Hawaiʻi - Hawaiian Language Research: Contextualizing Research with ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi Materials

In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.

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In just over a century, from 1834 to 1948, Hawaiian writers filled 125,000 pages in nearly 100 different newspapers with their writings. The contents of those papers span a period when noted historians, expert genealogists, skilled storytellers, and cultural specialists were numerous, and their knowledge was intentionally recorded in writing for their contemporaries and for generations of the future. Though scholars have generated entire books of history and legend with what they've extracted from these papers, only a tiny fraction, less than one percent of the whole, has been translated and published. The rest, equal to well over a million letter-size pages of text, remains untranslated, difficult to access in the original form, unused, and largely unknown. The most familiar English translations have developed into a canon of chosen texts. The books that make up this powerful canon are problematic at best, and yet flawed as they are, they have been the foundation of Hawaiian knowledge for most readers, teachers, and researchers for generations. Not only do these translations inadequately represent even the originals from which they were taken, but they further compound the problem by eclipsing the larger body of original writings that remain unrecognized. MAI PA'A I KA LEO focuses on how Hawaiian knowledge from the past has been handled in a basically English speaking world. Author M. Puakea Nogelmeier highlights the need to recognize and reincorporate the full array of historical Hawaiian resources into the foundations of current knowledge.