Dr. Erik Hadley
Interviewee: Dr. Erik Hadley
Interviewer: Doug Exton
Description: This talk examines the Native Hawaiian struggle for land, sovereignty, and community empowerment over the past 50 years, situating it within the broader indigenous civil rights movement in the U.S. Native Hawaiian activists drew inspiration from the American Indian Movement, joining a larger fight against settler-colonial dispossession. Over time, solidarity between Native Hawaiians and Native Americans grew. Hawaiian activists supported the Standing Rock protests in 2016, opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, while Native American activists backed the Mauna Kea protests in 2018-2019, even staging demonstrations on the mainland. These connections highlight a shared fight for indigenous rights. Bio: Dr. Erik Hadley earned his BA in History from the University of Montana and his MA and PhD from the University at Buffalo, specializing in Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World. He is a lecturer in the History Department at Boise State University, teaching medieval and early modern European history as well as Atlantic and Pacific World histories. His research focuses on cultural history, particularly folkloric rituals, identity, and public commemoration in Western Europe and indigenous communities in the Americas and Hawai’i. Dr. Hadley was awarded a 2019-2020 Fulbright Research U.S. Scholar grant to Belgium, where he studied the historical evolution and public memory of UNESCO-recognized folkloric festivals dating back to the late Middle Ages. He has authored numerous articles on cultural identity in French-speaking Belgium.
Date: 2021-02-23
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Doug Exton: And thank you so much for joining us for tonight's Connected Conversation. A program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, idahohumanities.org. I'd like to remind you all that you may submit any questions using the Q&A feature located at the bottom of the screen. I cannot guarantee that any questions answered in the chat will be answered.
With me tonight is Doctor Erik Hadley from Boise State University, and it's an honor to have you with us tonight. I turn it over to you.
Erik Hadley: Thank you. Doug. It's a pleasure to be here. I do have a present, or a Google slide presentation that I can. You gave me sharing rights, I believe. Well, thank you, Doug, and thank you very many's council for inviting me. My name is Doctor Erik Hadley. I teach a variety of classes and history department of Boise State University, including classes, in European history, which is my specialty.
To be honest, but one of my PhD fields was in, a new field in the late 90s, early 2000s called the Atlantic World, which we moved away from national histories and look more regionally, and have continents and continent wide histories and environmental histories and, and the role of indigenous peoples, and particularly the role of agency and power of indigenous peoples, in, in over long periods of time, 4 or 500 years.
And often starting with that, we would look before, you know, we have these key dates like Columbus sailing, 1492. And then somehow the narrative starts there on up in the Pacific in Hawaii, Captain Cook. And in 1788. And so the goal there was to move the narrative onto, indigenous ground and start with that. And then, yes, we we have this, this larger story of, eventually Western European settler colonial intervention, but to not grant power to that exclusively and say and move this notion of the age of discovery and put quotations around it and say, maybe an age of encounter is a better term.
Anyway, I, I've taught at a for a number of years and I got really interested in, in Pacific world and, Pacific Islander histories, particularly in Hawaii as well. And, so this is a challenge for me. This is my newest field, both, teaching at Boise State and as, an, emerging research interest for myself, which is when I teach a class called The Pacific World, at Boise State.
And it centers more or less on Hawaii. As, as, a micro history of, of it of an indigenous Pacific people with a very, particular special history and also, how their history tells us stories, a wider narrative, a wider kind of meta narrative of, of Pacific World. Identity. So that's where this started. And this talk is kind of the, I guess, the confluence of both of these, both Atlantic and Pacific world.
I wanted to talk about the power of indigenous peoples, in resisting the settler colonial narrative, and hegemony. And, I do that both kind of. And I'm as guilty, I guess, even though the things that Atlantic and Pacific, I didn't put into a world theory perspective and, I kept stumbling onto notions where I would see different indigenous groups working together for the same goal, for the same, end, and, so when I was asked if I would be interested in doing a presentation for the IHC, I thought, I want to talk about something I've never actually presented on, before.
So this is a new thing for me, and that is the intersections of where American Indian and, Native Hawaiian, movements over land and sovereignty in the last 50 years have met these kind of confluences, and it's not always going to be in the same direction. They're not always necessarily working to the same goals. But but, they're definitely operating in conjunction with one another and lifting each other up.
And, so that's what I want to talk about. I will say at the outset, I think it's important to note I'm not Native Hawaiian, and I have no claim to speak for Native Hawaiians. I have a deep respect for, Native Hawaiian culture, but I speak as an outsider and, so yeah, let's get started.
So I'm gonna start here and bring this to Idaho. This is Doctor LaNada War Jack. She's a member of the Shoshone Bannock tribe, out of Fort Hall in eastern Idaho. And this is a picture of her at Alcatraz in 1970. She's at Alcatraz because she with a, a group of of American Indian activists that occupied Alcatraz, the previous November and would continue to do so for another year and a half.
And that was this. This, if you know anything about the Alcatraz occupation, and I'll talk about it, greater detail shortly. It it was the catalyst for, a series of American Indian, movement renaissance in the 1970s. And it was on the world stage. It was followed by, very by the American media. And it was a nearly 20 month long occupation.
And, that became the model in some ways, for other indigenous groups to have similar both the expression of resistance and the means of resistance, to, to further, indigenous causes. So I want to start with her and this quote, which is a lengthy quote, I have to read it, in its entirety, but it's a quote by the Ka Lahui, Hawai'i and which is, Hawaiian organization dedicated to Hawaiian sovereignty or Hawaiian independence and, of Native Hawaiians and, reclamation of the Hawaiian archipelago for Native Hawaiians.
And, the title of this article was the Next Step toward Sovereignty Project Hawaiian Justice. And what I thought was really interesting is it was a series of bullet points. And one of the bullet points, I think this was number three was working with, American Indians and finding this commonality of experience and commonality of experience, in the face of Western settler colonial hegemony and racism and marginalization, and, a loss of culture, a loss of language and a realization that these goals can be met
in an alliance or in solidarity with one another. And, it's an article, that clearly is tying Hawaiian, sovereignty interests directly back to American Indian, similar struggles over sovereignty and land. So the way this will work, I have a brief, my wife helped me this down because she said it was way too long.
So I'll try to keep it brief. History of, native Hawaiians and the Hawaiian kingdom. Because I think it's really important. Just like I was talking about with understanding, say American Indian societies before Columbus or Hawaiian society before, quote, it's important to have some context or background to to the struggle and that many people don't really know that much about the history of Hawai'i.
