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At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kauaʻi, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nuʻalolo Kai. First excavated by Bishop Museum archaeologists between 1958 and 1964, the site contained the well-preserved remains of one of the largest and most diverse arrays of traditional and historic artifacts ever found in Hawaiʻi. The house sites that are the focus of this book were built over five centuries of occupation and contained deeply buried, stratified deposits extending more than nine feet beneath the surface. The book details the work of the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa which has been compiling and studying the animal remains recovered from the archaeological excavations. The chapters discuss the range of foods eaten by Hawaiians, the ways in which particular species were captured and harvested, and how these practices might have evolved through changes in the climate and natural environment. Adding to this are analyses of a sophisticated material culture. Demonstrating that an increased preference for introduced animals effectively limited negative impacts on wild animal resources, the book argues that the Hawaiian community of Nuʻalolo Kai practiced a sustainable form of animal resource procurement and management for 500 years.

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawaiʻi's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawaiʻi that few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawaiʻi. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. This book uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the SFF. The book supplies an analysis of how the carefully crafted staging of Hawaiʻi's cultural diversity was used to serve a national narrative of utopian multiculturalism while empowering Hawaiʻi's traditional artists and providing a model for cultural tourism that has had long-lasting effects. The book positions the 1989 Hawaiʻi program within a history of institutional intervention in the traditional arts of the island's ethnic groups as well as in relation to local cultural revivals and the tourist industry. By tracing the planning, fieldwork, site design, performance, and aftermath stages of the program, the book examines the uneven processes through which local culture is transformed into national culture and raises questions about the stakes involved in cultural tourism for both culture bearers and culture brokers.

This book offers an account of Hawaiian public art and architecture during the reign of David Kalākaua, who ruled the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1874 to 1891. The book provides visual and historical analysis of Kalākaua's coronation and regalia, the King Kamehameha Statue, ‘Iolani Palace, and the Hawaiian National Museum, drawing them together in a common historical, political, and cultural frame. These cultural projects were part of the monarchy's effort to promote a national culture in the face of colonial pressures, internal political divisions, and declining social conditions for Native Hawaiians. The book interprets the images, spaces, and institutions as articulations of the complex cultural entanglements and creative engagement with international communities that occur with prolonged colonial contact. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian sovereigns celebrated Native tradition, history, and modernity by intertwining indigenous conceptions of superior chiefly leadership with the apparati and symbols of Asian, American, and European rule. The resulting symbolic forms speak to cultural intersections and historical processes, claims about distinctiveness and commonality, and the power of objects, institutions, and public display to create meaning and enable action. The book pursues questions regarding the nature of cultural exchange, how precolonial visual culture engaged and shaped colonial contexts, and how colonial art informs postcolonial visualities and identities.

This is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. The book reexamines the past and present roles that Asians have played in the U.S. colony of Hawai‘i. It identifies settler colonialism as the basis of Hawaiian critiques of U.S. colonialism, arguing that Asians have also played the role of settlers within the colonial framework. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers' claims to Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.

Bayonets in Paradise recounts the extraordinary story of how the army imposed rigid and absolute control on the total population of Hawaii during World War II. Declared immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, martial law was all-inclusive, bringing under army rule every aspect of the Territory of Hawaiʻi's laws and governmental institutions. The result was a protracted crisis in civil liberties, as the army subjected more than 400,000 civilians—citizens and alien residents alike—to sweeping, intrusive social and economic regulations and to enforcement of army orders in provost courts with no semblance of due process. Army rule in Hawai`i lasted until late 1944—making it the longest period in which an American civilian population has ever been governed under martial law. The army brass invoked the imperatives of security and “military necessity” to perpetuate its regime of censorship, curfews, forced work assignments, and arbitrary “justice” in the military courts. The authors provide a rich analysis of the legal challenges to martial law that culminated in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, a remarkable case in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally heard argument on the martial law regime—and ruled in 1946 that provost court justice and the military’s usurpation of the civilian government had been illegal. Based largely on archival sources, this comprehensive, authoritative study places the long-neglected and largely unknown history of martial law in Hawaiʻi in the larger context of America's ongoing struggle between the defense of constitutional liberties and the exercise of emergency powers.

Politicians everywhere attract popular disaffection but in the Pacific the word ‘politician’ has increasingly become synonymous with corruption, graft and misconduct. But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region’s political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. A reminder that politicians are human - neither saints nor sinners - is timely given the clamor of popular critique. The book concludes with a reminder that while we may not always like who politicians are, or the way they operate, representative government does not work without them.

