Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (52 page)

At about the time the Massie trial ended, an effort to promote mainland tourism to Hawaii went into high gear with entry into service of the sleek, white, 26,000-ton ocean liner SS
Lurline
of the Matson Line.
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She, other ships, and eventually airliners disgorged paying passengers who were garlanded with leis, hosted at luaus, entertained with hula (which was sanitized, no longer scandalous, but an exotic tourist attraction)—and who never had a clue what their hosts might be thinking.

Race relations came to the fore in a different way during World War II, because about one-quarter of the population of the islands was of full or partial Japanese ancestry. On the West Coast, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and concentrated into internment camps; in Hawai‘i that was simply not workable. They were questioned, and watched, and lived under martial law, but ironically those of Japanese ancestry in the only part of the nation to suffer a major attack had a far easier lot than those thousands of miles in the rear. Ultimately, most Japanese-Americans who volunteered for the war were formed into the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were sent to Europe, where there would be no question of friendly fire; they saw their fiercest action in the Italian campaign. After the war one tally revealed that of all Hawaiian service members killed in battle, four in five were of Japanese ancestry—an imperishable monument to valor and patriotism.

In fact, during the next run made for statehood in 1946, the congressional report allowed that according to both army and navy intelligence, “not a single act of sabotage was committed by any resident of Hawaii before, during, or after the attack on Pearl Harbor.” The report went on to acknowledge “the important patriotic service rendered, under the most critical conditions … by all citizens of Hawaii, regardless of racial origin.” The U.S. Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion the same year, when it finally ruled (rather after the fact) that wartime martial law in the territory had been unconstitutional, and was based on “the mistaken premise that Hawaiian inhabitants are less entitled to constitutional protection than others.”

When statehood finally came in 1959, it was attended by some lovely ironies. The last-appointed territorial governor, Republican and Anglo William F. Quinn, was elected first governor of the state, to be sworn in by Justice Masaji Marumoto. The former speaker of the territorial House of Representatives, Hiram Fong, who had been an energetic leader in the campaign for statehood, was elected one of the state’s first two (and the nation’s first Asian-American and first Chinese-American) senators to go to Washington—where his seat was directly across the aisle from Strom Thurmond’s. James Kealoha, the state’s first lieutenant governor, was Chinese-Hawaiian; to the House of Representatives in Washington they sent Daniel Inouye, a Japanese-American war hero who lost an arm in Italy and won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Thus Hawai‘i entered finally the American union with its full ethnic rainbow in display.

After a decade of statehood, interest in Hawaiian language and culture led in the islands to what became known as the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, the first having been the resuscitation of native culture by Kamehameha V and Kalakaua. One inspiration for it was the writing, publishing, and cultural advocacy of an articulate and reflective
hapa haole
, John Dominis Holt. A trustee of the Bishop Museum and chief of Topgallant Publishing, Holt was 45 when his essay
On Being Hawaiian
appeared in 1964. His was an appropriate voice, as his heritage contained a thorough mixture of ancestries, and he was born at a time when his own parents were less than eager to relate his Hawaiian genealogy. Equally at home in New York or Europe, Holt supported the revival of Hawaiian arts, and was himself the author of a novel and several short stories, a treatise on traditional featherwork, and a history of the monarchy that was as insightful as it was all too brief.

Because of his recognition that pre-
haole
Hawai‘i was in fact no paradise, that some practices from the old days had been rightly discarded, and his stance that all of Hawai‘i’s past and its influences contain elements that can be salvaged to fashion a healthy modern culture, Holt came to be disparaged by the more radicalized element of the cultural renaissance.
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By the time of his death in 1993 he had won a place at the table, but the fact was that his literary interpretation of the Hawaiian mixed-blood experience, which is to say the experience of a majority of the islands’ people, fought uphill to gain the recognition of academia and the new cultural elite.

The cultural renaissance, as it grew, was all too often “highly fragmented and contains little sense either of unity among Hawaiians or of cross-cultural harmony within the wider society.”
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The way of
aloha
all too often goes wanting in the resentments expressed about the past—and the history itself often seems poorly understood by the angriest of partisans. In a time-transport back to those days, a native Hawaiian would stand 999 chances in 1,000 that he or she would be a fisherman and taro digger, even more impoverished than now, and, subject to chiefly whim or sacrifice, tied to a tree and strangled. That does not excuse the overthrow, which was indefensible. But political appeals to Hawai‘i’s history could use a reality check. There were no good old days.

To the independence movement after the turn of the twenty-first century, the boot heel of oppression is increasingly seen in virtually every aspect of the American presence, no matter how much respect was intended. One scholarly article published in 2005 savaged construction of the Waikiki War Memorial and Natatorium, dedicated in 1927, and criticized it on the ground that only eight Hawaiians had died in combat during World War I; for the monument to commemorate the lives of the further ninety-three Hawaiians who died of illness or accident while in American or British service was allegedly designed to exaggerate Hawai‘i’s participation, and is therefore a monument to American domination. One suspects, however, that if the monument had honored only the eight battle dead, and ignored the other ninety-three, the criticism would have been even more shrill. The same article also lamented that the memorial occupies the site of the Papa‘ena‘ena
heiau
(the Pacific War Memorial), and thus mourned the loss of an important native religious site—never mind that the
heiaus
were destroyed on the order of Queen Ka‘ahumanu and the chief priest, Hewahewa, before any missionaries arrived, let alone that its loss had nothing to do with Americans or World War I. One might further note that after the Battle of Nu‘uanu Pali in 1795, Kamehameha sacrificed the conquered
ali‘i
of Oahu at this
heiau
, an aspect of native religious practice that does little to validate today’s wash of nostalgia. The article even sees the monument’s heroic Western architecture as an insult to its Pacific location, despite its being within the vernacular of worldwide memorial design at the time. A monument to Hawai‘i’s war dead constructed of traditional thatched grass could have been equally criticized for paying them little regard.
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Modern times cannot put a foot right when it comes to the old days.