Prior to, prior to Cook and, and so we'll we'll talk a bit about that, and then we'll talk about Hawaii in the 20th century. And then I have just five examples of indigenous agency, starting with the Alcatraz occupation in 1969, moving to the, the Kaho'olawe, occupation, which is an island in Hawaii. And there's a direct consequence of Alcatraz.
And then at the same time, the hokule'a, which is a vaka moana, a double-hulled, traditional Hawaiian sailing vessel that sails thousands of miles to Tahiti using traditional techniques and navigation for the first time in 600 years. And then two further examples, more recently, the Standing Rock, protests in North Dakota and, the Mauna Kea protest over the 30 Meter Telescope, in 2015 and as recently as 2019.
So that's my talk in a nutshell. Some terms, I'm going to use and, can reference back here. Is it important to use the Hawaiian term the Kanaka Maoli means the native Hawaiian people. 'Ohana is family. 'Aina is land. To malama 'aina means to care for the land. To aloha 'aina is to love the land.
It's necessary to be pono. That's to say, righteous or achieve some degree of reciprocity and to provide kuleana which is responsibility. And the Kia'i would be a guardian who was charged with the kuleana the responsibility to do aloha 'aina and malama 'aina. To care and love the land. And it's up to an ohana group to do that.
A couple other term, an ahupua'a is a traditional land district, which references, and you can still see them today, if you go to Hawaii at least it designates where they are, on signs but they're pie shaped slices of traditional land, under the, under the traditional system before they overthrow well before the great mahele and certainly before the overthrow of the, the monarchy, the maka'ainana are people, but the common people, which is to be distinguished from the elite or the leaders.
And finally, much of what we understand, what I understand comes from mo'olelos. And those are stories or histories, the Hawaiian people have preserved and many of those are preserved through something that people most commonly associate when they think of Hawaiian culture, which is hula, mele, chanting and they tell mo'olelos. And finally mana or power.
So, do this really quickly. So there we anthropologists, archeologists traced, through pottery, a group called the Lapita people, from, New Guinea to, to the Fiji/Tonga/Samoa region, where they arrived probably 3000 years ago, at least. Maybe earlier. For about a thousand years, these people known as the Lapita stayed in that, general area in the western Pacific before,
And they develop a distinctly Polynesian, culture, language and traditions. And this is a, this is known as, or one of the, the, the homeland idea of this would be Hawaiki and Hawaiki would is the Polynesian Garden of Eden, this place, where Polynesian people came from and the term Hawaii, you have the glottal stop where you replace the k.
When, when these Polynesians arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, they named it that, Hawaiki, this, this, this special place. And they did arrive, after about a thousand years in the Fiji/Tonga/Samoa area, these Polynesian people who were very smart, very good navigators. Very adept sailors, sailed thousands of miles across open ocean. And they encounter the Society Islands or the, the Tahitian chain, the Tuamotu, the Marquesan chain.
And eventually they move northward into, crossing the equator to the Hawaiian chain. They also find, Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island and Aotearoa, also known as a New Zealand. And if you look at my little map here, you have this Polynesian triangle, locked in on the far East by Rapa Nui, to the north by, the Hawaiian Islands, and in this, southwest by, by Aotearoa.
And you can see, the Samoa, Fiji, Tongan area here, which is the heart of the Lapita culture. In addition to reaching Rapa Nui, we know from a couple of reasons, a couple of ways that, these other Polynesian explorers also reached the coast of South America, you know, that because they brought back sweet potatoes.
And these sweet potatoes were then farmed, throughout Polynesia, notably, all the way to New Zealand. But in Hawaii, certainly. And, most recently, they've done DNA testing of, of indigenous peoples and Rapanui and find similar DNA lines as people in the Peru, Bolivia area. So there was this connection, but there was no long term settlement.
The Polynesians remained and ocean and island, people. So Hawaii was colonized during this time between 500 and 1400 of the Common era. When they colonized, they, divided the land up into these things called ahupua'as which wwould start at the top of the mountain and go down to the ocean. And each of these who put us would be turned over to, kinship groups of commoners known as the maka'ainana, to work at.
They have a different notion of land ownership. The land is useful for its productive value, not in terms of of its acreage, not in terms of its territory, but land is worked, and is used for both livestock and the Polynesian voyagers brought livestock with them, like pigs and chickens and dogs, but also the they also brought plants with them, like taro, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, bananas, coconuts and other.
And so, they would the, the and in addition, they created fishponds. And these fishponds were very sustainable. And and there's an elite class over these people known as the ali'i and a priest class, the kahunas, and both the elite and kahuna is basically able to live off of the productive excess of of the ahupua'as.
To keep the ahupua'as sustainable, they developed a couple laws which would say, don't overfish in here, don't overhunt in here. Don't, give the grounds a rest when it needs to be. And so you would put it off limits temporarily. Eventually, you see the development by the 1500s and 1600s of a high kingship. And these are known as ali'i nui, which would be a great king or an ali'i akua to be a god king.
And someone like Kamehameha the first would certainly fit in that bill. It was forbidden by this point for the maka'ainana to even look at them, let their shadow fall on them. They were required to give them tribute. But this tribute was supposed to be held in pono, meaning the ali'i had to be righteous.
They had to aloha 'aina and allow the maka'ainana to care for the land. So, this is the system that Hawaii worked in, and we're talking ruling from maybe 4 to 500 colonists to a population of at least half a million. And some, some have estimated upwards of 800,000 at the time of Captain Cook's arrival in 1778.
Finally, there's a makahihi season, which is a wintertime peak season when, when no war can happen. And where, the god Lono, is a, is the god of fertility and rain is, allowed to collect tribute for the, the ali'i. This is when the maka'ainana would give it what they had, in tribute to, you know, to the ali'i.
Since the Hawaiian Islands. And this is in 1778, Cook arrives and dies. We'll just move on from that. We don't have time, but Cook gets killed in an altercation on the Big Island at Kealakekua Bay. And, when the expedition returns back to London, unlike previous Pacific expeditions, like the Spanish, who not really had not stumbled onto Hawaii, the London
Royal Society made sure to publish these things. So all of a sudden Hawaii was on the map. And then it was like the fur trade, and whaling it became. And missionaries became a very popular place. Subsequently, notably, if you're in Idaho, you know, the Owyhee River and the Owyhee mountain range not too far from Boise.
This is, Owyhee means Hawaii. And these are, Hawaiians who are brought in by fur traders to work the inner, rivers. And, three Hawaiians were lost, in the early 19th century in this, Owyhee. So Idaho has that connection. So to understand why Hawaiians, or how the language and culture and traditions that Hawaiians today use in resistance, takes a little bit of background here.
Kamehameha The First is, I can't go I don't have time to go through all of the the rulers of Hawaii. But Kamehameha is certainly, worth noting in part because he, using Western ships and weapons and, even artillery muskets is able to not. He's the king of the Big Island of Hawaii, but he eventually conquers the rest of the archipelago.
And he does this by around 1800. Within, ten, twelve years of Cook. And this is important it's important for the purposes of this talk, which is, he unifies Hawaii under a single kingship, and that means that the Western people would have to deal with him, and they couldn't try to play, one chieftain off against the other, which they had done very successfully, in the Americas, with, with Mesoamericans and Native Americans, trying to, divide and conquer and, and pull one tribe off to another tribe and get them to agree to the terms of the treaty, which over people they didn't have power over, or to use those people
in war against another. So Kamehameha, at a very key moment, unifies the island chain and prevents this from happening. There's no crack there for Westerners to exploit. Kamehameha. This is where he died in 1819 on the Big Island, in Kailua. After his death, you see an end. This is the beginning of change in Hawaii. And that's the end to traditional religious practices.
His, successor, a young man named Liholiho, who, is, co ruler with his stepmother Ka'ahumanu. Ka'ahumanu is, successfully agrees to be converted to Christianity by the New England board of, of, of Foreign Missions. And these are Congregationalists from the basically Puritans from England. And they bring Christianity to the island.
Hiram Bingham is notably one of these. And with the conversion of Ka'ahumanu, Ka'ahumanu convinces her stepson and ruler, Liholiho to end, end the old ways and the worship of the of the Hawaiian gods, including Pele in Kilauea. And they end the kapu system. There's this system of of of, of of taboos, which is the taboo is the, the Tahitian word for kapu, which is the forbidding of things.
And they do a certain, 'ai noa ritual, which is to say that men and women eat publicly together, and that's forbidden under Hawaiian law. And by doing that, it ends, it ends the at forcible conversion, starting at the highest level of Hawaiian society of people into Christianity. This is, Queen Ka'ahumanu, Hiram Bingham and the, some of the earliest churches, this in Honolulu, Liholiho dies young and his, younger brother, Kauikeaouli takes control.
He takes the title of Kamehameha the third, and it's important to mention him for two reasons, for the purposes of his talk. And that is the Great Mahele and the adoption of of a Parliament. He's convinced by these missionaries that if Hawaii wants to, be, recognized kingdom on a global scale by Europeans, they have to do a they have to do a British style parliament with a constitutional monarchy, which he agrees to.
And then later they, they, also push him to go to a fee simple style land ownership, which means no longer ahupua'as. It means we're going to take all the land and everybody gets title to it. Now you see the same struggle going on in Native American reservations with the notion of land being held by the tribe, as a whole, versus land being held individually, breaking up of the reservation and giving it to individuals.
It's even worse in Hawaii. In the Great Mahele, there's about 4 million acres of land in Hawaii. And they decide they'll divide it up in three, one third to the king, one third to the nobles, the elite, and some of these haole or white advisors, and one third to the maka'ainana, the commoners. But it doesn't work out that way.
Are about 80,000 Native Hawaiians. So in population loss of 90%, maybe by by the mid 19th century, and the crown lands of about 1.8 million acres are held by the King. And those and the ali'i, and the the haoles get their land, but only 1% of the maka'ainana get land. It's about 28,000 acres.
So this land. The point of this is this. When you go to Hawaii today, the, the state land and the federal land, that 1.8 million acres is the Crown lands of the king and, and of the monarchy. But it goes back to this Great Mahele. And, it's still being held in trust. And it has not been decided what to do with it.
A new constitution is forced to the king in 1864 that reduces his power even more. And by people like this guy Garrett King Judd, missionary, here posing with two later, Hawaiian kings. And finally it comes to a head under, David Kalakaua, the so called Merrie Monarch. Kalakaua is is, does his own version of a Hawaiian renaissance.
He wants to capture Hawaiian culture before it disappears. He he has the the Kumulipo recorded, which is the Hawaiian creation story going back to the genesis and all the way up, including Mauna Kea. And he does things like he builds a royal palace, the 'Iolani Palace in Honolulu. He brings back hula, which had been banned since 1830.
He gets boarded genealogies together, so that he can record the genealogies of the ali'i nui. And what you see here is he's negotiating between Western imperialism and the needs of Western imperialism that is being forced upon the islands, as well as a Native Hawaiian resurgence and cultural values. So Kalakaua he tries to he tries to do it both ways.
But his work on Native Hawaiian agency, backfires with with the haoles who force the, Bayonet the so-called Bayonet Constitution on Hawaii in 1887. By this point, the missionaries are third, second or third generation, they're very wealthy. They've taken over much of the land. They are royal advisors and, they basically force this constitution on the monarchy, which reduces the monarchy to a figurehead and disenfranchizes Native Hawaiians and other Asian migrants.
All power now goes to haoles who constitute less than 5% of the population. He dies and his sister Lili'uokalani takes power. This is the Honolulu Rifles, the haole militia enforcing the Bayonet Constitution. And Lili'uokalani, she refuses the Bayonet Constitution. And in 1893, she calls for a new constitutional convention to restore, to go back to at least 1864, preferably back to 1840.
And what are the missionaries do? They convince John Stevens, who's the US minister to the Hawaiian Kingdom, to use American Marines and the USS Boston in, Honolulu Harbor to, occupy 'Iolani Palace and overthrow the Queen. And that's what happens. So these guys like Sanford Dole, the same family as Dole Pineapple, he'll become the president of a provisional, Republic of of Hawaii.
And Hawaiians resist this. We have, they form a group called the Hui Hawaii Aloha 'Aina. And this, this group, collect signatures to protest to Grover Cleveland, the president of United States, saying this isn't fair. This isn't right. And, they collect 38,000 signatures of 40,000 registered adult Hawaiians, 38,000 to 40,000. And it works.
There's been a lot of historical work, on these on these petitions. And, the petition is to go to the US government and say, what you did was illegal. And what you need to do is restore our independence. And actually, Cleveland agrees, and Congress does nothing. But in 1896, William McKinley is elected president. He's a different party, he's a Republican.
And more sympathetic to the notion of occupying and, annexing Hawaii. And then the Spanish-American War happened of 1898. And the Americans decide, after capturing the Philippines from the Spanish, to keep it and not turn the Philippines back over as an independent country. And now Hawaii suddenly has a strategic resupply point. And it should be
no, coincidence, then, that the US government, in a simple majority vote, Congress just, annexed Hawaii, over the wishes of the Hawaiian people over the wishes of the previous president. And Lili'uokalani will die in 1917 with her will die, 1000 more or more years of Hawaiian independence. So compare that brief history. It was probably too long, and I'm sorry, but then I tried to cover the main points.
You can look at that. And I've kind of put this to here from between 1820 and 1898. And you can see how this works. The end of traditional religion, the banning of hula, the beginning of constitutionalism, the great Mehele, the changing constitutions, the Bayonet Constitution, the overthrow of the monarchy, the banning of the Hawaiian language and then annexation.
And then you can also compare that to what has happening in the American West. In Idaho, Fort Hall and Fort Boise are established pretty early. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which includes Standing Rock land is enacted and guarantees not just Standing Rock, but the land where the current DAPL pipeline is, to the standing Rock Sioux, in Colorado, the Sand Creek massacre, Red Cloud's War, a second treaty, the Great Sioux War, Custer's Last Stand, the Nez Perce War, Geronimo.
And then, of course, Wounded Knee. So you can see that these are happening roughly simultaneously, in the American West and in Hawaii.
All right. Keep going. Here's. So, Hawaiian marginalization under haoles. Three things happened. Hawaiians are basically kicked off their own land, which is now dominated by a planter elite. They are, removed from their own culture. Both, linguistically, traditionally, in terms of hula and other aspects the haole now dominate and as a population, they're a minority in their own country, maybe 25%, 40,000 people in 1900 of roughly 160,000 people on the island.
Actually, the largest group would be the Japanese at about 40%. And whites or haoles make up only 5%.
So looking at Native American versus Hawaiian experiences, and only with an hour, I can't get into all the details on this I'd like to talk about. But we do see one advantage that the Hawaiians have and that is centralized authority, the haoles cannot pit these chiefs against one another. But you also see this wider Hawaiian identification of other Pacific peoples, particularly Polynesian peoples, Tongans, Samoans Tahitians, Maori and others, rather than continental American indigenous peoples like American Indians. And Hawaiian people are not recognized as a tribe or nation.
There are 573 recognized tribes, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Hawaiin people are not one of them. And that's a sticking point, even today, there's been no agreement by the federal government to recognize Hawaiian people, as an indigenous self, governaned entity. But despite that, we see some similarities here the loss of sovereignty, the broken treaties, the dispossession of land and the loss of culture for schooling, vast depopulation and marginalization, out, and removal from political and economic power. This, at statehood in 1959 gives you an idea of the Hawaiians, which is the lavender versus the other ethnic groups in Hawaii.
Hawaii changes quite a bit after the Second World War. We see, changes in the sugar industry, which, at this point they're, producing more than a million, pounds of sugar a year on over 200,000 acres. You see, by 1960, America is getting three quarters of its of its pineapples through Dole and del Monte, also from Hawaii.
You see a rise of Hawaiian tourism. This Pacific nostalgia of of of, World War Two soldiers mixed with commodification of things like tiki and surfing and hula and vast militarization of Hawaii. Almost 120 military sites and bases, 75,000 personnel and head of the US Pacific Command. And so, Hawaiian culture in a sense, is there, but it's not.
But it's being commodified. It's being objectified. It's being used, for, under a tourist gaze. Hawaiian land has never been really addressed. In the 1920s, under the territorial government, they set aside 200,000 acres of relatively poor land. Not, the stuff that, they're you know, on beaches or, growing, sugar on.
They established the blood quantum requirement had to be at least, half native, half native Hawaiian. And yet, as of 2000, there's over 20,000 people on a waiting list. And they have yet to distribute 90% of this acreage. And on statehood states adopted basically a guardianship of Hawaii, native Hawaiians. They're wards of the state, they can't sue the state or or the federal government for violation of those rights.
And there's no bilateral recognition of Hawaiians. What they receive is one fifth interest inproceeds of the quote unquote, ceded lands. And that is this 1.8 million acres of Crown government lands that go back to the coup. This is an example from the Honolulu Magazine of White people utilizing Hawaiian tropes of culture in terms of luau and hula, without any basic understanding or necessarily appreciation for it.
It's an objectification of Hawaiian culture. So we're almost to Alcatraz. By the 1970s, late 60s, you see the near disappearance of Hawaiian language and culture, this vast commodification, the exclusion of Hawaiians from lands. Most land is owned by haole corporations. For instance, Lanai is an island next to, Kaho'olawe and, Molokai. And it was owned basically all of it by the, by one of the big five sugar companies. Today, it's owned by Larry Ellison, like 98% of it.
So. So how have things changed? It's still held in haole land, hands, it's still privatized. So I'm going to talk about three examples now. Alcatraz, Kaho'olawe, and the Hokule'a. So this is one of the best pictures of the Alcatraz occupiers. And so the catalyst for this was the destruction of an American Indian, cultural center in San Francisco, burned down, and searching for another, opportunity.
Three American Indian leaders, Richard Oakes, Leonardo Wardak of Idaho and Adam Fortunate Eagle came across the, Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868. And it said in there that, Indians could occupy abandoned federal lands. And Alcatraz had been abandoned for five years. And in, so in November of that year, 89, American Indians under the under the title of the Indians of All Tribes, not a single tribe occupied Alcatraz.
And by Thanksgiving or on Thanksgiving or Indigenous Peoples Day, it would be, 400 people. And what they did was really important. They set up a school and they taught nonwhite history. They set up, a medical clinic. They set up a kitchen, living quarters, a cultural center, and it was more than just an occupation. It was a reeducation.
It was a statement of, of native cultural values and a of pride. That we don't that ,we can speak our language, we can dress in our traditional, costumes or clothing. We can, worship as we see fit and we can remember our own history, and we can remember our history in a way that that doesn't, legitimize a settler colonial narrative. After two years, of a standoff with the Coast Guard and Richard Nixon, that most of the people finally leave and then, power and water is cut off and and and it ends, but it energizes, American Indian resistance.
Within a year later, the trail of broken treaties, is taken to Washington, D.C., an, American Indian caravan, and protest movement going to Washington with all the treaties, that the American government took broken. The Wounded Knee occupation would occur the following year, 1973, where American Indian Movement, activists would make an armed occupation of the site, at, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where Wounded Knee had occurred.
And so you see this, it becomes this really big deal. It's a it's an important, moment. If you go to Alcatraz today, it's a, it's a park, and it's still you can see the Indians welcome in Indian land, signs there. A direct consequence of that, native Hawaiians, utilize this same notion of occupying land, federal land.
And a guy named Walter Ritte, along with, eight others, including an American Indian. Karla Villalaba of the Muckleshoot tribe of the Pacific Northwest, decide to occupy, Kaho'olawe Island. And Kaho'olawe is this tiny little island. It's where the only, unoccupied in the sense that there's no permanent, human settlement there now. And from World War Two through the Vietnam War, it was used as a bombing range by the US Navy.
And, in addition, there were thousands of feral goats and sheep which had eaten everything and reduced it, to an, a severely eroded place. It also is sacred. There's a spot at the south end of that island where there's a heiau, a temple, a navigational temple that takes you to Tahiti, and where Polynesian colonists may have stepped foot first, when they arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, the, the, quote unquote Plymouth rock of Hawaiian colonists. And, the, the, the Navy basically taken it over and was desecrating it, was bombing it, including enormous bombs, thousands of tons of TNT, which were supposed to simulate, tactical
nuclear weapons. There's potholed and cratered and unexploded ordnance everywhere. And so the, these men and women, who were were inspired by Alcatraz occupied this, but, this area and, it worked. By 1980, a federal court ruled joint use between native Hawaiians and, the US Navy. By 1990 live fire ends at Kaho'olawe. In 1994
the Navy turns the island in its entirety back over to the state for the use of Native Hawaiians. I see a couple questions. Maybe, how about, I'll address those at the end if that's all right. So you guys can keep putting questions in from, I'll deal with them. As we go. So we can get through this quickly.
So this is military detonations on Kaho'olawe. Here's Walter Ritte. Second example, the Hokule'a, Hokule'a is a traditional voyaging canoe and, part, so if people are familiar with the with the Kon-Tiki expedition, and, postwar, like in 1948, it was this idea by these, Norwegian and, Swedes led by [inaudible] Thor Heyerdahl that it's that maybe colonization of Oceania happened, from the east on balsa wood rafts coming from Peru.
And he he does want to prove it can happen. But it's a, it's deeply insulting. It suggests that, there's no intentionality to navigation. That Polynesians couldn't do this. Plus, it breaks off everything we know about linguistics, archeology, ethnography and the mo'olelos or stories that, the Polynesian people told. And so the Hokule'a expedition starts with the Polynesian Voyaging Society, in which they decide they're going to build a traditional canoe, and then they're going to sail it and they're going to sail it using tradition, meaning not you're not going to get to use, you know, G.P.S. and not even a compass.
But they don't have any, pwo navigators left. The the art had been lost. So they have to go to Satawal on the Caroline Islands and found Mau Piailug who agreed to teach them how to navigate by the stars. And star navigation means you're pulling stars from the from the horizon all night long to to hold a bearing.
Dead reckoning, straight bearing line. And, and they do it in 1976. They voyage from from Hawaii to Tahiti. They're met by nearly one half of the Tahitian population. And it's this, this amazing moment, this first time at 600 years, that a traditional Polynesian community sailed across the open ocean with traditional techniques and made it with native Hawaiians on board. There are later voyages.
And one I'll talk about if I have time later, but notably the 1978 tragedy of Eddie Aikau who was a member of that. And Eddie Aikau is a very famous Native Hawaiian surfer. He had won the 1977 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational and subsequently served in on the Hokule'a, when it capsized off of Lanai, and he tried to use a surfboard to sail or to swim for help, and he was lost at sea.
And this is, of that first voyage, Nainoa Thompson who is still with the, Hokule'a and the, Polynesian Voyaging Society. And the Hokule'a, Tahiti, and Eddie. So we have this, this renaissance, and it culminates in this rebirth of Hawaiian culture and language and traditions. And we see the the establishment of, halau hulas or the, notably, like, for instance, the Merrie Monarch Festival.
It starts in Hilo in 1963 as a tourist attraction, but by the 1970s has been converted to an actual traditional, authentic, competitive both men and women's hula. And you see the establishment in Hawaii of a, state, but in a constitution in 1978 that makes the Hawaiian language a state language again, and creates the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which is basically tasked with, with being a representative and intermediary for Native Hawaiian peoples to the state government and also, in theory, to deal with with the proceeds from these lands that have never, formally been dealt with.
In 1993, you see the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy and the origins, really, of a Hawaiian sovereignty movement, Ka Lahui Hawaii, founded in 1987 with 20,000 members. And so this is a sovereignty movement like independent Hawaii, leave the Union, become an independent kingdom again.
There's the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo. I've only got a couple minutes, don't I. This leads to what we call second wave renaissance. And if this first wave the roughly from the late 60s to the early 2000, the results in these big accomplishments for both Native Americans and Hawaiians in culture. The second one is was centered on things like sovereignty and land stewardship.
And you have things like, kind of a second voyage of the Hokule'a, which is a worldwide voyage. It travels, and you can see on my map here, around the entire world and, and notably, it goes up and down the east coast of the United States and meets not with politicians. Not with haole, or white politicians, but with native peoples.
In Jamestown, Virginia, the home of the first, permanent white English settlement in Virginia. They meet there with the local Indian tribe and ask permission to come ashore. They don't meet with, with, with, settlers, white settlers. And so you begin to see this, this notion of this, of indigenous peoples sharing a common experience and doing it through ritual, doing it through through music and dance and chants.
And, the hokule'a becomes not just a vehicle of of of, of Hawaiian, indigenous identity, but but in some ways speaks for all indigenous peoples. You can watch a documentary on it. There's, Moananuiakea by Naalehu Anthony has a really good, documentary on that, worldwide voyage. A second, is Mauna Kea.
Is, over 30, 33,000ft from its base to its summit. That makes it the tallest mountain on the planet, if not the highest, the top third of
It, about 13,796ft or above sea level. And this, in the Hawaiian traditions, is considered the birthplace of the Hawaiian people. And you see this going back to the Merrie Monarch himself, the kumulipo on the summit of of Mauna Kea and or Mauna a Wakea is where, Mother Earth and Father Sky, had a daughter. And, so we say Mauna Kea, which means the White Mountain.
But it can also translated as Mauna a Wakea the home of the Sky Father. And this daughter had a stillborn son who she buried in the corner of the house. And then, and a shoot came up out of the ground, and that was a taro shoot. And that feeds the Hawaiian people. And her second son, is the first ali'i and the the beginning of all humans.
