FREEHAWAII.INFO PRESENTS A SPECIAL REPORT - FROM COUNTERCURRENTS.ORG
"THE INDEPENDENCE STRUGGLE OF HAWAI`I"
Here's Part Five -
By Amy Marsh
In 1897, approximately 21,000 Hawaiians - more than half the adult Hawaiian population - signed and presented a petition protesting annexation to the United States.
Congress ignored them.
Despite the petition evidence to the contrary, it was far more lucrative for Congress to accept the assurances of missionary lobbyists who claimed the Hawaiians were eager for annexation.
This "Ku'e Petition" of resistance to annexation - 556 pages long, and possibly one of the most significant documents of protest in American, as well as Hawaiian, history - was buried deeply in the U.S. National Archives until it was found by Noenoe Silva in 1998, over a hundred years later.
The discovery of the petition, and the exhibition of this document by the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, had an enormous impact on the kanaka maoli, [Native Hawaiian] who searched the pages eagerly for the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents.
As Silva puts it, "The petition, inscribed with the names of everyone's kupuna, gave people permission from their ancestors to participate in the quest for national sovereignty.
More important, it affirmed for them that their kupuna had not stood by idly, apathetically, while their nation was taken from them."
Tomorrow...Happy Americans Or Independence Fighters?
