Hawaiian Literature and Resistance, or How My Ancestors Took on the Stryker Brigade and Joined the Struggle to Demilitarize Hawai'i!

Abstract

When the United States formally took control of Hawai'i in 1898, the eighty-something years of Americans living among the kanaka maoli, called Hawaiians in English, had already positioned them above the maka'ainana, or commoners. By the end of the nineteenth century 90o percent of all kanaka had died from foreign diseases, and the 40,000 or so still alive were almost completely Christianized. With Christianity came haole (white) notions of literacy, that is, a written alphabet. The consequences of this worked for and against the kanaka, as writing down an extremely complex language also meant applying an arbitrary simplification via the foreigner's perspective. For example, the sounds of K and T were interchangeable from region to region, but in the written version, the letter T was left out of the alphabet. Today kanaka maoli are just over two decades into a cultural renaissance that is premised in large part on recovering '6lelo Hawai'i, or what some call 'olelo makuahine-the mother tongue. As a cultural phenomenon this process is woven into the contemporary sovereignty struggle, a movement that is as much about nationalism as it is about culture. It is not uncommon now and then to see an editorial written by a kanaka maoli that criticizes the missionaries and their descendants, a number of whom were personally responsible for the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. And without missing a beat, the newspaper follows up with a strongly worded letter from a haole person chastising the ungrateful kanaka who wrote the editorial. It usually goes something like this: If it weren't for the missionaries there would be no Hawaiian language because they gave you people an alphabet and taught you how to read. From 1856 onward kanaka maoli wrote and published in their own