So it's a very special. It's it's, it's like a Garden of Eden special place. It's considered an umbilical cord linking, the heavens to the ground and the beginnings of Hawaiian people for all the islands. It has a sacred lake, Waiau, which is one of the highest lakes in the United States. The only, one of the only lakes in the in the Hawaiian island chain.
And it's, pre, 19 or 1819, it was reserved that entire summit just for the ali'i and the kahunass or the, the chiefs. These are pictures my son took on a trip that we, where we hiked up to the top of Mauna Kea. And it is very, it feels very otherworldly.
You approach that, if you ever do this climb, do it in silence, do it with respect. There's me, and this is, Lake Waiau, and what I if you are not Hawaiian, you don't touch that water. You don't approach it. I sat down and gazed. I did take a picture, and then I turned around. I walked back down.
So on Mauna Kea, our series of observatories and the there start, the construction started in the late 70s, early 60s. And there's about 13 of them. The entire summit is rented by the University of Hawaii- Hilo. My son, who made it further than I did, was able to take pictures of of some of these observatories on the summit.
Right now, there's proposed to be a new observatory placed on it, known as the 30 Meter Telescope. This is an artistic rendering of what it would look like a very, very, very large, telescope. And people, were native, the native community was more or less overlooked when planning for this, was established. The permitting didn't take into account, Native Hawaiian concerns about, continued construction of, objects on the top of the summit.
And in the summer of 2015, the, the Ku Kia'i Mauna, a collective organization of, which involves both kupunas and kia'i or guardians, blocked the road, the access road, and they are following a similar they followed a similar pattern that we saw with both Kalalau and with Alcatraz in the sense that they built clinics and schools and kitchen and living quarters and teach, hula and mele, they create a hula hula university.
They make it a place of refuge, Pu'uhonua. Where they teach cultural studies and, and so on the one hand, you have this, this standoff with, with state and federal authorities, and arrests of kupunas and, kia'i. On the other hand, you have this there's this widespread expression of Hawaiian identity at this sacred place. Here's the demonstrations.
Kealoha Pisciotta is one of the, women, leading the resistance. Another is a woman named, Pua Case. And both of these, women are prominent, not just in, Mauna Kea, but subsequently at Standing Rock the next year. And maybe you know more about Standing Rock. It's basically a Dakota Access Pipeline
That was going to bring oil from, northern, North Dakota down to Illinois, and it would cross the very corner of, it doesn't actually cross onto reservation land, but it crosses right next to it and crosses the Missouri River. And a disruption of that pipeline would, first it would go through burial and sacred areas.
And second, a disruption of the pipeline would destroy the water. And you see a similar thing going on there, widespread occupation, of of of construction areas and roads and by indigenous peoples, the creation of camps that aren't just camps for the notion of blocking roads and doing a demonstration, but also a culture of vitality of, of, of, of creating a space for, for medicine, for religion, for education.
And it worked or almost worked. By December of 2016, the Army Corps of Engineers halted construction and was going back to do another environmental survey. And, that ended when President Trump took office and four days into office ordered the Army to finish the pipeline over all protests. But it suggests the power of these movements, and and at Standing Rock over, you know, over 300 Native American tribes.
But you also had, Kumu Pua Case who was, a 30 meter telescope plaintiff. She brought her entire ohana. Kealoha also, pledged support on behalf of five different organizations. Even the office of Hawaiian Affairs offered support. And the reverse began to see is true as well. The National Congress for American Indians issued support and amicus briefs, for the Mauna Kea protesters.
So you begin to see how the how, American Indians and Native Hawaiians are showing up and working directly with one another. Here's Standing Rock. Here's Andre Perez, a Native Hawaiian at Standing Rock. And I guess my last point, because I've got to wrap this up, is, why oppose astronomy? This is how it's posed. I mean, this notion that it's a benign science, it's passive, it grants knowledge to people, or we can recast it as why are Native Hawaiians standing in the way of discovery?
Why wouldn't they want jobs? Why don't they want these things? Some critics even cast Native Hawaiian resistance as anti-science, comparing them to basically the Catholic Church and the Inquisition, attacking Galileo. And what I would argue in brief is that this settler victimhood it, it casts the settlers as somehow victims to, the same notions of superstition or barbarism, that we could go back to Hiram Bingham with from from 1820 and it ignores or dehistoricizes, indigenous land and power struggles over hundreds of years and recasts it in some sort of immediate, well, why would you stand in the way of this progress?
Today you have a split in, in the Native Hawaiian community, not just on the issue of the TMT, although it seems increasingly more, in, in recent polling that Native Hawaiians oppose the TMT than maybe ten years ago, but also the notion of sovereignty. On the table right now is a bill that would allow, Native Hawaiians to organize and achieve federal recognition as, as an entity.
And they can determine the nature of that entity, but it doesn't grant independence. And so, it's it's in limbo because many of the same people who are opposing the TMT, who are standing at Standing Rock are also saying, why should we take a bad deal? If we take a bad deal, we'll never get a good deal. And we see that with the Akaka Bill, a ten year struggle, which basically would have given Native Hawaiians the same rights as Native Americans in terms of tribal recognition.
But Native Hawaiians aren't aren't content with merely recognition. And and in this recognition, nothing is ever addressed on the 1.8 million acres that it was stolen. It has never even been returned. And so nationalists like Haunani-Kay Trask say we are not going to compromise. And it, we've got a long game here and we're winning this game. So you can say the starting point of this is to say that if you want the TMT, then you have to negotiate with Native Hawaiians on, as equals and say, we understand that the basis of this negotiation, you may say no and never say yes.
And none of those negotiations have ever gone that direction. They've never started with the notion of it's not, no, it's not an option. It's always what would what would you need? What do you need? What do you need? And that doesn't it is a different it's not it doesn't have the violence of the 1893 overthrow, but it has the same invectives of settler colonial superiority and racism.
To say that you don't have the knowledge or capacity, or wherewithal to understand the value of this place. And it also is it's a land grab, in a sense. So, the conclusion of this is really intersectionality. And the intersectionality is looking at solidarities with, American Indian movements on all of these examples with between mainland indigenous peoples, including native Hawaiians in the diaspora, those 40% of native Hawaiians don't live in Hawai'i they live in most in the mainland United States, including in places like, Salt Lake and in Boise and, places like Iosepa, which is a, old, Hawaiian community, in west of
Salt Lake that is still cared for and maintained by not just Hawaiians, but Polynesian descendants, they, they take care of the graves there of the ancestors. And yet that in of itself is next to Goshute tribal land of Native Americans. And so you can see at Iosepa this, this confluence of Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and, and commemoration of of one's identity and how these different entities can operate. And you also see the role of indigenous peoples in, women in leadership positions from Doctor LaNada War Jack to, Kumu Pua Case, to others and the prominence of women is really significant here.
