Hawaii is known worldwide as the land of aloha. More than just a word that can mean hello or goodbye, the concept of aloha imparts a sense of love and life. For the Hawaiian people the spirit of aloha meant the coordination of mind and heart within a person and implied kindness, unity, harmony, humility and patience. But by the early 20th century the spirit of aloha as a concept had been co-opted by haole (white) businessmen as a marketing device to promote tourism. What had been a sacred idea to Native Hawaiians devolved into a tool to sell their own homelands from under them.
The trajectory of Native Hawaiians' loss of ancestral lands proceeded in stages. The early arrival of missionaries to the islands laid the groundwork for a process of deculturation which would separate them from their traditional religion and cultural life ways. Later, haole businessmen and lawyers/politicians would secure the necessary changes in Native Hawaiian land tenure practices, enabling the transfer of large plots of land into their possession, creating the massive pineapple and sugar plantations (which would necessitate the import of cheap labor from Asia), gradually displacing the indigenous population. Finally, the advent of the tourism industry would make Hawaii economically uninhabitable for its original inhabitants.
The most severe blow dealt to the Hawaiians, however, was the American overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, a fact that the United States has officially acknowledged. The Akaka bill, over 10 years in the making, attempts to right the wrongs of the American government's actions. This week at About.com's Native American history page I look at the Akaka bill in an abbreviated analysis of the historical narratives that have been deployed to sell the bill to the Native Hawaiian people. The article, entitled Historical Narratives, Hawaiian Sovereignty and the Akaka Bill is based on the most rigorous scholarship in which I show that the history portrayed in the language of the Akaka bill is filled with conspicuous gaps that leave out important facts about Hawaii's stolen past.