This book is a political history of the island of Malaita in the British Solomon Islands' Protectorate from 1927, when the last violent resistance to colonial rule was crushed, to 1953 and the inauguration of the islands first representative political body, the Malaita Council. At the book's heart is a political movement known as Maasina Rule, which dominated political affairs in the southeastern Solomons for many years after World War II. The movement's ideology, kastom, was grounded in the determination that only Malaitans themselves could properly chart their future through application of Malaitan sensibilities and methods, free from British interference. Kastom promoted a radical transformation of Malaitan lives by sweeping social engineering projects and alternative governing and legal structures. When the government tried to suppress Maasina Rule through force, its followers brought colonial administration on the island to a halt for several years through a labor strike and massive civil resistance actions that overflowed government prison camps. This book presents a practice-based analysis of colonial officers' interactions with Malaitans in the years leading up to and during Maasina Rule. A primary focus is the place of knowledge in the colonial administration. The book's overarching topic is the dangerous road that colonial ignorance paved for policy makers, from young cadets in the field to high officials in distant Fiji and London. Today kastom remains a powerful concept on Malaita, but continued confusion regarding its origins, history, and meanings hampers understandings of contemporary Malaitan politics and of Malaitan people's ongoing, problematic relations with the state“rebels.”

In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship because they were not “white,” dismissing the plaintiff's appeal to skin tone. Unable to claim whiteness through naturalization laws, Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi developed their own racial currency to secure a prominent place in the Island's postwar social hierarchy. This book explores how different groups within Japanese American society staked a claim to whiteness on the basis of hue and culture. It demonstrates how the meaning of whiteness evolved from mere physical distinctions to cultural markers of difference, increasingly articulated in material terms. Nisei consumer culture demands examination because consumption was vital to the privilege-making process that spilled over into public life. The book builds on recent scholarship that considers ethnic communities within a trans-Pacific context, highlighting ethnic fluidity as a strategy for material and cultural success. Yet even as it assumed a position of conformity, the Japanese American consumer culture that took hold among Honolulu's middle class was distinct. It was at once modern and nostalgic, like the wayo secchu ideal—a hybrid of Western and Japanese notions of beauty and femininity that linked the ethnic group to the homeland and mainstream U.S. culture. By focusing on the marketing of whiteness that connected the old world and new, the book reveals the dynamic commercial and cultural environment that underwrote the rise of the Nisei in Hawaiʻi.

In 1941 the Japanese military attacked the U.S. naval base Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu. Although much has been debated about this event and the wider American and Japanese involvement in the war, few scholars have explored the Pacific War's impact on Pacific Islanders. This book fills this gap by advancing scholarly understanding of Pacific Islander relations with and knowledge of American and Japanese colonialisms in the twentieth century. It traces the formation of divergent colonial and indigenous histories in the Mariana Islands, an archipelago located in the western Pacific and home to the Chamorro people. It shows that U.S. colonial governance of Guam, the southernmost island, and that of Japan in the Northern Mariana Islands created competing colonial histories that would later inform how Americans, Chamorros, and Japanese experienced and remembered the war and its aftermath. Central to this discussion is the American and Japanese administrative development of “loyalty” and “liberation” as concepts of social control, collective identity, and national belonging. Just how various Chamorros from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated their multiple identities and subjectivities is explored with respect to the processes of history and memory-making among this “Americanized” and “Japanized” Pacific Islander population. In addition, the book emphasizes the rise of war commemorations as sites for the study of American national historic landmarks, Chamorro Liberation Day festivities, and Japanese bone-collecting missions and peace pilgrimages.

This is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders. The book reconfigures conventional views of globalization's impact on indigenous communities, moving beyond diagnoses of cultural erosion and contamination to a grounded exploration of creative agency and vital cultural production. Central to the study is a rich and textured ethnographic account of contemporary Cook Islands dance practice. The book offers an analysis of how Cook Islands social life is generated through expressive practices. Dance is explored in a variety of settings, including beauty pageants, tourist venues, nightclubs, and community celebrations at home and within Cook Islands communities abroad. Contemporary Cook Islands dance practices are also shaped by competing ideas about the past. Debates about precolonial traditions, missionization, and colonialism pervade discussions about dance and expressive culture. The book shows how the politics of tradition reflect the competing moral, political, personal, and economic practices of postcolonial Cook Islanders.

We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This book argues that this is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans? And how can we redraw the lines maps and plans use so that the qualitative world of shadows, footprints, comings and goings, and occasions can be registered? In short, the book asks why we represent the world as static when our experience of it is mobile. It traces this bias in Enlightenment cartography, in inductive logic, and in contemporary place design. This is the negative critique. Its positive argument is that, when we look closely at these designs on the world, we find traces of a repressed movement form. Even the ideal lines of geometrical figures turn out to contain traces of earlier passages; and there are many forms of graphic design that do engage with the dark environment that surrounds the light of reason. How can this “dark writing” be represented? And how, therefore, can our representations of the world embody more sensuously the mobile histories that have produced it? The book answers these questions using case studies.

