Do You like book Hawaii's Story By Hawaii's Queen (2004)?
This book was on the suggested reading list for our local Hilo, Hawaii Library's Adult Summer Reading program. The coup d'etat that imprisoned Queen Liliuokalani and stole the monarchy from the Hawaiian people was fulminated by businessmen: Dole, Thurston and others. Then these powerful and entitled men convinced the United States government's powerful people to acknowledge their stolen position. The Hawaiian People fight to have their spiritual beliefs and connection to the 'aina today. Check out the fight to protect Mauna a Wakea from the powerful business partnership called TMT. Queen Liliuokalani's words are still alive here after over 200 years. Here's my favorite quote: "......the habits and prejudices of New England Puritanism were not well adapted to the genius of a tropical people, nor capable of being thoroughly ingrafted upon them."
—Susan Odetta
Required reading for visitors to the Hawaiian Islands, IMO. Written by Hawaii's last queen, a very eloquent, worldly, and loving Victorian woman. She speaks directly, and in a somewhat formal Victorian manner. She tells of how she was essentially framed by US advisers whom she trusted and who had profited from her and her country's generosity. She was arrested, imprisoned, and forced to abdicate. Her possessions were all ransacked and stolen. She bears no bitterness, only disbelief at the Christians who deposed her, questioning their "Christian" values. The first few chapters on lineage were confusing to me (but there are charts in the back to help, if you wish to understand it). Bear with it or skim, till the plot kicks in. This might also be Victorian style, setting the scene.Most interesting is the Queen's forgiving attitude, letting go of her mistreatment by the missionary party, letting "God be the judge." Even her reference to her childhood time in missionary school ("they must not have known we were growing children, because we were always hungry, and were only fed once a day") shows forgiveness on her part. It makes one wonder how the Islands would be today if President Cleveland's edict that Hawaii be self-governing had not been undermined by a greedy socio-political party. A fascinating history lesson.
—Robin
read this many years ago- decades actually. significant for the more recent kamaaina renaissance, the recovery of hawai'ian pride. surprised that I had not put this on here, though through family history know most of the appropriation of the islands, the unavoidable american annexation- look on any globe and you will note Honolulu is more or less the exact centre of the northern pacific, so useful to Europeans, to Americans, to whaling ships of moby dick era, to nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers... not a surprise local land, people, resources, were all incorporately absorbed. at about the time this was written, it was suggested with great certainty that the hawai'ians as a people, as a 'race', were destined to die out as superior 'races' came to take over the islands... this did not happen, exactly, though as with natives and First Nations of North America, there was no resistance to European diseases and this led to a great dying... I am only half hawai'ian, but this is my spiritual home, this is family history, this book not the best, but then books are books...
—the gift
