#219 in the Moʻolelo series
Colonization follows a rough pattern wherever it is imposed. I explain this process using 3 “actors” or groups, each of which begins with the letter M:
MISSIONARIES (1820): In the case of Hawaiʻi, the Congregationalist missionaries sent by ABCFM (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) were specifically not allowed to become involved in government.
The mission itself read:
Your views are not to be limited to a low or a narrow scale… You are to aim at nothing short of covering those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings, and schools and churches; of raising up the whole people to an elevated state of Christian civilization; of bringing, or preparing the means of bringing, thousands and millions of the present and succeeding generations to the mansions of eternal blessedness.
(ABCFM)
But this mission was naive in that it tacitly required some government involvement. But still, the first wave of missionaries did not directly attempt to colonize Hawaiʻi – that came with next two waves.
MERCHANTS (1835): The sons of missionaries, having often grown up in poverty and at times outright squalor and having good educations, saw it as perhaps a right to build wealth for themselves. Very few carried on their fathers’ missionary work (Hiram Bingham II was an exception). Along with newer foreign arrivals, they built the industry that came to known as “King Sugar,” so dominant was it in Hawaiʻi’s economy. Their ostensible mission was not to overthrow the monarchy, but merely to build wealth, but when the government did not conform to their wishes, they instigated the “overthrow before the overthrow” – the Bayonet Constitution, stripping Kalākaua of power. This was a decisive blow to the monarchy and some could argue that overthrow itself was merely the culmination of the course set in 1887.
MILITARY (1893): When Liliʻuokalani attempted to discard the Bayonet Constitution for one – the draft constitution of 1893 – that would restore the balance between government branches, this was a cause for the landing of troops. The rest is history. But it is this sequence that exists both in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere that constitutes a pattern – the 3 Ms – that puts the process of colonization into perspective.
Of course, Hawaiʻi it seems was not literally colonized in the end, but the cultural and political processes involved can be seen in our history.
the umiverse 