2025.04.06 | Restoration
Matthew 8:18-27
“Resoration: Hawaiʻi, a Monarchy Lost, a People United”
Special Guest Speaker,
Ifa Māhealani Uchiyama
Introduction
When I was a young girl in Washington, DC, I remember seeing a photo in Ebony Magazine of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King wearing a lei.
I was transfixed! Imagine, having a whole necklace made out of flowers! I wanted to learn how to get one of my own, and (even as a very young girl was a voracious reader) soon learned about a magical place called “Hawaii”.
This was my first introduction to the island chain which had very recently become our 50th State. As I grew older, I wanted to learn all that I could about Hawaiʻi. It was being marketed as a tropical paradise and as a place without racism. Living in DC during the last phase of Jim Crow, this was very meaningful.
That was my understanding of Hawaiʻi. A paradise in every sense of the word, physically beautiful, perfect weather, and an integrated population.
It was my dream to be there, and when I was ready for college, that dream became real.
Living in Hawaiʻi gave me a completely different perspective than what I would have had had I gone there as a visitor. The racial paradise part turned out to be not true. But I also learned a lot more about what Hawaiʻi is in fact.
That at one time in its history, Hawaiʻi was comprised of four different kingdoms: Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Maui Nui and Moku O Keawe (Hawaiʻi Island).
That during the time of the first contact, King Kamehameha was on his campaign to unite the islands under one rule. The introduction of Western style weapons exacerbated the warfare.
That Hawaiʻi had a complex food system that fed between 300,000 and one million people.
That its population collapsed in 1790s due to introduced diseases. This collapsed indigenous industries.
And that the Kingdom moved away from indigenous ideas and practices as it was forced to adopt western ways of being.
The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi
By the 1800s Hawaiʻi was a Constitutional Monarchy and had better infrastructure than many US cities: electricity, railroads, a free press, a postal service and telephones.
Highest literacy rate in the world - higher than the US. By end of 19th century, over 100 Hawaiian language newspapers.
Its biggest industry was sugar, so much so that workers were brought in from China, Japan and the Philippines to work the plantations.
Descendants of the missionaries who were originally sent to bring Christianity to the population, sought to create an exchange of duty free access to the US sugar market in trade for US access to Puʻuloa (also known to us as Pearl Harbor). This arrangement came to be known as the Treaty of Reciprocity, and it bypassed the concurrence of the King of Hawaiʻi. In what has become known as the Bayonet Constitution, the King was forced by the presence of heavily armed militia to accept the treaty. The people feared and understood that this arrangement was likely the first step towards annexation. Once in effect, the sugar industry boomed and even more people were brought in to work the plantations.
Upon the death of Kalākaua in San Francisco, the people petitioned the queen to create a new constitution which would more accurately reflect the concerns and ideals of Hawaiians. This caused the American community to fear that the Queen would gain more power for her people.
The plan to overthrow the Monarchy was already in place.
When the Queen did in fact attempt to create the new constitution, it was the trigger for them to act. The Committee of Safety brought armed American troops onshore, had the Queen arrested and put on trial. Stanford Dole, a missionary descendant, was made an unelected president of the new government. And the new Republic of Hawaiʻi was then recognized by the US government.
Although this act was conveyed to the people of the US as being an inevitability, Hawaiian people were not in favor and expressed these sentiments in their Hawaiian language newspapers.
The date was January 17, 1893.
The Republic of Hawaiʻi existed from then until 1898 when Hawaiʻi was formally annexed by the United States. It became a state in 1959.
Pōpoloheno
These are the things I learned as a young woman in Hawaiʻi.
What I didnʻt learn about Hawaiian history until much, much later was that people of African descent were a part of this history since the very beginning of the western presence in the islands. They initially arrived in Hawaiʻi as a direct result of colonization and enslavement.
These people were scholars, educators, musicians, entrepreneurs and peace seekers. Most of the people in Hawaiʻi know nothing of their history. As so much of what is important to the culture of Hawaiʻi is conveyed through music, I decided to initiate a project to create songs for them. Many wonderful musicians stepped forward to support this effort, including those who have won Grammy and Nā Hoku Awards. The collection will be released this June. It is called Pōpoloheno (cherished pōpolo) after the dark colored medicinal berry.
As part of my research, I learned that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King came to Honolulu in 1959 to address the Hawaiʻi State Legislature. Hawaiʻi had just received its statehood and their capital building had yet to be built. In those years, the State Legislature met in the Throne Room of the ʻIolani Palace, the place where the Queen addressed her people offering comfort in their time of difficulty.
The words she spoke during that time so long ago reminded me of the words spoken by Reverend King in that very room.
Present during Kingʻs address was Reverend Akaka of Kawaiahaʻo Church. So moved was he by his speech that a few years later, during the difficult days of the Civil Rights Movement, he instructed his parishioners to gather plumeria blossoms from the trees on the church grounds and to construct lei out of them. These he had delivered directly to Reverend King in time for his 3rd march on Selma, Alabama.
And it was a photo of that march that I saw in Ebony Magazine as a young girl in Washington, DC.