The Hawaiian sovereignty movement (Hawaiian: ke ea Hawaiʻi), is a grassroots political and cultural campaign to re-establish an autonomous or independent nation or kingdom of Hawaii due to desire for sovereignty, self-determination, and self-governance.
Some groups also advocate for some form of redress from the United States for the 1893 overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani, and for what is described as a prolonged military occupation beginning with the 1898 annexation. The movement generally views both the overthrow and annexation as illegal.
Sovereignty advocates have attributed problems plaguing native communities including homelessness, poverty, economic marginalization, and the erosion of native traditions to the lack of native governance and political self-determination.
They have pursued their agenda through educational initiatives and legislative actions. Along with protests throughout the islands, at the capital (Honolulu) itself as well as the places and locations held as sacred to Hawaiian culture, sovereignty activists have challenged United States forces and law.
The ancestors of Native Hawaiians may have arrived in the Hawaiian Islands around 350 CE, from other areas of Polynesia. By the time Captain Cook arrived, Hawaii had a well-established culture with a population estimated to be between 400,000 and 900,000 people. In the first one hundred years of contact with Western civilization, due to disease and war, the Hawaiian population dropped by ninety percent, to only 53,900 people in 1876. American missionaries would arrive in 1820 and assume great power and influence.
Cannot overemphasize how fucking terrible visiting Hawaii is as a tourist if you have any semblance of the history of the islands. You’re actively watching a people die, smothered to death by the imperial fist of American capital. The Kanaka Maoli put on sanitized dances and silly shows in massive hotels for the tourists to feel like “Hawaiian culture” is thriving and then go back to their rotting homes while immigrants from the mainland open up another taco truck and make bank. Nobody even eats taro anymore, nobody speaks Hawaiian, and what little vestiges left of islander culture is packaged as a cultural commodity and not something beautiful. Sacred beaches are overrun with sunburned tourists, mountaintops awash with Instagram hype seekers. Death to America and freedom for Hawaii.
I heard something disturbing last month that brought me back to a story from my childhood.
A diabetic woman in the US had to call an ambulance, and the paramedics asked about her medication. She said she couldn’t afford to consistently buy her insulin, so she had lapsed and it was making her sick. They kept radioing back “diabetic, non-compliant for insulin”. She kept saying, “no, I’m trying to take it but I can’t afford it” and they kept referring to her as “non-compliant”. That’s the only word for it. It doesn’t differentiate between someone who refuses medicine and who is refused medicine.
When I heard that, I instantly thought back to when I was 10 years old at 69’s beach near Waikoloa. A couple of haole nurses were talking, and they must have been from two different hospitals. So according to one of them, the medical staff would get on the intercom and say things like “Mr. Honda to ICU” or “Mr. Honda to recovery” which sounds like a request for a staff member with a common Japanese last name.
What they really mean is that they’re sending a patient to one of those rooms, and they’re calling him “MR. H.O.N.D.A”
That stands for “Hawai’ian Obese Non-compliant Diabetic Asshole”
So your country is invaded by English and American capitalists and missionaries, your kingdom is overthrown, your universal health care and social welfare system is dissolved, they rip up the rail system, turn your land into a plantation, and then into a resort. You can barely afford to stay in your homeland, and maybe you can’t even afford to ship yourself off to the mainland for the cheaper cost of living, leaving your family for good. You live with several extended relatives on a Hawaiian Homes plot, but you can’t get your own because the waiting list is 20 years. Your house is falling apart. You live very far from any steady source of employment.
You can’t afford insulin, because these same people hiked up the price to astronomical levels. And it was astronomical to your finances long before it was to most other people living under the American flag.
You go into the hospital, yet again, because you’re losing vision due to a diabetic episode triggered by insulin deprivation. The people who are supposed to take care of you are some white people from Ohio. They patch you up while they use coded language to demean and publicly insult you.
Then you go home and fucking die.
Thank you for sharing
Even most of the former “royal family” are all intermarried to the fucking Dole family and are more white than a lot of the workers in Hawaii
The implications of that are disturbing
I didn’t know the Dole family intermarried with the Royal family, that’s really interesting. I do know several people from very long-standing dynasties who are a tiny bit Hawaiian and mostly very white and share their last names with landmarks and major businesses.
EDIT: I even knew someone whose great great grandfather literally wrote the Bayonet Constitution and then overthrew the Kingdom - they were also very slightly Hawaiian but white as fuck, and pro-Hawaiian sovereignty lol.
Yeah a Republic seems like the only way to go in this instance, the Kanaka Maoli are too few in number and too divided to base any sort of long term government on them. The idea of “Hawaiianess” has stretched far beyond the realm of just the indigenous inhabitants pre-Cook, and I can foresee a world in an independent Hawaii where that culture, primarily based on the one set up by the indigenous Hawaiians, is the basis of a new Hawaiian state while being inclusive of the various peoples who have moved to Hawaii since.
uncritical support for Hawaiian independence
People are amazed when I tell them the story of how Hawaii became a state. In fact I think it’s the first actual neoliberal country when they dissolved the kingdom for Dole. Also the fact that the Hawaiian people were considered “aboriginal” not “native” so that they would not be classified as “American Indian” when they were fully absorbed. Living in Hawaii actually changed my life and made me into the Marxist that I am these days.
Also the fact that the Hawaiian people were considered “aboriginal” not “native” so that they would not be classified as “American Indian” when they were fully absorbed
What are the consequences of this?
Mainly that they don’t have any tribal autonomy like American Indians on the reservations. No treaties have to be abided by, the federal government owes them nothing, they can’t set laws on their own lands, etc.
And all of that was pretty much engineered too. After the Dawes Act passed, if they were considered “native” then every family would be owed 150 acres of land. So they decided to literally set up a banana republic. Just colonizers being colonizers.
I mean every wrong thing with Hawaii these days. Natives were excluded to protections, representation and rights given to Native Americans. So like there’s literally no “Native Hawaiian Reserve.” Meaning that every bad thing capitalism has to offer is being imposed on these people. So high rent, inflation and homelessness are huge in the state because there is literally no where to go if you loose your house besides living out in a beach parking lot. So like imagine what we did to Native Americans and multiplied it by four because there was no where to go.
Jesus Christ. “The rules we put in place on ourselves to stop ourselves from oppressing natives like we keep doing are too restrictive let’s not follow them”
:amerikkka:
