History
Little is known about Hawaii’s first settlers, who arrived around AD 500. Tahitians arrived around AD 1000 and for the next 200 years navigated thousands of miles back and forth across the ocean in double-hulled canoes. Ruled by chiefs, ancient Hawaiian society was actually matriarchal, and its religion followed strict laws known as kapu.
By accident, famed British explorer Captain James Cook ‘discovered’ the islands in 1778. The first white Westerner to arrive, Cook was mistaken for the god Lono and treated like a deity. He stayed several weeks and then resumed his journey. When he returned to Hawaii a year later, his less-than-godlike behavior led to fighting and he was killed.
Beginning in the 1790s, King Kamehameha, chief of the Big Island, conquered and united all the Hawaiian islands. He is credited with bringing peace and stability to a society that was often in flux due to wars and the power struggles of the ruling class. However, after his death in 1819 his son inherited the throne and, in a stunning repudiation of their religion, deliberately violated the kapu and destroyed the temples.
As fate would have it, Christian missionaries arrived not long after, and in the midst of Hawaii’s social and spiritual chaos they found it relatively easy to ‘save souls.’ New England whalers also arrived, seeking different quarry, and by the 1840s Lahaina and Honolulu were the busiest whaling towns in the Pacific. Meanwhile, foreigners made a grab for Hawaii’s fertile land, turning vast tracts into sugarcane plantations. As there weren’t enough Hawaiians to work the fields, immigrants were brought in from China, Japan, Portugal and the Philippines, giving rise to Hawaii’s multiethnic culture but also displacing Native Hawaiians, most of whom became landless.
In 1893 a group of American businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. The US government was initially reluctant to support the coup, but it soon rationalized its colonialism by citing the islands’ strategic importance and annexed Hawaii in 1898. Hawaii played an infamous role in US history when a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor vaulted America into WWII. Hawaii became the 50th US state in 1959.
In February 2009, Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka reintroduced into the US Congress the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act – aka the Akaka Bill. This seeks to establish the legal framework through which a Native Hawaiian government can be formed and thereby gain federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as the indigenous people of Hawaii. This would, in essence, finally put them on the same legal footing as the over 500 federally-recognized Native American tribes.
Federal recognition of Native Hawaiians is widely supported in Hawaii (including by Governor Lingle), but there is lots of controversy and disagreement over what shape ‘Hawaiian sovereignty’ should ultimately take. As a result, the bill’s sponsors emphasize what the legislation does not do: it doesn’t establish a government (it provides the means for doing so); it doesn’t settle any reparation claims; it doesn’t take private land or create a ‘reservation’; it doesn’t authorize gambling; and it doesn’t allow Hawaii to secede from the US. Establishing a Native Hawaiian government, as Senator Akaka has said, ‘is important for all people of Hawaii, so we can finally resolve the longstanding issues relating from the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.’
The two main options are the semi-autonomous ‘nation-within-a-nation’ model, similar to Native Americans, and outright sovereignty, in which Native Hawaiians would have full autonomy over portions of land within the state of Hawaii. Either option raises thorny, complex questions about who would be included and what land would be used. However, there are starting points for addressing both. First, the state of Hawaii holds in trust over a million acres of ‘ceded lands,’ which by law are to be used for the benefit of Native Hawaiians, in addition to the island of Kahoʻolawe. Second, extensive Native Hawaiian genealogical databases already exist, since the separate dispersal of Hawaiian Homelands requires that applicants prove they are at least 50% Native Hawaiian. Today, with Hawaii-born President Barack Obama indicating his support, hopes run high that the Akaka Bill might soon be passed.
