Culture Change

Abstract

This chapter examines the case of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Hawai‘i is a valuable case study in demographic change and national identity because Native Hawaiians had to internalize immigration-driven diversity and accept its contradictions. The arrival of Americans in Hawai’i in the nineteenth century spread disease, spurred immigration, and eventually toppled the Hawaiian Kingdom and its system of cultural norms. By the time Native Hawaiians organized during the 1960s “Hawaiian Renaissance,” they had intermarried and intermingled their traditions, culture, and genealogies with people from China, Japan, Portugal, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the United States. This chapter explores four different ways Hawaiians have renegotiated their sense of identity and power in the aftermath of demographic transformation: (1) the reestablishment of genealogical bloodlines, (2) legal quests to reassert Hawaiian national sovereignty, (3) the resurrection of the Hawaiian language, and (4) the reclamation of ancestral lands and revival of farming cooperatives.