Stealing Paradise: History of the Hawaiian Kingdom

The Hawaiian Kingdom, U.S. Annexation, and the Gospel’s Arrival

30 seconds. We're getting quick answers from people in Kauai. How did Hawaii become part of the United States? What do you think?

I think it was adopted by the United States Congress.

1959, right?

1959.

Yeah, I think.

And how did that process take place? Do you know?

How did it take place? Well, the Congress voted it in, right?

How did Hawaii become part of the United States? What do you think?

Like a lot of other countries, it was taken over and colonized.

Annexed? I don't know.

That's fine. That's all we need to know.

You know what happened. I went to Nitty Gritty.

Do you know how Hawaii, the islands of Hawaii, became part of the United States? Do you know the history?

No.

How do you think that Hawaii became part of the United States?

Overthrow, basically.

How did Hawaii become part of the United States?

It hasn't yet.

At the White House yesterday, President Clinton signed a formal letter of apology to the people of Hawaii. He was apologizing on behalf of the U .S. government for the government's involvement a hundred years ago in removing the independent Hawaiian monarchy by force.

Native Hawaiians represent nearly half of all those in prison and make up 30 percent of the homeless population. Now they are saying, enough.

It's difficult sometimes cleaning up the mess that Christians in the past have created.

Yeah. I don't know how to explain, but we just, you know, we want our country back.

What America did was all wrong, all through threat of force and stealing, stealing their land literally with, sign this or we kill everyone.

It's a really amazing story, the story of the Hawaiian people. Their history is fascinating to begin with in terms of thinking about what kind of discipline that they had to come from the South and to just eke their way to the Hawaiian islands like over generations, really.

And that in itself is an amazing history. But when they get to the islands and they begin to flourish and grow as a people, you have a point in time where God and his providence sent missionaries with the gospel.

And these were Christians who were not perfect Christians. They were sinners who loved God and were forgiven. And they wanted to share that message, the message of the gospel, of Christ and what he had done, his perfect life and death and resurrection, and that salvation was through faith in him.

And they went, they went to the Hawaiian islands and they brought the gospel.

Well, my name is Daniel Fincham and I'm a 36 year resident of Kauai. And about two and a half years ago, I started this type of photography type called wet plate collodion photography, which was actually a process that was done back in the 1850s during the Civil War.

I'd seen a documentary about Billy the Kid and a few weeks later, I thought, man, I bet the people of Kauai would look amazing with that aesthetic. And so a year later, I was starting to pour my first plates and create images.

And then as my skills developed, I started doing more like storytelling pieces with my subjects. I think, you know, I'm being a Christian myself. I have studied, I have read books on the early missionary movements in Hawaii and stuff.

And I think the original intentions of the missionaries were good, but unfortunately greed took over and Christians have gained a bad reputation over the years, not only for trying for money grab and for land grab and taking from the Hawaiians and willingly buying up lands that Hawaiians gave up that they later regretted.

They also basically kind of the Haoles kind of lost their religion. The Haoles are the white people or the visitors, whereas a lot of Hawaiians gained it. And in fact, one of the men that was in here the other day, breaking down in tears, big Hawaiian man, he was a Christian himself.

And so there's a lot of Hawaiians that are Christians who still are very tied to their culture. And so that's kind of the way I view it also. And I address that in some of my work, like Hawaiian history for dummies.

You can see that there's a picture in there called exchange, where the little girl and the little boy have actually exchanged necklaces, where the girl came to the shore with a crucifix on, but later on, it's the Hawaiian that's wearing it.

And it shows that the Haole over time has lost the religion to a large degree. There's so much paganism here and lost people. And yet there are so many Hawaiians that have still maintaining their faith.

Apologia Church’s Mission to Kauai

An amazing list of scholars, scientists, and theologians, pastors. And we are having actually a really important show today talking about Hawaii. If you guys don't know, Apologia Church is bringing, planning a church on the island of Kauai.

