I am from Hawaiʻi, but I am not of Hawaiʻi. I was born to two Jewish-Americans on the Hāmākua Coast, the East side of the Big Island. The circumstances of my birth are the result of nearly 250 years of colonialism, beginning with Captain James Cook’s landing. In the words of legendary Hawaiian activist and academic Huanani-Kay Trask, my very presence in Hawaiʻi is a luxury provided to me through centuries of white conquest that visited genocide on American Indians, slavery on Africans, peonage on Asians, and dispossession on Native Hawaiians.
The place where I was born is my home, but it is not really my home. I love the Big Island with all my heart its lush rainforests, its towering mountains and volcanoes, its world-class coastline, its people, its food, its culture but my heart lies with me far, far away from where I grew up. Hawaiʻi needs more love than I can ever give. I have other lovers.
Still, I can’t sit idly by and watch as the place I grew up is slowly stripped of all that makes it unique and beautiful. I am reminded of a quote by Karl Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” I want to use this article to describe a nightmare, and ask echoing Vladimir Lenin What Is to Be Done?
A Nightmare
Since Cook’s arrival to the islands, a slow, excruciating process of colonization, marginalization, and suffering has plagued the Indigenous peoples of Hawaiʻi the Kānaka Maoli (literally native people). With the arrival of missionaries, traders, and whalers, came Christianity, disease, and cultural genocide. In under 20 years, the Indigenous population plummeted to around half. At its lowest, there were about 39,656 Native individuals on the islands. In 1819, the kapu system, the Indigenous, part religious, part practical legal system was abolished when Kamehameha II (Liholiho) held a feast between men and women an act many academics deem a political move by the Kamehameha dynasty.
With the abolition of the kapu system came the beginning of an environmental disaster. Ecological problems are inevitable on such an isolated archipelago, and indeed, when the first Polynesians arrived with terrestrial mammals (particularly rats) numerous native birds and plants were impacted. However, foreign trade was the beginning of the end for Hawaiʻi’s ecosystem. The introduction of European rats, mosquitos, ranching, plantations, and finally tourism spelled disaster. Hundreds of native birds died, deforestation ran rampant, feral pigs, cattle, and goats stripped the land, sugarcane and pineapple became ubiquitous, and massive resorts sprung up on the coast.
Returning to the Kamehameha dynasty, Kamehameha III passed the Great Māhele (or great division) of 1848, which privatized land rights. Pre-contact, there was no concept of land ownership beyond the stewardship that all segments of Hawaiian society participated in. However, foreign advisors to the Kingdom convinced Kamehameha III to allow foreigners to buy government land. By 1893, 74% of all land sold was owned by non-Hawaiians, constituting 10% of all of the land in Hawaiʻi. The common people, the maka‘āinana, owned only 30,000 acres, constituting less than 0.01% of Hawaiʻi’s total acreage.
Two years after the Māhele, the Masters and Servants Act was passed. This was another blow to all commoners, Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian alike. The Act legalized indentured servitude and stipulated that escapees were to be apprehended and coerced into working. At the same time, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Puerto Rican, and Spanish labor was being imported to the islands to render Indigenous labor obsolete.
The darkest day in Hawaiian history is undoubtedly the Overthrow of the Kingdom. After nearly a hundred years of self-rule after European contact, the American sugar barons and missionaries who had profited off of the slow degradation of Hawaiian society got impatient. They wanted the U.S. to annex the islands, to give them full control. Without presidential or congressional approval, U.S. troops and American businessmen threatened the last monarch of Hawaiʻi, Queen Liliʻuokalani to cede authority to the U.S. However, President Grover Cleveland was dismayed at the overthrow and it took until the presidency of William McKinley for Hawaiʻi to officially be annexed. In the interim, the brutal Republic of Hawaiʻi was in charge, headed by Sanford B. Dole. Dole would serve as the first colonial governor of Hawaiʻi.
Since then, Hawaiʻi has had very little agency. Hawaiʻi is considered a strategic military center, meaning that around 5% of Hawaiʻi’s total land is controlled by the U.S. military. The military has bombed, contaminated, and restricted significant swaths of land, particularly on the small island of Kahoʻolawe, which is also an important spiritual site.
Today, the ecosystem is in a dire situation. Feral pigs are the worst culprit on land, as they make wallows that mosquitos can breed in, besides just being a pest. Native birds are still going extinct. Invasive plants are completely outcompeting native ones. Hawaiʻi’s reef system is under threat from invasive species, overfishing, coral bleaching, and tourism.
Native Hawaiians face a myriad of problems. First and foremost is housing, which is expensive and in low supply, leaving many Hawaiians with only two options: try to leave Hawaiʻi for the mainland or live on the streets. Wildfires on the island of Maui that destroyed the historic town of Lahaina exacerbated housing problems as well as issues of water, land, and colonialism. Hawaiʻi’s beauty has attracted many of the wealthiest Americans to buy property, including but not limited to Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Oprah Winfrey. These individuals and the profitable tourism industry have virtually unlimited access to Hawaiʻi’s natural aquifer, leaving areas like Lahaina unnaturally dry which was a key factor in its destruction.
There are too many problems facing Hawaiʻi today for me to enumerate. On my home island alone, there is: a serious methamphetamine and drug problem, homelessness problem, and poverty-related issues in general; sewage in the ocean, erosion (on land and in the sea), dwindling native flora and fauna, feral pigs, goats, cattle, and sheep, desertification, and deforestation; issues of land and culture such as military activity on Pōhakuloa, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and tourist resorts claiming large sections of Hawaiʻi’s coastline. There is no one solution to all these problems, but it is clear to me that drastic action must be taken to save Hawaiʻi from this long colonial nightmare.
What Is to Be Done?
“For the colonized, this violence represents the absolute praxis. The militant therefore is one who works.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, page 44.
To answer the question What Is to Be Done, we must first answer another question: what is decolonization? The answer lies in the works of Frantz Fanon the massively influential Martinican philosopher, poet, and psychoanalyst who lays out the truth of colonization and the nature of decolonization, pulled from his experiences in the Algerian National Liberation Front. In the very first page of his magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth, he explains “…decolonization is always a violent event.” He continues,
“Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces…Their first confrontation was colored by violence and their cohabitation or rather the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer continued at the point of the bayonet and under cannon fire…[Decolonization] infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is truly the creation of new men.” (page 2)
Fanon sees decolonization as a historical process set in motion by the first instance of violence perpetrated by the colonizer onto the colonized. The terminus of this process is a liberated new people, birthed through violence violence aimed at regaining what was taken from them. That is decolonization and that is the only option if Hawaiʻi is to be saved from its problems.
The fact that I am a settler, a colonizer, that for Hawaiʻi to be for Hawaiians something must be taken from me: it does not hurt me. What hurts is the nightmare of hundreds of years of colonial exploitation weighing on my soul. What hurts is that Hawaiian sovereignty is not for me, it is something that Hawaiians must decide for themselves. I cannot make Hawaiʻi sovereign again, but I can make the case that it should be.
This article pulls heavily from the works of Huanani-Kay Trask and Frantz Fanon. I am indebted to their memory. May they rest in power.
Journalism 2.0 