This revised edition of the standard history of Guam is intended for general readers and students of the history, politics, and government of the Pacific region. Its narrative spans more than 450 years, beginning with the initial written records of Guam by members of Magellan 1521 expedition and concluding with the impact of the recent global recession on Guam’s fragile economy. The book presents a historical and geographical overview of Guam and its significance in international affairs. It remains one of the world’s last colonies and continues to fulfill the geopolitical role imposed on it by outsiders centuries ago. The book looks into Guam’s current political situation and claims that the country is a special case of colonialism that will go on for years in a postcolonial world unless a compromise is reached that meets the needs of all sides to end the colonial status of the island. Currently, Guam’s economic viability remains dependent on its strategic location and its enduring military value.

This is an interpretive history of tourism and tourism policy development in Hawaii from the 1960s to the twenty-first century. Part 1 looks at the many changes in tourism since statehood (1959) and tourism’s imprint on Hawaii. Part 2 reviews the development of public policy toward tourism, beginning with a story of the planning process that started around 1970—a full decade before the first comprehensive State Tourism Plan was crafted and implemented. It also examines state government policies and actions taken relative to the taxation of tourism, tourism promotion, convention center development and financing, the environment, Honolulu County’s efforts to improve Waikiki, and how the Neighbor Islands have coped with explosive tourism growth. Along the way, the book offers interpretations of what has worked, what has not, and why. It concludes with a chapter on the lessons learned while developing a dream destination over the past half century.

This book focuses on Fiji’s people and their agency in responding to and engaging the multifarious forms of authority and power that were manifest in the colony from 1874 to 1914. By concentrating on the lives of ordinary Fijians, the book presents alternate ways of reconstructing the island’s past. The book is an excavation of a large mass of material that tells the often moving stories of lives that have largely been overlooked by historians. These challenge conventional historical accounts that tend to celebrate the nation, represent Fiji’s colonial experience as ordered and peaceful, or British tutelage as benevolent. In its contribution to postcolonial theory, the book reveals resistance as a constant but partial and untidy mix of other constituents such as collaboration, consent, appropriation, and opportunism, which together form the colonial landscape. In turn, colonialism in Fiji is shown as a force shaped in struggle, fractured and often fragile, with a presence and application in the daily lives of people that was often chaotic, imperfect, and susceptible to subversion. The book divides the period of study into two broad categories: organized resistance and everyday forms of resistance. These forms reveal a complex web of relationships between powerful and subordinate groups and among subordinate groups themselves. The book concludes that resistance cannot be framed as a totality but as a multilayered and multidimensional reality. In the wake of Fiji’s present volatile climate, this book will aid readers in understanding the continuities and disjunctures in Fiji’s interethnic and intraethnic relations.

This book is about domination and resistance in the Pacific during the Cold War. In the race against the Soviet Union for nuclear supremacy, the United States tested a vast array of nuclear bombs and missiles in the Marshall Islands while at the same time conducting research on the effects of human exposure to radioactive fallout. Although these military and human experiments reinforced the American strategy of deterrence, they also led to the displacement of several atoll communities, serious health conditions in the Marshallese, and widespread ecological degradation. Confronted with these troubling consequences, the Marshall Islanders utilized a variety of political and legal tactics, including lawsuits, demonstrations, and negotiations, to draw attention to their plight in Washington and the United Nations. In response to these acts of resistance, the US strengthened its strategic interests in the Marshalls under the Compact of Free Association, but granted the islanders greater political autonomy, financial assistance, and a mechanism to settle nuclear claims. In the post-Cold War period, however, Washington failed to provide adequate compensation to the people of the Marshall Islands for the extensive health and environmental damages caused by the American testing programs.

Tobacco kills five million people every year and that number is expected to double by the year 2020. This book combines a search of historical materials on the introduction and spread of tobacco in the Pacific with extensive anthropological accounts of the ways Islanders have incorporated this substance into their lives. The book uses a relatively new concept called a syndemic to focus on the health of a community, political and economic structures, and the wider physical and social environment and ultimately provide an in-depth analysis of smoking's negative health impact in Oceania. In the book, the idea of a syndemic is applied to the current health crisis in the Pacific, where the number of deaths from coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease continues to rise, and the case is made that smoking tobacco in the form of industrially manufactured cigarettes is the keystone of the contemporary syndemic in Oceania. The book shows how tobacco consumption has become the central interstitial element of a syndemic that produces most of the morbidity and mortality Pacific Islanders suffer. This syndemic is made up of a bundle of diseases and conditions, a set of historical circumstances and events, and social and health inequities most easily summed up as “poverty.” The book calls this the tobacco syndemic and argues that smoking is the crucial behavior—the “glue”—holding all of these diseases and conditions together.

