Abstract
In the nineteenth century American settlers systematically dispossessed the indigenous Kanaka Maoli—Hawaiian islanders, or the “true people.” While dispossession of North American Indian tribes is a familiar subject, Hawai’i has occupied “a space of denial in the consciousness of American history.”1 On these volcanic islands of the northern Pacific, the United States launched a global empire while plantation owners reaped massive profits from the sugar industry. Exploiting the spread of devastating disease, enforced labor, legal structures, and the threat of militarism, Americans undermined indigenous authority, leading to a takeover in 1893, annexation of the Islands in 1898, and statehood in 1959.
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Notes
Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 24.
Steven Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002), 175.
The “Pacific World” framework has been extensively and engagingly developed by Bruce Cumings in Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Gary Y. Okihiro places Hawaiian history within a larger frame of Oceania in Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 2008.
Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai’i (Lanham, MD.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1999), 32.
Marshall Sahlins, Island of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 136.
Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawai’ian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 24; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 5;
see also Eleanor C. Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989; 1977).
Tom Coffman, Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai’i (2d ed., Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2009; 1998), 54.
Linda S. Parker, Native American Estate: The Struggle over Indian and Hawaiian Lands (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 6.
Okihiro, Island World, 96, 114; Jonathan K. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawai’i an Nation to 1887 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 60–65.
Parker, Native American Estate, 89, 93; Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983), 4–6.
Jennifer Fish Kashay, “From Kapus to Christianity: The Disestablishment of the Hawaiian Religion and Chiefly Appropriation of Calvinist Christianity,” Western Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 2008), 17–39.
Marshall Sahlins, “Hawai’i in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Kingdom and the Kingship,” in Robert Borofsky, ed., Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 189.
Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 128–162.
Patrica Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 154–178.
Ibid., 38; Likikala Kame’eleihiwa, “U.S. Merchants, Missionaries, and the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Government,” in Ward Churchill and Sharon H. Venne, eds., Islands in Captivity: The Record of the International Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 81.
Blaine to Comly, December 1, 1881, Department of State, Papers Relating to Foreign Relations of the United States for 1881 (Washington, D.C, 1882), 635–636.
William Michael Morgan, Pacific Gibraltar: U.S.-Japanese Rivalry over the Annexation of Hawai’i, 1885–1898 (New York: Naval Institute Press, 2012), 241.
Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories Under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 185, 9.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.
Morgan, Pacific Gibraltar; see also Eric Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Sally Engle Merry, “Law and Identity in an American Colony,” in Merry and Donald Brenneis, eds., Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2003), 135.
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 10.
Mililani B. Trask, “Hawaiian Sovereignty,” in Fujikane and Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism, 73; see also, George Cooper and Gavan Davis, Land and Power in Hawai’i: The Democratic Years (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985); Merry, “Law and Identity in an American Colony,” 142–143.
Walter R. Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 33–89.
James R. Gibson, “Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska,” in Stephen W. Haycox and Mary Childers Mangusso, eds., An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996), 27; Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 115–146; Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 60–73.
Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 191–196; Borneman, Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, 106–112; Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, 170–175; See also Paul S. Holbo, Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, The Press, and Congress, 1867–1871 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).
Donald Craig Mitchell, Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and their Land, 1867–1959 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 6–7.
Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 34–35.
Donald Craig Mitchell, Take my Land, Take my Life: The Story of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960–1971 (Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press, 2001).
David S. Case and David A. Voluck, Alaska Natives and American Laws (Anchorage, AK: University of Alaska Press 2012), 26–33.
See Barry Scott Zellen, On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State, and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).
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© 2013 Walter L. Hixson
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Hixson, W.L. (2013). “Spaces of Denial”: American Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i and Alaska. In: American Settler Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374264_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374264_7
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