I am doing my podcast here in Maui, Hawaii and enjoying my vacation and trying to relax. But I am drifting in my cis gender white privilege and decided to look at the history of this state.
For many Americans, Hawaii lies in a hazy ether between statehood, colony, and exotic getaway. Despite their vacations to here, continental Americans know little about the cultures or histories of its Native people.
The US government brought it into focus when war came over the horizon. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
At the time, Hawaii was not a US state. It was illegally annexed territory: a military outpost, arms depot, and training site taken from Hawaiian hands in 1898.
This was the culmination of nearly two centuries of foreigners, especially whites interference and meddling, beginning with Captain Cook’s arrival. These developments showered wealth on a small, plantation elite, who required a docile land with docile people for extractive agriculture.
Their wish was granted by the United States military in 1893. In what President Grover Cleveland called “an act of war,” a cadre of businessmen and armed militiamen led an insurrection against Queen Lili‘uokalani, quickly setting up the all-white “Provisional Government of Hawai‘i” and demanding that Washington annex the islands to the United States.
The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom is unusual in that land theft and dispossession had all been accomplished without the usual bothersome wars and costly colonial administration.
Hawai‘i was a proving ground for American imperialism, a precursor of what would befall other small islands and atolls which stood in the way of American imperial ambition. After World War II, the US turbocharged its military base building project around the world, with a particular eye to the Pacific. In the process, many Indigenous peoples were displaced from their ancestral homelands and prevented from ever returning.
Throughout the Second World War and its aftermath, Hawaii was under martial law for seven years, during which time over 600,000 acres of land was confiscated, civil rights were held in abeyance, and a general atmosphere of military intimidation reigned.
Hawaii is also a tourist colony. Historically, its economy rested on whaling, then sandalwood logging, and later pineapple and sugarcane production. Today, it’s tourism that comprises the largest single source of private capital for Hawai‘i’s economy.
Sovereign debt makes matters worse. That most of the world’s island nations are both formerly colonized and deeply indebted is no coincidence. As the colonial project took off in the 17th century, imperial powers devoured small archipelagos the world over in the race for global hegemony. Islands were hoarded as both strategic military outposts (bases and depots) and sites for resource extraction (plantations and markets). After years of plunder and repression, a relationship of dependency between colonizer and colonized took hold, however massive a resistance Natives put up.
With 1.7 million tourists visiting the Kuwaii each year, even non-extractive activities like scuba diving and surfing tend to disrupt the local flora and fauna as well as traditional fishing practices.
Tourism dollars tend to not benefit locals, who work at big hotels, attractions, and sites but get paid a pittance. Locals generally get the pocket change spent on souvenirs, locally grown produce, or small-scale guided-tour outfits.
Hawai‘i is a beautiful place—there’s no doubt about it—but when the myths about “paradise” fall away, it’s hard to ignore the horrors that finally shrink-wrapped the islands into a tourist-friendly venue: two centuries of bayonets, bombardments, and subjection; missionaries hacking away at Hawaiian culture and philosophy; sugarcane plantation owners ravaging the soil; and the US military and real estate speculators despoiling the land. Tourism, it appears, is only the latest iteration of the devouring of Hawai‘i.
As I sit here I have to be reminded of my need to return to the mainland an continue to work on making a better world for all and especially for the people at the margins.
