How does Hawaiian culture change when white settlers arrive?

Modern Hawai'i, like its colonial overlord, the United States of America, is a settler society. Our Hawaiian people, now but a remnant of the nearly one million Natives present at contact with the West in the 18th century, live at the margins of our island society. Less than 20% of the current population in Hawai'i, our Native people have suffered all the familiar horrors of contact: massive depopulation, landlessness, christianization, economic and political marginalization, institutionalization in the military and the prisons, poor health and educational profiles, increasing diaspora.

When the United States military invaded our archipelago in 1893 and overthrew our constitutional monarchy, our fate as an outpost of the American empire was sealed. Entering the U.S. as a Territory in 1900, our country became a white planter outpost, providing missionary-descended sugar barons in the islands and imperialist Americans on the continent with a military watering hole in the Pacific.

Today, Hawaiians continue to suffer the effects of haole (white) colonization. Our language was banned in 1896, resulting in several generations of Hawaiians, including myself, whose only language is English. Our lands and waters have been taken for military bases, resorts, urbanization and plantation agriculture.

Under foreign control, we have been overrun by settlers: missionaries and capitalists, adventurers and, of course, hordes of tourists, nearly seven million by 1998.

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