Origins

Hawaiians in Canada trace their origins to a unique part of the United States. Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii functioned for nearly a century as an independent native kingdom before the American annexation at the end of the nineteenth century.

Hawaiians are descendants of eastern Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands, who about 300 C.E. became the first settlers on the Hawaiian Islands. By the time the Europeans arrived towards the end of the eighteenth century, there were an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 aboriginal inhabitants living in the eight main islands of the Hawaiian chain. Their numbers were to decline precipitously, however, as a result of European diseases that their immune systems could not resist. By 1854 at least three-quarters of the Hawaiian population had perished. Today, of the 1.1 million inhabitants (1990) in the Hawaiian Islands, only 135,000 (12 percent) identify themselves as native Hawaiian. Moreover, most of these are of mixed race, so that the number of “pure” Hawaiians may be as low as 9,000.

The original tongue of the indigenous islanders was Hawaiian, a Polynesian language closely related to Marquesan, Tahitian, and Maori. After the islands became an American territory, the Hawaiian language was eliminated from schools. Today only a few speak the language. And what little of the “old” tongue that is used is actually a creole language informally known as Pidgin.

The British explorer Captain James Cook is credited with having discovered Hawaii for Europe in late 1778. He called his discovery the Sandwich Islands, and, after his death in a skirmish one year later, Hawaii became a provisioning stop first for European traders and then for North Pacific whalers. During the 1780s, a junior chief named Kamehameha began a campaign to unite the islands under a single ruler. With the help of British weapons and advice, Kamehameha defeated his rivals and gained complete control of the eight main islands in 1795, the date usually taken to mark the beginning of the Hawaiian kingdom.

Under King Kamehameha I and his successors, Hawaii welcomed foreigners (called haoles), including Protestant (Congregationalist) missionaries who were to gain great influence over the kingdom’s laws and practices. The indigenous religion was abolished (1819) and other cultural traits – hula dancing, surfing, and kite-flying – were eventually banned as remnants of pagan beliefs. In the 1840s, the Hawaiian king replaced the traditional system of land as the common property of all inhabitants with Western-style private landed property. In actual fact, this meant that the king, government, and major chiefs appropriated most of the land for themselves; as for the vast majority of native Hawaiians, they soon found themselves with only limited access to land, large tracts of which were steadily being granted by the king’s government to foreign plantation owners. A special treaty was signed with the United States (1875) ensuring that sugar become a cash crop. To work the fields, the plantation owners imported large numbers of workers from the Philippines, east Asia, and Europe with the result that the native Hawaiians became a minority in their own country.

American influence continued to increase, and in 1893 a clique of businessmen led by Sanford B. Dole overthrew the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani. They set up a republic and five years later succeeded in having the Hawaiian Islands formerly annexed to the United States. Hawaii functioned as a U.S. territory from 1900 to 1959, when it became a state. Under American rule, the sugar planters encouraged extensive immigration of Japanese at the same time that Americans from the mainland came to direct the sugar and pineapple industries.

In the course of the twentieth century, immigrants from Asia and other countries have succeeded in integrating economically and socially in Hawaii; however, the native Hawaiians have become increasingly marginalized and impoverished. In an attempt to correct this situation, there has been, since the 1970s, an upsurge of Hawaiian cultural awareness and political activity marked by a revival of the Hawaiian language (including instruction in public schools), affirmative-action programs aimed at native Hawaiians, and a movement calling for Hawaiian sovereignty and independence.