Lost & Found

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with The American Backstory hosts.

ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey Ed.

ED: And Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey Ed.

ED: When Noelani Arista was growing up in Hawaii in the 1970s and 1980s, the Hawaiian language was something that was spoken mostly by old people.

NOELANI ARISTA: I mean, you know, you heard stories from your parents– his grandmother would always speak in Hawaiian when she didn’t want us to understand what she was saying.

ED: Arista’s grandmother spent the last few months of her life receiving care at home.

NOELANI ARISTA: There were days when she couldn’t remember English, but she could remember Hawaiian. So that’s when I realized, wow. In my own family, if I learn Hawaiian, there’s going to be a continuous chain of people who spoke Hawaiian– [LAUGH] practically.

PETER: When Arista was in college in the 1980s, she decided to learn her family’s native language. Until then, the opportunities for formal instruction in Hawaiian had been limited. Since 1896, the language had been marginalized in the public schools, and only now was it experiencing something of a rebirth. Arista would go on to study history,and her language skills would give her a whole new perspective on her island’s past.

ED: As a kid, Arista had learned a verse of Hawaiian history that’s basically the same as mainland American kids learn, if they learn one at all.

NOELANI ARISTA: So you learn about the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778, followed by the unification of the kingdom, the archipelago under Kamehameha I, then the arrival of the missionaries in 1820. And then there’s this sort of like, gray portion that happens until sometime around 1893. The kingdom is overthrown.

PETER: It may be gray, Arista says, but its shape is unmistakable– that of a steady and relatively unchallenged march toward annexation by the United States. Arista refers to it as a progress narrative. NOELANI ARISTA: The progress narrative seems to depend upon kanaka maolipeople, native people, and sort of going with the flow, agreeing to everything that looks progressive.

ED: That version of Hawaiian history started to unravel for Arista whenshe was in graduate school. There she was working on a project translating Hawaiian language newspapers for other scholars to use.

NOELANI ARISTA: I would go every Saturday from 9:00 AM to 12:00along with a bunch of other graduate students and several native speakers. And we would read Hawaiian language newspapers every weekend, and we would summarize each article. Some of the articles were advertisements, some were chantes. Some were [HAWAIIAN], or histories.

PETER: What Arista found in those newspapers ran counter to the idea that Hawai’s annexation by America was inevitable, and that native Hawaiians welcomed the political change taking place. In the papers from 1845, for instance, she discovered a series of petitions addressed to Kamehameha III, urging him to fight against the growing influence of the missionaries and their descendants. NOELANI ARISTA: There are all these petitions from [? Machinanina ?], from Hawaiian citizens, asking the king not to allow so many foreigners to swear the oath of office. And the words that they use are, uh, [HAWAIIAN], or they shall become– Hawaiian nationals is what I can imagine. But [HAWAIIAN] sounds like or they shall become Hawaiians, like in our place. So there’s a high degree of suspicion among the native population for foreign officers serving in government.

ED: The people’s suspicions were well-founded. American missionaries and businessmen came to dominate the Hawaiian House of Nobles and the King’s cabinet. They used their legislative power to redistribute native lands and to control the economy. And their descendants became the driving force behind the deposition of Queen Kamehameha I, and the annexation of Hawaii to the United States at the end of the 19th century.But for more than 150 years, all that has been missing from the historical record. NOELANI ARISTA: You know the entire petition drive? It’s not in any narrative, you know, and for every other kind of moment in Hawaiian history. I imagine there’s going to be moments like this that we have yet to uncover. This is what’s so amazing.

ED: Today, Noelani Arista is a professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And surprisingly, she is the first and only member of the university’s history department who is a fluent reader and speaker of Hawaiian.

Arista hopes that distinction will be a short-lived one. She is energetically training her own graduate students to read Hawaiian. Thanks to their translation projects, hundreds of thousands of formally missing pages of Hawaiian history written by the native Hawaiians who lived it are coming to light. Those pages are reshaping the history that future generations of children will learn about their islands.