Hawaiian Historical Overview

By Jonathan Osorio, Ph.D.

Jon Osorio is the Director and tenured Associate Professor of the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He teaches introductory and upper level Hawaiian Studies courses with a focus on nineteenth century history. An accomplished musician, composer, and author, Dr. Osorio recently wrote Dismembering Lahui: The History Of The Hawaiian Nation To 1887, published by the University of Hawai`i Press in July 2002. A native of Hilo, Hawai`i, Dr. Osorio has spent most of his adult life in Honolulu, he has lived in Palolo Valley, O’ahu for the past 13 years.

Beginnings

The first arrivals in the Hawaiian archipelago were probably Polynesian voyagers from the southern islands of Tahiti , Bora Bora or Raiatea more than 2,000 years ago. Over the next millennium settlers and explorers sailed between our northern and southern islands with great frequency, exchanging genealogical lineages, religions, ideas, technologies, and probably certain kinds of diseases. In short, Hawai'i was a distant but participating partner in a regional community that included most of Polynesia .

Our distance as well as the ecological wealth of the archipelago, however, did impel the growth of certain characteristics unique to Hawai'i. Most significant, perhaps, was that a substantial agricultural development of the inland (mauka ) valleys improved our subsistence economy with labor-intensive construction of irrigation ditches ('auwai) that fed a network of taro gardens (lo'i) and coastal fishponds (loko i'a). This agricultural civilization depended, in turn, upon an increasingly complex social and political division of chiefs (ali'i) and people (maka'ainana), and a population that recent estimates place at nearly one million people before the arrival of Europeans.

A profound ethic of responsibility to the 'aina (land) as a mother, ancestor and elder sibling also helped to structure the society. Even the Ali'i Nui did not own the 'aina, so much as they organized and controlled the management of it to the society's entire benefit. This system, and the cultural belief known as Malama 'Aina (cherishing land), maintained the social fabric even through the political changes wrought by the conquest and unification under the Mo'i (paramount chief) Kamehameha at the end of the eighteenth century.

Strangers

Captain James Cook's arrival in 1778 heralded an increasing number of foreign explorers, traders, missionaries and settlers. Referred to as haole, these foreigners from Europe and America brought new technologies, ideas and economies that competed with Kanaka Maoli (Native) traditions. They also brought fierce epidemic diseases; syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, mumps, measles, smallpox and leprosy that decimated the Kanaka population to a tenth of its size by 1850 and halved it again over the next forty years.

As the Native people disappeared, the population of foreigners increased. The haole population, though not large, had an increasingly large influence on culture and economics throughout the nineteenth century. In 1820, American Calvinist missionaries arrived from Connecticut and Massachusetts and began what proved to be their most successful mission anywhere. By 1850, virtually every Kanaka Maoli was enrolled as a member in some Christian church. As influential as the missionaries were in the area of religion, they came to be even more influential in political arenas.

When the conqueror Kamehameha died, his sons, first Liholiho and then Kauikeaouli, inherited his rank as Mo'i over all of the islands. But it was Kamehameha's Kuhina Nui (chief councilor) and favorite companion, the chiefess Ka'ahumanu, who directed the chiefs and people to accept missionary teaching. After her death, Kauikeaouli also known as Kamehameha III, eventually came to accept missionary advice and assistance within the government itself.

New Laws and Economies

Missionaries wrote constitutions, creating government positions at the highest possible level, which they proceeded to fill with their own members. From the mid 1830s on, they continually pressed for economic and social change that would privatize land and destroy the traditional relationships between the ruling ali'i and the maka'ainana.

The first commercial sugar planting operation was formed by a missionary on Kaua'i in 1835. By the 1880s, haole plantation owners and corporations owned or leased the bulk of private lands in the Kingdom, close to a million acres in all. The critical event in this development was the 1848 Mahele (division) of lands that was promoted and designed by haole missionaries in which the ali'i and maka'ainana families registered claims over the 4.2 million acres of the archipelago. Despite specific legislation to encourage maka'ainana to secure title to their lands, by 1852 the majority of Hawaiian fishermen and farmers were landless and were compelled to leave the lands on which they had subsisted for centuries. In the same year, the government passed a series of vagrancy acts designed to force the now landless Native into labor on government projects and sugar plantations.

The sugar industry grew by fits and starts over the next 25 years until by the 1880s, it was a multi-million dollar-a-year operation. The necessary pool of cheap, dependent labor could not be met by a dwindling population of Kanaka, so the Kingdom contracted immigrant labor in China , Japan , and later in Korea and the Philippines . In the process, the Native people came to be outnumbered by foreign populations even as they erected, on missionary advice, a constitutional government that allowed universal male suffrage from 1852 to 1864.