So here is a picture from one of my graduate students, Frederick Johnson, who's doing work on Iosepa. And he went down there to take pictures of that community. And, doing a protest, not in Hawaii, but here, but in, in in Utah. Here's one from the Idaho Hawaiian Group. On Facebook who, organized a protest at, the Albertsons Stadium at Boise State.
Also to protest the TMT, which tells you that this, this, this notion of solidarity is, is, is not restricted to a single island chain or to a single indigenous group, but has spread amongst them. So thank you. Any questions now?
Doug Exton: Yeah. Thank you for such a wonderful presentation. And we are going to stay on for about 15 minutes for the Q&A. So we will be running a little bit past that 7:00 deadline. But also you did have a lot to cover with the history of Hawaii. So I applaud you for being able to do it in such a short amount of time.
So the first question we have is, since the conversion of Christianity was led by the Queen of Hawaii, did the Hawaiians readily abandon the traditional beliefs or was there, you know, resistance, even though it's coming from the Queen, you know, in that top down kind of structure?
Erik Hadley: That's a great question. It's it, and it has no short answer. Yes. There was resistance. At the time that had happened, there was actually, a rebellion of of priests in, on the Big Island against the imposition of Christianity. But they were ultimately, ultimately they were pushed down. And, it's a complicated question because you can argue that, that these beliefs are not in a binary system, that you could adopt Christianity and what's to say someone fully adopts Christianity
just, because someone says they showed up in a church, that doesn't mean that they necessarily are giving up native belief systems. And these native belief systems can can exist simultanously and have both in some ways. So, so that's a good question. I wish I as much as, some of my students call me a kumu, or a teacher
I'm also a haumana, a student. And that's something I don't know as much about in terms of the 19th century versions of it, but, but yeah, there was not a fast process. I would argue that.
Doug Exton: What was the relationship between the Japanese immigrants and the native Hawaiians on the island?
Erik Hadley: Whoof. That's another good one. So Japanese immigrants, brought in, primarily as laborers, agricultural laborers, typically to work in, the sugar fields. And they, initially stay very closely to themselves, meaning that they, they, they marry other Japanese and stick within a Japanese community. There are moments of, of overlap and crossover. For instance, at the time of the of the 1864 Constitution leading to the Bayonet Constitution, there is increasing voting solidarity amongst Asian migrants and the Hawaiian community against a haole minority in France.
Another example would be, you see, Japanese immigrants going on strike. But for World War Two, for better, pay and working conditions. And that's being supported by Native Hawaiians as well. So there are connections between the two. And then later on the question of who is a Hawaiian is a complicated one. I would argue you have to be of the kanaka maoli.
You have to be of, of of Hawaiian ethnicity. But I can, and there are many people who are part Japanese, part Chinese, part Hawaiian today. It's not an exclusive community anymore. And for instance, the the governor today, Ige, who's of Japanese descent and so was Daniel Inouye, the World War Two veteran, Japanese American, who fought quite hard on behalf of, Native Hawaiians.
But in his, in this way of, of of not sovereignty, but within, within the bounds of federalism.
Doug Exton: And since the, percentage of Hawaiians on the island is actually relatively small compared to the rest of the population on the island and in the US, how are the efforts, to reclaim not only their culture, but also their lands kind of being perceived, you know, in the greater US?
Erik Hadley: Okay, that's a good one as well.
Doug Exton: Getting all the good ones tonight.
Erik Hadley: I can't, as I said at the beginning, I won't speak for, necessarily for Native Hawaiians.
There is a split. There are, there are, it's a group. I mean, Senator Akaka, who is of Hawaiian descent himself, is the one who introduced this this, federal recognition bill, which is a compromise bill. It basically puts, Native Hawaiians on par with Native Americans in terms of the BIA. And that's a so there's a split between those who would support this kind of centrist approach of we need to get something.
We need to have some sort of settlement, we need federal recognition, and we need to to accept that, maybe we're never going to get the 1.8 million acres back. And then there are others, the group that we've seen, like with the TMT, on those supporting standing Rock and others who say no, why why would we, if if the coup of 1893 is illegal and then everything that follows from it is illegal?
Nothing. You can't sell me stolen land. You can't offer me 10% of land when I, When you stole 100% of it. And and so I would in my, observation of the of how the community has been debating. There is no clear direction forward right now because, the sovereignty movement, is demanding something that the federal government isn't, allowing.
And, then you also have to fundamentally, at some point, I would argue you probably would have to deal with the fact that there are obviously, large groups, 80% of the population of Hawaii today is non Hawaiian. That doesn't mean that they don't sympathize with or identify with with, the goals of the, native movement.
But it's a, a really complicated issue. And has no clear solution.
Doug Exton: Yeah. And as you touched on earlier, the with, you know, the sovereignty movement and other indigenous movements, Hawaiians kind of tend to have more of a, I can't think of the right word, but they kind of identify more with like Polynesian culture as a whole rather than other indigenous tribes in the continental US. So do you think that kind of I don't want to call it a rift, because as you've shown, it's definitely not, you know, rift in a negative way, but that cultural difference has that impacted, you know, either moves you saw for sovereignty on Hawaii's part or, you know, just kind of Hawaiian perception, you know, in these roles.
Erik Hadley: And, yeah, I mean, so traditionally, and we could see this going back to David, King David Kalakaua and others that, that Hawaiians were seeking, both as an independent kingdom and then post overthrow to create these wider connections with other Polynesians. And you could see that with, my, my experience with the Polynesian community here in Boise or in the Salt Lake community.
And you see that with the question about the flags, if you go to Iosepa, my graduate student, Patrick Johnson's, doing some really importantwork there. And, you see pictures of, the, behind the graves of the ancestors. And these components are the flags of Samoa and the flags of, Tahiti and of, of New Zealand.
And, all of these different Polynesian communities are represented. And so what the reason I gave this talk, was because I was moving past the notion that it was a pan Polynesian identity, which is important. And that's what the hokule'a really connected back to. Is this this pan Polynesian identity and the shared experience in, of island people in the Pacific with imperialism, the settler colonialism, but also this increasing connection to mainland, to the mainland.