Facing the Spears of Change takes a close look at the extraordinary life of John Papa ʻĪʻī. Over the years, ʻĪʻī faced many personal and political changes and challenges in rapid succession, which he skillfully parried or grasped firmly and then used to fend off other attacks. He began serving in the household of Kamehameha I as an attendant in 1810, when he was ten. As an attendant, ʻĪʻī was highly familiar with the inner workings of the royal household. He went on to become an influential statesman, privy to the shifting modes of governance adopted by the Hawaiian kingdom. ʻĪʻī’s intelligence and his good standing with those he served resulted in a great degree of influence with the Hawaiian government, with his fellow Hawaiians, and with the missionaries residing in the Hawaiian Islands. At the end of his life, he also became a memoirist and biographer, who published accounts of key events in his own life and in the lives of others during the sixty years that he served his kings, his nation, and his people. As a privileged spectator and key participant, his accounts of aliʻi (nobles) and his insights into early nineteenth-century Hawaiian cultural-religious practices are unsurpassed.

Powerful labor movements played a critical role in shaping modern Hawaii, beginning in the 1930s, when International Longshore and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) representatives were dispatched to the islands to organize plantation and dock laborers. They were stunned by the feudal conditions they found in Hawaii, where the majority of workers—Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino in origin—were routinely subjected to repression and racism at the hands of white bosses. The wartime civil liberties crackdown brought union organizing to a halt; but as the war wound down, Hawaii workers' frustrations boiled over, leading to an explosive success in the forming of unions. During the 1950s, just as the ILWU began a series of successful strikes and organizing drives, the union came under McCarthyite attacks and persecution. In the midst of these allegations, Hawaii's bid for statehood was being challenged by powerful voices in Washington who claimed that admitting Hawaii to the union would be tantamount to giving the Kremlin two votes in the U.S. Senate, while Jim Crow advocates worried that Hawaii's representatives would be enthusiastic supporters of pro-civil rights legislation. Hawaii's extensive social welfare system and the continuing power of unions to shape the state politically are a direct result of those troubled times. This book details for the first time how radicalism and racism helped shape Hawaii in the twentieth century.

Sugarcane arrived in Hawai‘i with the Polynesian settlers, and sugar grew into an important industry in the mid-1800s. By the early twentieth century Hawai‘i had become a world leader in sugarcane production and research. However, despite a century of almost continuous growth and development, in the last quarter of the twentieth century the industry faltered, unable to cope with continually increasing costs of production that outpaced sugar prices. Of the twenty-eight sugar companies operating in 1970, only one, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company, better known as HC&S, was still open in 2011. This was no accident. Beginning in the 1870s HC&S gathered water from the windward slopes of East Maui and moved it to its fields in sunny Central Maui. It gradually absorbed the best lands of smaller companies, drilled irrigation wells, mechanized its field operations, improved its fertilizer and irrigation technologies, modernized its factories, and reduced its labor costs. As a result, HC&S was consistently profitable into the twenty-first century. However, low sugar prices and environmental challenges increasingly threaten HC&S’s future. We hope that this book contributes to a balanced public perception and appreciation for HC&S, long Hawai‘i’s largest and now its only sugar company.

This book discusses both the historical and contemporary experiences of Hawaiʻ's Japanese Americans and interprets these experiences from racial and ethnic perspectives. The transition from race to ethnicity is demonstrated in the transformation of Japanese Americans from a highly racialized minority of immigrant laborers to one of the most politically and socioeconomically powerful ethnic groups in the islands. The book has produced a racial history of Japanese Americans from their early struggles against oppressive working and living conditions on the sugar plantations to labor organizing and the rise to power of the Democratic Party following World War II. It goes on to analyze how Japanese Americans have maintained their political power into the twenty-first century and considers the recent advocacy and activism of individual yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) working on behalf of ethnic communities other than their own. The book's analysis elucidates the differential functioning of race and ethnicity over time insofar as race worked against Japanese Americans and other non-Haoles (Whites) by restricting them from full and equal participation in society, but by the 1970s ethnicity would work fully in their favor as they gained greater political and economic power. The book reminds that ethnicity has continued to work against Native Hawaiians, Filipino Americans, and other minorities—although not to the same extent as race previously—and thus is responsible for maintaining ethnic inequality in Hawaiʻi.