Independence Lost

Concerned about the still-diminishing Kanaka and the enormous political and economic power wielded by haole, the Hawaiian monarchs from 1864 until 1893 sought constitutionally-acceptable ways of strengthening Hawaii's political independence by requiring that voters and political candidates be true citizens, either Hawai'i-born or naturalized by oath of allegiance solely to the Kingdom. In this period, the Kingdom of Hawai 'i was as liberal as any nation in the world in its extension of citizenship. Chinese and Japanese laborers and merchants took advantage of the hospitality and pledged their allegiance to the monarchs.

Meanwhile, the Kanaka continued to struggle with disease and dispossession. While some Native families clung to lands which they had wisely claimed during the Mahele, even those productive taro lands began to lose their value and productivity as privately-funded water projects began to divert water from the upland streams that had fed the 'auwai into the more arid areas in the central plains of Maui and O'ahu islands. Sugar grew on the backs of Native agricultural production. The government supported by law and subsidy any measure that assisted production and sale of sugar. Native voters became increasingly hostile to haole businessmen whom they characterized as arrogant, uncharitable opportunists, and "Hawai'i for Hawaiians" became both a moral and political slogan in the 1880s. In particular, Kanaka politicians criticized the clique of businessmen close to the wealthy missionary families and "missionary" became a derogatory term.

Stung by the growing criticism of their leadership, concerned about the increasing confidence and competence of Kanaka legislators and electorates, and worried that the government might not continue to support their industry, a small group of haole businessmen and lawyers supported by their own para-military, coerced King David Kalakaua to abrogate the Kingdom's constitution for one that they themselves had drafted. The Bayonet Constitution, as it was called, eliminated the King's power and diluted the Native-controlled legislature by making one branch of the legislature, the House of Nobles, accessible only to those with large incomes or land. The Constitution also ended citizenship for hundreds of Asian men whom these haole did not consider trustworthy bearers of democracy. From 1887 to 1893, Kanaka and haole legislators sympathetic to Native control continued to lobby both the King and his successor, Queen Lili'uokalani, to reinstate the older constitution.

The haole supporters of the new regime grew uneasy and began to openly support annexation by the United States . In 1893, when Lili'uokalani declared her intention to abrogate the Bayonet Constitution, the annexationists conspired with U.S. Foreign Minister John Stevens and moved to unseat the Queen. In the third week of January 1893, U.S. troops aboard the U.S.S. Boston disembarked at Honolulu and protected the conspiracy while it declared itself a provisional government. The Queen, unwilling to commit her police and guard to a bloody confrontation with American soldiers, submitted under formal protest to the superior military power of the United States . President Grover Cleveland believed that the U.S. had misused its power and committed an "act of war" against the Kingdom deserving an "earnest effort to make all possible reparation." However in 1898, the United States occupied the Hawaiian Islands and passed a joint resolution in the House and Senate to take possession of Hawai'i.

The vast majority-perhaps 90 percent-of Kanaka Maoli continued to be loyal to the Queen and the Kingdom and protested the American takeover in several petitions sent to the U.S. Senate. However, in 1900, the United States imposed a charter of government on the Hawaiian Islands , with a bicameral legislature and an appointed governor. An American-styled school system prohibited the Native language, as well as other immigrant languages, and began the erosion of the Kanaka Maoli cultural identity. Once among the most literate people in the world, young Kanaka grew ever more alienated from the educational system as Native teachers began to disappear. As Asian immigrants began to prepare their offspring for careers and opportunities off of the plantations, many Native families tried to continue to live partial subsistence lives and interacting as little as possible with the new American-dominated society.

The Territory of Hawai 'i

Between 1902 and 1954, The Republican Party controlled territorial politics and business with an uneasy alliance of haole merchants and sugar planters and many Kanaka Maoli voters. Territorial government also controlled nearly 2 million acres of "ceded lands," the private and public lands of the Kingdom, which the Republic had unlawfully seized and given to the United States prior to the takeover. The "Big Five," sugar companies founded in the Kingdom era and whose close cooperation with one another was well-documented, used the "ceded lands" as a source of cheap leaseholds and were able to prevent widespread dispersal of those lands to other individuals or businesses.

