Decolonization in the Hawaiian Islands

785 Words2 Pages

The people of Hawaii and other Pacific Island Nation groups have experienced great injustice from their colonial powers and the acts of imperialism. Lands were seized, cultural practices banned, language lost, and people were even forced to move away from their homes for the purpose of bomb testing. The United States and other countries abroad sent out representatives to do their work for them; in return their future actions would be justified in describing the Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders as savages that need to have wider powers enforced upon them; thus resulting in a tangled web of political mythologies.

The first step in legitimizing the take over of an indigenous person was to make them less human. In Stannard's article he says the way that this was achieved was by a ""blotting out of knowledge" of native people or the making of them into "people without history." Once the natives have thus been banished from collective memory, at least as people of numerical and cultural consequence, the settler group's moral and intellectual right to conquest is claimed to be established without question." (Stannard, 382) "The fact that indigenous societies had their own system of order was dismissed...they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough to have systems, they were not literate, and their languages and modes of thought were inadequate." (Smith, 28)

In some instances the erasing of a history was not enough though; to further justify the take over and occupation of a given area, historians maintain "that there were very few indigenous people in the area of colonization prior to the arrival of colonists. And... the colonist historian dismisses those few native people as primitive and savage types who act...

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...have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people have reaped the consequences, yet they are only Pacific Islanders; they lay dying from cancer, being born with birth defect, and even mothers giving birth to stillborn babies. (Keever, 1-23)

In each of the cases stated above, the people of Hawaii and the Marshall Islands lost what they had, everything from safe drinking water to their native homelands. In the process they were made out to be savages and another less significant races in order for the United States to justify what they knew was wrong.

Keever, "Chain Reaction: Neutrons, News, News Zero" from News Zero:

The New York Times and the Bomb

Smith, Tuhiwai, excerpt from Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

Stannard, David E., "Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth"

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