Politics / Amid official preparations for a 50th anniversary of statehood celebration–including the lei-bedecked arrival of the USS Hawaii, a $2.5 billion nuclear submarine billed by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin as “7,700 tons of aloha”–a counter movement is offering a different narrative of how, and why, Hawaii became part of the Union.

One leading spokesman of this movement is Dean Saranillio, a Maui native now at the University of Michigan whose dissertation is entitled Seeing Conquest: Colliding Histories and the Cultural Politics of Hawaii Statehood. He has been speaking in venues around the Islands this summer in an attempt to drum up discussion of competing narratives.

In a recent “Unmasking Statehood” event held on Kauai, Saranillio detailed the ways Lorrin Thurston, a major force in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, capitalized on the prevailing attitude of white supremacy to make a case for both the coup and the Islands’ subsequent annexation.

Thurston traveled to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with an exhibit on volcanoes that played up the notion of Pele as a dark, brutal, superstitious force that destroyed men, and the Islands as the place where American civilization triumphed over Hawaiian savagery. The fair, Saranillio recounted, included exhibits from around the world that portrayed the darkest races–including Hawaiians–as “primitives” that needed to catch up to the more advanced white race, with Asian races falling somewhere between the two extremes.

Saranillio said that Thurston hyped the notion that deposed Queen Liliuokalani was a “dangerous woman of savage temperment” who had planned to behead and him and others for treason. This prompted an indignant reply from the Queen that beheading had never been a common practice in Hawaii. Thurston also began advancing the notion, which still prevails today, that the question wasn’t whether Hawaii would be dominated by a foreign power, but when, and by which one.

With the foundation thus laid, Saranillio went on to discuss how Hollywood made the 1951 film Go for Broke! intentionally to soften Americans’ attitudes toward the Japanese in preparation for Hawaii’s statehood. He also showed a clip of Territorial Gov. William F. Quinn, who went on to become the first governor of the new state, saying statehood “will allow us to sell Hawaii like never before.”

During the 1950s, big banks and insurance companies wanted to invest in the Islands, but were nervous about putting serious money into a Territory. Other statehood supporters believed that the fledgling tourist industry would get a big boost if folks could travel someplace exotic without leaving the safety of the United States.

Saranillio said that “the Big Five”–Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., Amfac and Theo H. Davies & Co. –also strongly supported statehood, which they saw as increasing their profits.

The notion that Native Hawaiians failed to resist statehood “is bogus,” Saranillio said, noting that the economic power of the Big Five, the Islands’ major employers, worked to suppress public opposition to statehood. When residents of Papakolea Homesteads told a visiting Congressional delegation that they didn’t want statehood, Saranillio said, a member of the Hawaii Statehood Commission came and told them they would suffer repercussions if they continued to speak out.

Saranillio went on to talk about the opposition to statehood by Territorial Senator Alice Kamokila Campbell, who successfully sued the Commission because statehood foes couldn’t access any of the $475,000 in public monies allocated to lobby voters on the issue.

“Colonization or occupation isn’t just about dominating another people,” Saranillio said. “You dominate those people by not letting them tell their history, not letting them speak their experiences, not letting them express themselves as a people. Colonization tries to interrupt and block that and speak on behalf of those people.”

Statehood Hawaii has been posting key primary documents aimed at challenging the traditional statehood story on its website at [www.statehoodhawaii.org, fifdififdi.com]. The postings began Aug. 1 as part of a 21-day countdown to statehood and include many documents that were previously classified and have not been publicly seen.

KU’E 12-26-08

The myths of statehood

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