I’ve spent the better part of the past 2 months exploring the Hawaiian islands, partly to make new Kava connections, and partly to discover first-hand why there is so much lingering distrust of the white man or “howlie” as we’re called by Hawaiians. It didn’t take long to get in far deeper than I expected, and to learn of a history that has been hidden from most Americans, and at least; from this American. I was deeply moved by the things I learned, through visits to museums, through talking with Hawaiians, and through visiting a number of Kava Bars and Kava Farms throughout the islands.

What first struck me was the lack of Hawaiian culture previous to the arrival of the Christian missionaries in 1920.  What struck me next was the fact that most of the initial people I spoke with, spoke reverently of the first Christian missionaries. This seemed impossible to believe, but as I dug deeper, spoke to more people, and started to sort out the difference between Hawaiians and transplants, things began to make a whole lot more sense.

This journey of discovery inspired an hopefully informative article called “LOST HISTORY OF HAWAII AND KAVA” found elsewhere on this website. This may sound controversial, because people tend to like simple explanations for beliefs, and from my brief experience, it seems that most of the distrust and anger by native Hawaiians tends to be focused at Americans. Initially I thought that the disdain was surely justified, and that the United States first muscled their way in via the Christian missionaries who first arrived, and then again in the late 1800’s, when a true political coup occurred, and Hawaii was basically annexed to the United States in 1893, as Hawaii’s last queen was held prisoner in a room in the tower of her own residence for 5 years.

History is not that simple, though.

Hawaiians themselves were relatively late transplants from the Marquesas and Tahiti, where a 2010 study called “High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia” placed those early settlers on the Hawaiian islands as late as the mid-1200’s.  Before American, European and Asian influences arrived on the Hawaiian shores, and at the time of Captain Cook’s arrival, there was an estimated 500,000 native Hawaiians living on the islands, at least according to an article called “New Evidence of the Pre-censal Population of Hawaii”.

Shockingly, Hawaiians had no resitance to Western diseases, so by the 1900 U.S. Census, only 37,656 residents were listed as full or partial native Hawaiian ancestry, at least according to

The 2000 U.S. Census identified 283,430 residents of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander ancestry, showing a dramatic growth trend since annexation by the U.S. in 1898.[12]

Although Captain Cook, a British explorer is credited with opening the international doors to Hawaii, it was not British or Americans who then flooded Hawaii with immigrants.

Although the Christian missionaries did often forcefully convert many Hawaiians, making many of their practices and traditions punishable as crimes, the stage was set for Christian missionaries long before they arrived on Hawaiian soil. This doesn’t excuse any of the actions of the missionaries or the Americans who basically took over the Hawaiian Kingdom through military force, but the Hawaiian culture was not as untouched and pure as I was initially led to believe.

For example, when sugar plantations began to take over the islands in the early 1800’s and plantation owners became powerful political figures, a massive workforce was needed to tend to those plantations.  First, the Chinese were recruited, and over the course of the next 50 years, 46,000 of them became the backbone of the sugar plantation workforce.  They were typically well-educated, and often became prominent in all aspects of island life. After that, it’s estimated that a whopping 180,000 Japanese were recruited, and by the late 1800’s, Japanese comprised the largest ethnic group in Hawaii, overshadowing Hawaiians by 5:1.

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