Street roots., April 15, 2011, Page 9, Image 9

Street roots
9
April 15, 2011
ALOHA STATE, from page 8
to convert and convince the monarchs and
the other aristocrats first. And by sucking
up to the ruling class, one major impact the
missionaries had on society at large was
convincing the Hawaiian government to
outlaw fornication and adultery and to
regulate liquor. Just as the first New
England missionaries arrived, the first New
England whalers started to show up as well.
These whalers had pretty much opposite
goals than the missionaries, and so the
Hâwaiians got to witness Americans at our
worst, at both our most puritanical and our
most Orlando spring break.
Then, when the missionaries and their
offspring started the sugar plantations, that
completely revolutionized the Hawaiian
landscape. They built these complicated,
engineered irrigation ditches and diverted
water so that places that had been dusty dry
plains and near deserts became green with
sugar bane. In traditional Hawaiian society,
land had been held communally and was
managed by the chief in concert with the
commoners, but with the sugar trade, it
became the American capitalist system of
plantations overseen and owned mostly by
white people and worked mostly by foreign
workers. The native Hawaiians were
increasingly shut out of their land and the
Hawaiian popûlation was decimated by as •
much as 80, maybe 90 percent, just by
disease, so its hard to overemphasize how
much impact the haoles had on Hawaiian
life, government, culture, everything.
R. A.: You write about David Malo as a
figure who embodies the transitional period o f
H awaiian history between traditional culture
an d Westernization. How does his life and
work capture this?
S. V.: Well, he’s a really interesting figure,
and probably because he’s a writer, I really
identify with him. When the first
missionaries showed up, he was pretty old.
He was nearing 30 when they taught him to
read and write, and he happened to be,
luckily, one of the Hawaiians who had been
thé keepers of the oral tradition. So he
knew all the old chants and genealogies and
was intimately aware and knowledgeable of
all the old customs and the stories of the
old chiefs and priests and the old religion.
So after the missionaries taught him to read
and write, he wrote “Hawaiian Antiquities.”
He also became a Very devout Christian and
was eventually ordained as a minister.
But làtér in life, he still had nostalgia for
the old ways even though he (was) a true
servant of Jesus Christ. He wrote this
rather melancholy letter to some Hawaiian
friends that I quote in the title to my book:
“If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar
fishes will come from the dark ocean and
when they see the small fishes of the
shallows they will eat them up.” And it
turned out to be the truth. When he died,
lie asked to be buried up this hill that was
really hard to get to because he just wanted
to be where no white man would build a
house. But his book is really quite beautiful.
R. A.: The events leading up to the U S.
annexation o f Hawaii were driven by the
opposing ideals ofL orrin Thurston and Queen
Liliuokalani. Can you explain the political
and cultural conflicts between these two
figures?
S. V.: Lorrin Thurston’s major problem
with Queen Liliuokalani was just that she
was a queen. Even though he was born in
Hawaii and because he was a descendant of
the missionaries, the whole idea of
monarchy was just something to disdain.
And that is something I can kind of identify
with. To me, there’s no inherent value in
monarchy. That said, the Hawaiian kingdom
was an established constitutional monarchy
and as monarchies go, it was wildly
inclusive. I mean, the Hawaiian monarchs
welcomed all these foreigners into their
kingdom and into their government,
including Thurston.
Although to me there’s nothing
inherently great about a queen, she was, I
think, for that time and place, pretty much
the ideal ruler. She was an impressive
person who was schooled by the
missionaries, so she was a very devout
Christian who at the same time was a very
proud and knowledgeable native Hawaiian.
So by the time the queen became the queen
she was plotting to reverse that constitution
which had also severely limited native
Hawaiians’ right to vote for their
representatives. That’s when Thurston and
his pals conspired to oust her to support
their own sham of a constitution. Even
though she had overwhelming native
support, the native population was in such
decline that there just Weren’t enough of
them to put up much of a fight? ’*
R. A.: You write about a double-sided view o f
American history that you have come to know
through your own experience. How does
Hawaii represent this notion o f America as
two places a t once?
S. V.: I’m part Cherokee and was born in
Oklahoma because some of my ancestors
were forced by the U.S. Army at gunpoint to
march across the country in what came to
be called the Trail of Tears. So, that’s always
been a littlebit of a caveat to the story of '1
American exceptionalism that I was
certainly taught in school. You know, I’m all
for self-government and the First
Amendment and all that stuff — but there’s
always a part of me that knows firsthand
about the failures of those ideals.
The annexation of Hawaii, as many of the
dissenters at the time pointed out, really
does contradict the ideals put forth in the
Declaration of Independence. In 1898, when
the U.S. annexed Hawaii along with Guam
and Puerto Rico and invaded the Philippines
and Cuba, we became a global empire
overnight. A group of Americans, a lot of
them in the highest echelons of the
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government, were more concerned with
power and greatness than our core ideals of
republican forms of government One of
those men was Henry Cabot Lodge and he
gave (this speech) in 1900 to poo-poo all of
the anti-imperialist sissies where he just
demolished the idea that consent of the
governed is even possible. He talked about
Thomas Jefferson, the author of that
phrase, being the greatest expansionist in
American history who, when he negotiated
the Louisiana Purchase, acquired the
biggest chunk of land at once that we had
ever acquired, and it didn’t even occur to-
him to ask the consent of all the French
colonials and Indians who were living out on
that vast continent he had just taken over.
So, I think Lodge sort of has a pouit.
It is interesting to me that throughout
American history, this idea of government
based on the consent of the governed is at
our core, but also this contradictory process
of expansion. The Hawaiian annexation
definitely is a part of that because the
Hawaiian people, once annexation was afoot,
they rallied and collected thousands and
thousands of signatures and Sent them to
Congress, protesting annexation. It was
definitely something that the Hawaiian
people were completely against and yet the
United States annexed those islands anyway.
So, I guess in that sense it jibes with my
view of the country as having these lofty
ideals that we frequently betray.
Originally published by R eal Change
Newspaper, Seattle© www.streetnewsservice.
org
Queen Liliuokalani.
“E ven though she
had overwhelming
native support, the
native population
was in such decline
that there ju s t
weren’t enough o f
them to p u t up much
o f a fight. ”
P H O TO COURTESY OF
W IK I C O M M O N S