Should Hawaii Belong to the U. S.?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The so-called “birthers” insist that Barak Obama should not be president of the United States because he was not born on American soil, as required by the U.S. constitution. They may be right—but not in the way they think.

A loosely organized group of conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, racists, and religious bigots, these people claim that the president was born in Kenya, or perhaps Indonesia, and is secretly a Muslim.

Of course this is nonsense. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961.

But should this archipelago, America’s 50th state, belong to the U.S?

The Hawaiian islands are not offshore, the way Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland are. On the contrary, they are the most isolated inhabited pieces of land in the world: 2,390 miles from California; 3,850 miles from Japan; 4,900 miles from China; and 5,280 miles from the Philippines.

Honolulu is three time zones west of Los Angeles. It takes as much time to fly there from the west coast as it does to get to New York, three times zones to the east.

Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, a U.S. Commonwealth, is much closer to the mainland United States.

Hawaii was an established, ethnically homogenous, Polynesian kingdom. The islands were unified under King Kamehameha I in 1810. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839-1840.

In November 1843, the British and French Governments formally recognized Hawaiian independence. The U.S. followed in 1849, and Japan and Germany afterwards.

But European and American settlers began to meddle in the affairs of the kingdom, and in 1893 the last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was deposed in a coup d’état led largely by American businessmen and missionaries.

They were opposed to her attempt to establish a new constitution for the country, one which would have strengthened the power of the monarch relative to the American business elites. Sanford Dole, a member of the family later famous for its pineapple plantations, declared a republic.

The islands were formally annexed by the United States in 1898. It was part of a wave of American expansion that year. The U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War also added the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and, temporarily, Cuba, to the American empire.

Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900 and a state 60 years later. It is the home of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, based in Pearl Harbor, which was attacked by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, bringing the U.S. into World War II.

A Joint Resolution of the U.S. Congress adopted in 1993, the centenary of the 1893 coup, and signed by President Bill Clinton, “acknowledges that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.”

The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009, introduced by Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii in the U.S. Congress, proposes to establish a process for aboriginal Hawaiians to gain federal recognition similar to an Indian tribe.

There are nationalist movements in the state seeking some form of sovereignty for the islands, which they spell as Hawai‘i (pronounced Havayi, the proper pronunciation in the Polynesian language).

Others would be content with some form of self-government for indigenous Hawaiians, in effect creating a special entity within the state. They want recognition that there is an aboriginal people in Hawaii, one which had formed its own nation prior to annexation.

One group, the Reinstated Hawaiian Kingdom, a few years ago landed on a small island and planted its own flag, symbolically laying claim to the state.

In her recent book Unfamiliar Fishes, about the American takeover of the islands, author Sarah Vowell recalls hearing her tour guide recount the story of when the Hawaiian flag was lowered and the American flag was raised. “It happened more than a hundred years ago, but she was upset about it, as many Hawaiians are,” Vowell said.

Can Hawaiians reclaim their country, or is it too late? Today, native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, at 21 per cent of the state's population, are now a minority in their own homeland. They have been surpassed by Caucasians, Japanese-Americans, and other Asian-Americans.

It would take a lot for an American state to secede from the Union. But proponents of some form of self-determination for native Hawaiians may yet succeed.