Spring 2025
“Hawaii’s Water,” picture of Kauai’s coastline, June 2023, self-captured
At the age of ten, I lay in bed as a salty breeze drifted through the open windows. The crashing waves blurred into white noise, rhythmically hitting the rocks just twenty feet below. Ten-year-old me did not know she was sleeping on stolen land, and she still would not know when she returned to Kauai eight years later. The history of Hawaiian land is not as pristine as its lush hillsides and crystal-clear waters. It is a history of deceit and pain; one that remains unacknowledged and unamended. The truth lives in the stories of the Hawaiian people, those who lived on these islands long before the first missionaries ever stepped ashore (Cobb 2015).
American missionaries first arrived in Hawaii in 1820. They quickly gained influence, claiming land and working closely with the ali’i (sacred Hawaiian nobility) to help establish Hawaii as a sovereign kingdom. However, their intentions quickly began to shift with the rise of the sugar export industry. The missionaries and their descendants formed the Missionary Party, which in 1887 forced King Kalākaua to sign the Bayonet Constitution. This document stripped Native Hawaiians of many rights and transferred power to a group of white elites. When King Kalākaua died four years later, his sister, Queen Lili’uokalani, took the throne. She drafted a new constitution to restore power to the monarchy and Native Hawaiians, but in 1893, the Committee of Safety staged a coup. They overthrew the Queen and declared Hawaii a republic (Laukea 2022).
The United States did not consider the rights or sovereignty of the Indigenous Hawaiian peoples when it set its sights on the islands. Instead, it saw a strategic and commercial opportunity. In 1898, Senator Cabot Lodge tied the importance of Hawaiian annexation to a war revenue bill, claiming them as equally important (Osborne 1981). With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Hawaii’s location became increasingly valuable as a military base in the Pacific. That same year, President McKinley declared Hawaii a US territory, devastating Native Hawaiians and breaking international law (Laukea 2022). By the 1890s, growing fears of economic decline due to limited overseas markets made annexation seem not only beneficial but inevitable (Osborne 1981).
With annexation came another question: would the Indigenous Hawaiian population be granted suffrage? Women, who held moderate power during the Hawaiian monarchy, lost the right to vote until 1920. By the time Hawaii became the 50th state of the United States in 1959, the majority of the island’s population consisted of foreign-born individuals from Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese backgrounds. The question of their suffrage rights was also under examination. Republicans feared losing white political dominance and proposed educational and property requirements to restrict Hawaiian voting participation. Democrats, meanwhile, argued that Hawaii should have never been annexed in the first place, but since it was, and since African Americans were granted suffrage, so too should the Indigenous Hawaiian people (Basson 2005). Both parties, however, overlooked some key questions: Do Native Hawaiian individuals want to vote in a government that took their land? Do they believe their voice is heard by the same system that ignored them for decades? How is a conqueror supposed to speak for the conquered?
The questions still echo today.
At the age of 20, I sit in the open yoga studio and hear the leaves rustling in the hot, humid air. Panama’s famous wave, La Punta, crashes against the rocky shoreline 300 feet below me. I am learning about the history of surf. The local Panamanian instructor who has been teaching me for the last week pulls up a picture of the beautiful Hawaiian water, and as we all admire it, he explains surf culture.
“This,” he says, “is Hawaiian water.”
He then looks at us and adds,
“They may seem entitled, but with all that has been taken from them, we must let them have their water.”
Works Cited
Basson, Lauren L. “Fit for Annexation but Unfit to Vote? Debating Hawaiian Suffrage Qualifications at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Social Science History 29, no. 4 (2005): 575–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40267890.
Cobb, Daniel M., ed. “‘My Own Nation’ (1899): Queen Lili‘uokalani.” In Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, 13–18. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469624815_cobb.6.
Laukea, Sydney. “The dark history of the overthrow of Hawaii,” February 17, 2022, by Ted-ed, YouTube, 5 min., 46 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2bjjwv4134.
Osborne, Thomas J. “Trade or War? America’s Annexation of Hawaii Reconsidered.” Pacific Historical Review 50, no. 3 (1981): 285–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/3639601.
