The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 5 October 2011
by Sarah Vowell
In 1898, after a series of political accidents, most of which were brought about by the venal actions of American missionaries and entrepeneurs, the island nation of Hawaii was annexed by the United States. It would go on to become a state 61 years later, and today we've got a Hawaii Five-O revival on TV. In Hawaii, there remains a long-simmering resentment by those of native ancestry toward the haoles, just about anyone from the outside. There is a native independence movement (though fragmented), and there has been a drive to have native Hawaiians defined by law as Native Americans. Hawaii is, in many ways, a paradise. The people are warm and cheerful, the land is stunningly beautiful (if ecologically alien to what it was in the distant past), and the sea is an indescribable blue. But haoles know they are haoles. To be Hawaiian is not anything to which we'll really be able to relate. Sarah Vowell respects this. Her narrative of the Americanization of the islands is generous to Hawaiian culture and also devoted to a kind of personalized truth about American behavior in the world back then, and even today. She tells us about the Hawaiian royal families and their sometimes brutal history of warfare between the islands. Kamehameha unified the islands after a bloody war, and his descendents kept a tenuous hold on power as, first Captain Cook, and then a flood of missionaries and speculators started coming to the islands. Vowell relates the bad behavior of the wealthy white outsiders, their scheming to have the islands annexed by the USA. This is the ugly story told by the Hawaiian native movement today. America's claim to the island is based upon some legally dubious actions that are of the kind familiar to Native American tribes across the country. In fact, Vowell connects the fate of Hawaii to that of her own Cherokee ancestors in Georgia. They both had to endure the meddling of New England missionaries who brought the Bible and their cultural chauvanism. In the islands, this led to the quashing of Hawaiian culture, most especially their founding myths and the tradition of the hula. At the same time, though, Vowell is canny enough to tell us about the Hawaiian chiefs, kings and queens who, through neglect, dissipation and greed, either sold Hawaii cheap, or merely failed to see the vast conspiracy being wrought upon them by the untrustworthy haoles. This is an old story in this world, the natives outmaneuvered by a mendacious invader more driven by greed than the words of their supposed scriptures and founding documents. It is not a pretty story. Vowell tells it with a note of anger. Or, at least, this reader seemed to detect that. We, as a nation, are so devoted to the good of which we are capable, that we are so often blind to the bad we have allowed in our name. Now, Hawaii is pretty well off as an American state. Tourism drives the economy after the collapse of the sugar industry. In some places, the land is healing from the onslaught of exotic species. But the history of Hawaii's joining America is full of falsehood and injustice (certainly by today's standards, if less so by those of 1898), and on both sides. This remains a wound that Hawaiians are still trying to deal with. Vowell's book is a very accessible story, witty and sharp, and full of the joy of discovering an exotic place with a very full history. Much of what she writes has been told elsewhere, but never before with the kind of personal wit we find in her book.
Also by Sarah Vowell: [Assassination Vacation]