And it comes in two directions. It comes with the diaspora of, native Hawaiians living in the American West and places like Boise or California. In Nevada, there's a very large Hawaiian community, in Salt Lake there's an enormous Polynesian community. And but also to Native Americans, to the American Indian. And you see that and you can see it at these key points, like at Standing Rock, that it's not just a it's not just about Polynesians standing as Polynesians, it's about indigenous peoples standing with other indigenous peoples and playing off of one another's movements.
In fact, Kumu Pua Case, so, another, former student at Boise State, got in touch with me, last week, and was talking about my Pacific World class, and, he, when his name's Nick Beluso. And he's doing PhD, at the college of William and Mary.
And he did a really nice, job of translating, a mele for me from, Kumu Pua Case, and it's mainly that she had written for Mauna Kea, but then rewrote it for, for Standing Rock and to bring Standing Rock into it. And water protectors, which are similar to the, the Kia'i, the guardian protectors at Mauna Kea.
So you she and then she goes, she rewrites this, this is her, her mele. And then she goes and sings it, at Standing Rock. And so it complicates this notion of, of indigeneity and, and solidarity that it's that we can move beyond the Polynesian connection to this American connection.
Doug Exton: Yeah, and I think, you know, tying into that, it's also kind of, perspective of we are in like we are, you know, a state in the United States, it makes sense for us to be involved in these other native movements since we have a similar perspective, you know, of colonialism and stuff like that, with the fact that, you know, they were annexed essentially into the US.
Erik Hadley: Well yeah. If you go back to that first quote on that presentation and I can make a, I can give you the presentation, people want to look at it. But, that quote really says, you know, Native American tribes are, are fully aware of the incompetencies and corruptions that have occurred in tribal government level and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and using, using that knowledge, using that experience.
They can stand shoulder to shoulder with the native Hawaiian organizations and say, you know, you can ask for a better deal than the one that's being offered. And, you know, beware, beware, what, what seems to be probably is. And so there, there is this, this, this, that, that one thing that, that Samoans, Tongans, Tahitians and other Polynesians communities are not necessarily.
Well, the Samoans are, the American Samoans are. But outside of the American Samoans, none of these other Polynesian communities are not directly dealing with the United States government. The federal government and American Indians have been and continue to do so.
Doug Exton: And and you mentioned earlier with, all native Hawaiians are, you know, essentially wards of the state of Hawaii. And because of that, they can't sue not only the state government, they also can't sue the federal government. Is that something that was like unique to the Native Hawaiian experience, or is that also part of like the Native American tribes in the continental US?
Because that was just something that struck me. It's really interesting.
Erik Hadley: I believe. And anyone on the call can, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it is unique. So when I mean sue, I don't mean like you can't sue in any court that you don't, but it means that in terms of, say, speaking on behalf of Native Hawaiians or speaking on behalf of Hawaiian lands, you can't sue for that.
Now, we have seen different groups in federal court actually do, theresuits have been brought up about TMT. There are suits have been brought up about the Kaho'olawe. So it's not to suggest that it means that you are considered a permanent ward of the state, but the Hawaiian, Native Hawaiian people as a community have no legal standing.
Be, to speak as a, as a, as a group before, state or federal government because there's no recognition of them, as, as a legal, organization akin to a tribe. The way a tribe can, you know, Shoshone Bannock tribe and the Nez Perce tribe can, can, can sue in federal court as a tribe. Can, the Hawaiians don't have that
right. I think that's relatively, I mean, there may be other groups. If you went to Puerto Rico or Guam or something, you might see similar things. But, as a, as a, as a native or indigenous group, it's relatively rare.
Doug Exton: And do you think that is partially, due to the fact that, Cleveland, you know, found the annexation process of Hawaii kind of illegal? Do you think that was like a way for the federal government to maybe protect themselves and a little bit, since they didn't offer Hawaii the same status as indigenous tribes in America?
Erik Hadley: Yeah. I mean, that's why I spent a little more time, maybe more time than I should have on the history part of things is to point out in some ways, why it is so exceptional that we can see these connections today, because the history in some ways was very different, that you have a single, you have a single, monarchy, which is internationally recognized by the British, by the French, by the Japanese, by all these other countries as an actual country.
And that's not to say that Native Americans didn't occasionally achieve that as well. But in general, you can look at most of the America, the American West, in which, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, they are viewing Native Americans as basically occupiers of land that is under the jurisdiction of the American government, and thus they can't ever and still today, tribal government can't ask for for sovereignty.
It can't be identified. It it can, you know, you can make them tax free or you can build a casino, you can have tribal police, you can do all these things, but you don't get to say, and now we're going to open an embassy and invite the British in. We're going to join the United Nations and we're a new country.
So that's something that's different, though. The Hawaiians had that. And so when they come in, when they're forcibly annexed in the troubles with the whole annexation treaty and how it feels and how, one American president calls it illegal, how the initial annexation falls apart. And it's only after the Spanish-American War and a change in administration. So you see that happen, just like you see it happening
at Standing Rock, a change in administration is what fundamentally leads to this. The, the the collapse of the of a native claim here. And, in doing so, yes. They annex the Hawaiian Islands but never address the Hawaiians, the native Hawaiians, as, as a group. And, in part because the haoles, the white people had taken over, they had taken over the government.
So if you were to say, well, with a tribe or we have, native tribe, elders, men and women speaking on behalf of this tribe, it's not a bunch of of third generation white guys doing it. And that's what happens in Hawaii is they they overthrow the government and then claim it. And they claim to, they they take the lands.
Now they try to wash their hands of it. And when annexation occurs, they turn all the crown lands over to the to the feds and to the state, and so it looks like they're not actually benefiting from it, but they are because they lease it. And and, and so, it's a peculiar aspect of history that the native Hawaiians, unlike other groups, never are never given formal recognition.
As a, as an indigenous people, the way others are.
Doug Exton: Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for tonight. So I did want to say thank you again, Doctor Hadley, for being with me tonight and giving us that wonderful brief overview of Hawaiian history and all the different movements. I think you did a really good job showing those connections. You know, outside of the Polynesian World, because I did take your Pacific world class.
So in that class, we definitely talked a lot about those connections. So I think you really showed the other side of that coin with the connections to the indigenous tribes in the U.S.
Erik Hadley: Well, Doug, it was a pleasure, and thank you very much for inviting me. And to everyone on this call, I, feel free to email me. With any questions. It's very simple. erikhadley@boisestate.edu, and thank you for your time tonight.
Doug Exton: Yeah, have a good night, everyone.
Erik Hadley: Thank you.