Crown Prince, he had traveled by train through the United States and had been ejected, along with his brother Prince Lot, because of his skin color.

As their newspapers argued, Hawaiians would suffer "virtual enslavement under annexation," including further loss of lands and liberties. Understanding both the predatory designs of the sugar planters in Hawai'i and the haole politicians on the continent, Hawaiians supported their chiefs in resisting annexation.

Lunalilo had no sooner changed his mind, bowing to the wishes of his people, when he contracted tuberculosis and died in 1874. His reign had lasted less than thirteen months.

The King's death was but the most glaring example of the toll introduced diseases had been taking on the Native people since the arrival of Cook in 1778. The first "gifts" of venereal disease and tuber- culosis brought by the British were followed by diseases introduced by Americans and Asians: typhoid fever, measles, smallpox, influenza, and leprosy. Lacking immunities and plagued by political and eco- nomic crises, the Hawaiian population continued its rapid decline. It was a vastly weakened nation that faced yet another political crisis fol- lowing the death of their beloved sovereign.

While debates over the threat to Hawaiian sovereignty raged in the papers, an immediate menace to Native independence was posed by the constant interference of U.S. naval forces to quell civil distur- bances in the city of Honolulu. Since the early eighteenth-century pres- ence of whalers and merchants in the new towns, such as Lahaina and Honolulu, civil disturbances had increased. Alcohol and prostitution exacerbated the problem. The Kingdom was periodically inundated by foreigners, often rowdy and drunk, congregating at the ports and in city saloons.

But peacekeeping was a superficial excuse for the continuing American military presence. As every U.S. Minister after the Civil War

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had argued, warships were needed to protect American economic inter- ests. Thus when political disturbances threatened to disrupt the sugar industry, the U.S. military intervened.

Just such an occurrence followed the untimely death of Lunalilo, when Kalakaua ran against Dowager Queen Emma for the throne. His supporters and those of the Queen engaged in a brief conflict that pre- cipitated the landing of United States marines, ostensibly to maintain order but in reality to support the pro-American Kalakaua against the pro-British Emma. Kalakaua became King, but he was indebted to the Americans for his election.

After nearly forty years of negotiation, a Reciprocity Treaty was concluded under Kalakaua's administration in 1875. It brought imme- diate relief to the sugar industry, indeed, an unprecedented boom. Sugar exports to the U.S. went from 17 million pounds in 1875 to 115 million pounds in 1883. Of the 32 plantations that dominated the Hawaiian economy, 25 were American-owned.

But while the treaty brought a temporary boost to Hawai'i's economy, it also brought a flood of foreign immigrants to work the sugar plantations. Between 1877 and 1890, 55,000 new immigrants flooded Hawai'i, an increase of 33 percent in their numbers. During the same period, the Native population was halved, while the haole popu- lation soared. By 1890, Hawaiians made up less than half the popula- tion (45 percent) while haole and Asians were 55 percent of the popula- tion. This increase infuriated Hawaiians, who saw, correctly, that the decline of their own people coupled with the large-scale foreign influx would endanger Native control of their homeland.

American interests, meanwhile, grew larger by the day: planta- tion ownership was predominantly American, and Kalakaua's min- istry was entirely American in sentiment. Henry Pierce, American Minister to Hawai'i, reflected this reality when he argued in 1877 that the islands were an American colony in all their material and political interests.

A predictable economic crisis in the 1880s left Kalakaua with a debt-ridden government and public agitation by both Natives and haole planters for a resolution. President Garfield's Secretary of State James G. Blaine had begun the decade by baldly stating that Hawai'i had become the key to the dominion of the Pacific. For him, and for most other arrogant politicians from the continent, American control of the commercial life of Hawai'i made it an outlying district of California.

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Finally, American military and economic interests triumphed in the Reciprocity Treaty of 1887 when Pearl River Lagoon was ceded to the United States in exchange for duty-free sugar. The treaty had been accomplished as a result of the aptly named "Bayonet Constitution" forced upon Kalakaua by haole merchants and politicians. Impudently self-titled the "Hawaiian League," this group was in fact an all-white gang of businessmen, armed with guns from San Francisco, formed specifically to protect the interests of haole property owners. A sub- group, the Honolulu Rifles, was an all -haole annexation club. Unable to dominate the legislature, the Hawaiian League effectively seized power by forcing Kalakaua to agree to a new constitution in which the Ministry was no longer responsible to the King but to the legislature. To ensure haole domination of the legislature, the electorate was severe- ly restricted by income qualifications of $600 or $3,000 worth of prop- erty. The intended and immediate result was that missionary descen- dants, whose parents had benefited from the land division of 1848, cap- tured the legislature. The Cabinet and patronage went to the Hawaiian League. Predictably, what the haole capitalists could not achieve through their much-touted system of American-style democracy, they took through another time-honored American tradition of thuggery and armed intervention. The worst cut of all was the extension of suf- frage to foreigners willing to swear allegiance to the new government.

Of the results of this usurper's constitution, U.S. Commissioner James Blount, sent years later to investigate the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, wrote:

Power was taken from the King in the selection of nobles, not to be given to ihe masses but to the wealthy classes, a large majority of whom were not subjects of the Kingdom. Power to remove the Cabinet was taken away from the King not to be conferred on a popular body but on one designed to be ruled by foreign subjects. Power to do any act was taken from the King. . . . This instrument was never submitted to the people for approval or rejection, nor was this ever contemplated by its friends and promoters.10

Together with the cession of Pearl River Lagoon, the Bayonet Constitution effectively challenged the sovereignty of the Kingdom.

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British Minister Wodehouse observed at the time, ". . . the Hawaiian Kingdom has relinquished its own territory to a foreign power." The United States, in collusion with white settlers in Hawai'i, moved inex- orably to fulfill the prophecy of Manifest Destiny. Extending the Amer- ican imperium into the Pacific seemed entirely natural to a people and a government seasoned by centuries of genocide against American Indians.

After the Bayonet Constitution, racist arguments about Native cultural inferiority and political and economic inability appeared daily in the haole newspapers of the times, justifying the seizure of power and the deafening calls for annexation. Enraged by the actions of the planter aristocracy, the Hawaiians revolted, seeking to revise the Bayonet Constitution in favor of the more equitable Constitution of 1864. Once again, American troops were landed to "restore order," pre- figuring their role in the eventual overthrow of the Hawaiian govern- ment in 1893.

In that fateful year, the "missionary gang" of white planters and businessmen plotted with the United States Minister to Hawai'i, John L. Stevens, to overthrow the lawful Native government of our last rul- ing ali'i, Lili'uokalani. The Queen had succeeded her brother, Kala- kaua, upon his death in San Francisco in 1891. Unlike him, she was determined to return her people to their rightful political place in their own land. Having received dozens of petitions signed by thousands of her subjects requesting a new constitution, and realizing that the deadlocked legislature would not call a constitutional convention, the Queen decided to give her people a new and more democratic consti- tution, one that removed the property requirement for voters and restricted the franchise to subjects of the Kingdom. Foreigners would not be allowed to vote.

But Lili'uokalani was thwarted by her Ministry, which betrayed her to the haole planters.

As they had rehearsed so many times before, the haole business- men and their foreign supporters immediately organized themselves as a "Committee of Safety" to create a new, all-white regime and to seek immediate military help from Minister Stevens. Agreeing to land the marines and to recognize the haole "Provisional Government" (as they called themselves), Stevens played out his imperialist role.

Confronted by the American-recognized Provisional Govern- ment, and facing an occupying U.S. military force across from her palace, Lili'uo

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