The 1897 Mass Petition Against the U.S. Annexation of Hawaii

The petition referred to in the prior post - An Open Letter to the U.S. Left from the Hawaii Sovereignty Movement - is really very important. 'The petition' was a petition of native Hawaiians, signed by 95 percent of the Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) population, against the annexation (colonization) of Hawaii by the U.S. Hawaii was finally 'annexed' by the U.S. a year later in 1898, after a decades-long process of attempted U.S. colonization and native Hawaiian resistance.

This petition represented a basically total rejection of U.S. colonization by the native Hawaiian people. That level of unity in resistance to colonialism is remarkable. Yet this petition, buried in the National Archives, was historically forgotten. That is, until Silvia Noenoe uncovered it very recently. She writes about the petition in her book Aloha Betrayed, which documents the extensive native Hawaiian resistance to U.S. colonialism.

This is a hugely important book, because it demolishes the popular idea that native Hawaiians didn't resist U.S. colonialism, and passively (or even actively) accepted it. Noenoe didn't have to look very far to refute this bogus colonizer's history -- all she had to do was go into archives and read the many newspapers in native Hawaiian language written in the 1800s. There it was - all kinds of resistance, easy to document! It seems that nobody had bothered to read what the native Hawaiians were saying in their own newspapers in their own language at the time, all the while proclaiming that they 'accepted' or supposedly didn't resist U.S. colonialism. Talk about colonial arrogance!

Here is a web page from the National Archives that goes into more detail about the 1897 petition against U.S. annexation of Hawaii. The ongoing struggle for sovereignty for the native Hawaiian people is a just struggle that all progressive people should learn more about and support.