Beginning in 1917, certain laws written into the territorial charter began to enforce the general public's right to use and lease these lands. Worried about the imminent loss of thousands of acres of prime sugar lands to small farmers in the Kanaka and Asian communities, the Big Five argued for changes in the law. In 1920, Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Act , defining Native Hawaiian beneficiaries by blood quantum (50% or more), and making available 200,000 acres of land from the "ceded lands" for residential and commercial leases to qualified beneficiaries at $1.00 per year. Congress also repealed the laws in the Organic Act that had threatened to open up the government lands to the general public. Territorial officials, most of them connected to the sugar companies, were allowed to identify the lands which would be made available to Native Hawaiians under the Hawaiian Homes Act . Most of the properties in the Hawaiian Homes inventory were barely suitable for pasture and had few commercial or agricultural possibilities.

As for the blood quantum requirement, it was assumed that there would be fewer qualified Native beneficiaries over time, as Hawaiians continued to intermarry with every single ethnicity that took up residence in the Islands . In fact by the 1930s and 1940s, American sociologists became fascinated with the population of people of mixed ancestrys growing in Hawai'i, and their relative lack of hostility to one another. Some scholars predicted that Hawai'i represented a future trend in America and the world, while others denounced such intermarriages as dangerous threats to pure racial strains and social order.

As the sugar oligarchy in control of the Republican party continued to dominate land and economic growth, labor unions led by Kanaka Maoli, Filipino and Japanese organizers challenged Republican hegemony, gradually strengthening the Democratic Party in the Territory. The Pacific War (1941-1945), only delayed the Democratic takeover, especially when American martial law was imposed from 1941 to 1943 following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor . During this time, prices, wages and even employment mobility were controlled by a combination of military and sugar officials.

After the war, the Democratic Party, populated by young, WWII veteran Asian Americans and strengthened by labor unions, took control of both houses of the Hawai'i State legislature-a control the party has not relinquished since. The Democrats in particular argued for statehood, hoping to wrest control of Hawaii 's economy from the sugar companies by a broad-based support for diversifying land and economic opportunity.

The Modern Tourist State

In 1959, the United States unilaterally removed Hawai'i from the United Nations' list of Non-self-governing Territories as a prelude to making Hawai'i a State. A trust relationship between the United States and Native Hawaiians was reaffirmed under paragraph 5-F of the 1959 Statehood Act which transferred the "ceded lands" to the State of Hawai`i with the provision that one of the five uses of the land were to benefit Native Hawaiians. Eventually this led to the creation of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a State agency which was designed to receive and spend revenues from the ceded lands on behalf of Native Hawaiians.

OHA was also seen initially by many Hawaiians as a possible solution to the failure of the Hawaiian Homes Commission to place Native Hawaiians on homelands and to the impoverishment of many Hawaiians. Representing over one-fifth of the population, people of Native ancestry are the fastest-growing ethnic group in Hawai'i. But Kanaka Maoli also consistently represent over half of incarcerated felons and less than one tenth of the college student population. Health statistics are even more depressing with Hawaiians leading every other ethnicity by large margins in the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, alcohol and drug abuse, and the concomitant threat to child-birth and child-rearing.

The Democratic government did succeed in transforming the economic base of the state from sugar to tourism, creating a more broadly distributed prosperity and a greatly expanded state bureaucracy, funded by the increased tax revenues of tourism and urbanization. But the tourist industry and its seven million annual visitors also require much of the Islands ' resources of water and land and compete with local agriculture. Together with the large military presence in Hawai'i and its control of nearly 25% of O'ahu, the urbanization of former sugar lands for tourism has contributed to a vast rise in real estate values which has led to, among other things, a significant rise in homelessness in Hawai'i, especially among Kanaka Maoli.

Newcomers (malihini) often compute the "price of paradise" when they consider moving to Hawai'i, while large numbers of Kanaka and older local Asian families have moved away from the Islands in recent years. In fact, the demographics in Hawai'i have been undergoing a slow but steady change from the balance of Kanaka, Asian Americans and haole to one more influenced by recent arrivals from America and Southeast Asia with little understanding of or connection with Natives.

As Hawai'i has changed, producing a multi-ethnic culture that is connected to and yet markedly different from American society, it is easy perhaps to overlook the Native people and what they have had to surrender to make this society possible. However, one should not overlook the dignity with which these people have met death, dispossession and even the suspicions that they were incapable of accomplishment. Indeed, the Kanaka Maoli today are more vibrant and resolute about their cultural practices than they have been for many generations: recovering their language; remembering their histories and genealogies; connecting with other Native peoples around the globe and seeking to restore self-government. That they do this with few funds, no land base, and with a peaceful persistence is an extraordinary distinction.