In 1993, the centenary of the overthrow, President Bill Clinton did the only proper thing to mark the occasion: On behalf of the rest of the United States, he apologized. Another event of cultural significance to the islands that occurred in 1993 was the repatriation of the remains of Henry Opukaha‘ia, the youthful refugee from the Kamehameha conquest whose zeal for the new God set the missionaries in motion and changed Hawaiian history forever. An effort was coordinated by collateral descendents, who raised money and support, and shipped a glowing casket of koa wood to Connecticut. In July a team led by the state archaeologist painstakingly excavated the grave at Cornwall; their hopes sank as they found only discolored soil in the outline of the original coffin, which had been dissolved by the acetic soil. To their great surprise, however, Opukaha‘ia’s nearly intact skeleton slowly emerged from the earth. Washed and articulated in a bed of foam rubber in the koa coffin, he returned home and was reburied on August 15 in the cemetery of the Kahikolu Church, close by Kealakekua Bay from where he had escaped the butchery of the conquest two centuries before.
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Originally constructed in 1852–55, the Kahikolu Church was one of only two stone churches built on the Big Island in the missionary era. Felled by the earthquake of August 21, 1951, it lay in ruins for many years before being restored and reopened for services in 1999.

A much more important restoration has been the stunning resurrection of the ‘Iolani Palace, seat of the Kalakaua monarchy. Immediately after the coup the building was appropriated to house the junta’s government, for a time during which the queen was locked in her bedroom directly overhead. Much of the original woodwork had been lost to insects and rot incident to the climate, and was meticulously re-created. Similar to the experience of the French palace of Versailles, a call was put out to return furniture and precious objects that had been dispersed. While the project is not complete, the people’s response has been eloquent testimony of their endorsement of the project.

In 1994 another site of cultural importance was recovered when the U.S. Navy relinquished control of the sacred island of Kaho‘olawe. Once settled and agricultural—albeit thinly because it lies in the rain shadow of Haleakala and is semidesert—it had been uninhabited since being commandeered as a bombing and naval gunnery range during World War II, a use that continued through the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. In one test, to see whether a retired cruiser could withstand a nearby blast, five hundred tons of TNT were set off, ruining the island’s only well. Shattered by the decades-long rain of high explosives, the forty-four-square-mile island was designated an environmental and cultural reserve, and is being restored by young natives reconnecting to their Polynesian traditions.

*   *   *

Hawai‘i in the twenty-first century, despite having contributed a president to the United States, is still in ferment. Protests, such as those that periodically occupy the ‘Iolani Palace grounds, continue to the present day, carried out by what is collectively known as the “Independence Movement.” It is angry and vigorous but disunited, with perhaps half a dozen principal groups, some headed by one or another royal descendent, each claiming the throne for herself. Some things, it seems, never change.

But Hawai‘i’s social ills—poverty that is demonstrably an aftereffect still of the
Mahele
more than a century and a half ago; youth crime and disaffection that come of having one’s cultural heritage ripped apart and never mended; the restoration of native identity and the just desire for the return of some amount of autonomy, which for decades was never accorded a status equal to that even of American Indians; the natural environment that was nearly obliterated in the worship of sugar; and more, need to be not just addressed but comprehensively, meaningfully—and probably expensively—addressed.

But they are not addressed by nostalgia for the chiefly days. People who espouse reincarnation always fancy themselves to have been Henry VIII or Marie Antoinette. No one channels his past as some humble, downtrodden medieval plowman. In old Hawai‘i 999 people in 1,000 were
kanakas
, digging taro, netting fish, trying to hide their one pig from the chief’s steward, being throttled on an altar if their shadow crossed an
ali‘i
. Modern cultural sensitivity obscures an important fact: Hawai‘i never was a paradise.

In its own way the Western-dominated nineteenth century was as merciless as precontact warfare. The Age of Imperialism had no room for small but strategically vital countries. Kamehameha III sensed that when he prepared to cede his kingdom to the United States in preference to the French or British. Kalakaua realized it when he tried to marry off Princess Ka‘iulani to a Japanese imperial prince. The Second World War gave sufficient examples of how the Japanese governed their client states for the Hawaiians still to be counting their blessings that he failed.

What is needed, by the government and on the mainland, is a clear grasp of the history and what Westernization has done to the islands and people. Precontact Hawaiians had no iron, but that did not make them a Stone Age culture. They had by most measures a highly evolved society, albeit retaining some brutal remnants of a more primitive time whose eradication need not be mourned. But there was also a large extent to which contact meant exploitation—economic more than cultural—and that is what needs to be put right. Over generations as an American territory and then state, Hawaiians have often struggled to maintain the spirit of
aloha
—the “face of breath,” from the ancient greeting of inclining close in greeting, and sharing the air. That is the most famous part of their culture, and mainlanders have come to expect that of them.

But Hawaiians have another important concept:
Ho ‘oponopono
—reconciling, the making right of a bad situation. In the ancient days there were ceremonies to achieve it, to cleanse the minds of anger or selfishness, and to come together earnestly and in good faith to rectify and satisfy. Hawai‘i deserves to have it made right.

Notes

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Preface