An Indigenous People's History of Hawaiʻi

Undergraduate / Graduate

What you know about Hawai'i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania's sea of islands, Hawai'i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai'i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai'i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.