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reinventing hawai‘i tom coffman As we in Hawai‘i start the next “X” number of years of U.S. statehood, most will agree the original invention is in trouble. We hear cries of pain throughout the state of Hawai‘i, but we hear no real discussion of how we got to this pass or how we might find our way to better times. Perhaps that is a possibility of this book—to get a group talking about the reinvention of Hawai‘i. I’m not pretending to have the answers, but let me take my turn at the conversation. As a marker in time, let us try to imagine the State’s 2009 observance of the fiftieth year of statehood. For all who missed it—that would be almost everyone—the observance was held in that cold glass temple, the Hawai‘i Convention Center. Most of the participants were under the gun to be there (literally, because the majority were National Guard personnel). The program was forced, the energy low. Audience participation in the breakout sessions was almost nonexistent. Among the Hawaiians protesting outside, the venerable Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell was accidentally injured, surfacing inside the Convention Center with a painful black eye. That this thoughtful, gentle man would become an emblem of the Statehood Observance lights up the arc of the fifty-year subject. In 1959, when the sociologist Lawrence Fuchs was interviewing people for his book, Hawaii Pono, he said the only person who questioned statehood was Kekuni Blaisdell. Kekuni says that actually he was still brainwashed by American propaganda at the time, so Dr. Fuchs did not begin to get the full force of his dissent. Either way, you get the idea. Originally celebrated enthusiastically , statehood at year fifty was observed awkwardly. While native Hawaiians have a way of illuminating and intensifying the public discussion, the need for a reinvention arises not only from their issues but our myriad of cascading problems: fiscal, educational, economic, etc. We part one: ka wehena 10 The Value of Hawai‘i have a resource management crisis, an energy crisis, and a crisis of leadership so pervasive in all sectors that it goes unremarked. (Quick. Name today’s three great leaders of business. Name two great leaders of unions. Name one great leader of the legislature.) Since we are arguably as well-intentioned as the statehood generation, how do we account for the present state of our State? As I attempt to find threads by researching Hawai‘i’s history, I am returned again and again to Hawai‘i being a small, semi-separate outpost of American mass culture that is nonetheless original, distinctive, and vital. We twist in the wind between a hope that we are special and a fear that we are inconsequential. Our most familiar ways of expressing this dichotomy are “a subtle inferiority of spirit,” on the one hand, and the power of the aloha spirit on the other. How different are we? How different is our history? What other state of the USA began as a destination for Polynesian voyagers, evolved into multiple island chiefdoms, responded to Western contact by developing a unified constitutional monarchy, and then was illegally taken over and told this was a good thing? Hawai‘i was subjected to a territorial status longer than any geographic area that became a state of the United States—a possible clue as to our sense of being marginal. During the long territorial period, the essential point of contention was whether Hawai‘i would be treated as an evolving community governed by constitutional principles, or exclusively as a military bastion governed by fiat. In response to the famous Massie case, the Navy admiral Yates Stirling argued for recognizing that Hawai‘i’s unique military importance required a unique military government, a government of Caucasian men “who are not imbued too deeply with the peculiar atmosphere of the Islands . . . by men without preconceived ideas as to the value and success of the melting pot.”1 Ironically, it was the crisis of World War II that tipped the scales in favor of democratic community-building, and it was with community-building in mind that the campaign for statehood took on a noble dimension. Here was the upside: out of a determination that the sacrifices of war not be in vain, the statehood campaign was at the heart of a political strategy to create a novel multiethnic society, in which the rights of working people were to be secured and...

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