Gay Marriage and Hawaii Sovereignty :: Politics Political Gays Hawaii Essays

Lesbian/gay work sits on a lily pad. The lily pad is the foundation, the Kanaka Maoli struggle the beautiful pink bloom of youth is the lesbian/gay work. Kuumeaaloha Gomes (1)Its a big industry, the exotification of Hawaii and its people, making it into every white mans paradise. Its nice now that we discombobulate ownership of our own stories.Lois-Ann Yamanaka (2)Hawaii is arrival. To arrive in Hawaii is to follow all of history, superstar group at a time. To the Kanaka Maoli, the people who first traveled in ancient times across the ocean in canoes and small boats from Polynesia, Hawaii was the promised land. It was the end of their pilgrimage, the land of powerful spirits and gods in need of worship. The Kanaka Maoli develop a complex society around this new land and these new spirits a free society built around peace, love, and worship of nonpareils homeland. This way of life flourished for thousands of years, until the arrival of Christian missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries declared their freedom evil, their nakedness vile, and their gods false. Christianity flooded the shores of the islands, pulling with it white entrepreneurs, who toughened up massive farms and plantations to take advantage of Hawaiis unique agriculture, and Japanese workers for those plantations, with whom Christianity gained its strongest base in the islands. Then came the political opportunists, who in less than one century pulled the Hawaiian monarchy up to its highest levels of Western pomp and circumstance, only to tear it down again with the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 with help from the United States political relation (who later annexed the island chain). Next came the arrival of the expatriates the tourists the haoles (whites) who saw Hawaii as nothing more than a tropical novelty or an escape from their stress-filled lives back on the mainland. Statehood came quickly in 1959, as did immigrants from the Phillipines and Korea. I came in 1995, with my haole military family, to a land that would become my adopted home the way it had for so many others. I found a land carved up like a puzzle each person, each culture, each idea holding onto their piece with the depart of God or gods. Today, there are many Hawaiis. Depending on where you go, you can witness the poor, the rich, the privileged, the oppressed, the loud, the silent, the passive, and the active.