And the story behind that is actually pretty amazing, compelling. And we've told it elsewhere, so I won't be doing that today, but we are on the tail end of the planning for the mission. And we are right about to send out families to bring the gospel, to love the Hawaiian people.

And so I'm gonna make an introduction right now. This is Pastor Luke Pearson, we call him the bear.

What up?

I'm Jeff, they call me the ninja. Jeff Durbin, they call me the ninja. And this is Dustin Nelson. Greetings. He is a member of Apologia Church. He's been with us for a very, very long time. He loves the Hawaiian people and has a delicious beard, of course.

Oh, and yours is coming back quite nice.

Look at that.

You just cut it off this morning and look at it already. And Dustin is going to be going out to Kauai by God's grace and according to his will with his family to love the Hawaiian people and bring the good news to them.

And of course, over here, Claudio Ramirez.

Hello, hello.

And he is also going out to Kauai to plant and to love the people that are there and communicate the good news.

Okay, so let's talk.

Apologia Church has been invested for about the last two years in trying to discover what God would have for us in Hawaii. And we have, over the last two years, gone out numerous times to get to know the people of Hawaii, to try to figure out how we can love them, how we can serve them.

We've discovered over the course of time of going out and getting to know the people on the island and just growing in our affection for them. We've discovered the plight of the Hawaiian people and had a much better understanding of what God has done on those islands in history.

And we've learned about a lot of the tragic situations that have happened and a lot of the injustice. And of course, we've also learned about how some of the native people continue to feel about the injustice and the things that have happened on the island of Kauai.

So let's just talk.

Let's have a conversation about... Well, let me just introduce it this way. Tell me, the two of you, tell us about your discovering the history of Hawaii, specifically about the gospel coming to the islands and the transformation that took place and then learning about the injustice that has taken place.

How has that impacted you? And what have you learned? Let me start with Claudie.

The Gospel, Transformation, and Betrayal in Hawaiian History

Tremendously. And it's interesting because you have a people that... We had essentially Puritan doctrine that came into the island and you see a group of people come to faith in Christ. And the tragedy of it is that it was essentially the children of those same people that caused this deep hurt for these people.

And so intertwined in all of that is something that's very compelling and enough for, I think, all of us to get to the point where we really wanted to understand what that was all about. Because if as a church, planning a church there, if we were to ignore that or to dismiss that, that would be a massive failure on our part to ignore that.

And it's a deep wound. I think we've all experienced that.

Yes. Yeah. Dustin, tell me how you feel about learning about the plight of the Hawaiian people and what's taking place there.

Well, I had one word pop up in my mind and that was betrayal.

Do you know anything about the missionaries that came to the island?

Well, you know, there was one of the big fives too that came here and took everything from us. You know, I mean, why I say that? That's what it all came down about. When they came here, everything just went, just not say nothing, you know, just come go with this lady, the other lady, you know.

More so than the politicians, more so than the politicians.

When the gospel came to the Hawaiian islands, the gospel came around 1820. 1820, the gospel gets to the islands and there's this massive evangelistic movement to bring the good news of salvation to these wonderful people.

And what's compelling about this story is just how fast the peace of God spread across the Hawaiian islands and among the Hawaiian people. That is compelling. The story itself is insane. From 1820 to 1840, you had a 20-year time period there of love and evangelism.

They weren't perfect. They didn't do everything right, but they communicated the love of Jesus Christ and salvation through him to the Hawaiian people to the effect that in about 20 years, you have a Hawaiian constitution, the constitution of the Hawaiian kingdom.

It's one of those tremendous moments in history where you see that the gospel penetrated a culture and a people to such a degree that within like 20 years of the missionary efforts in Hawaii, you had them so transformed that they were transformed to their constitution.

So in the 1840 constitution, you actually have wording that says that no law of the Hawaiian kingdom will be at variance with the laws of Jehovah God. And that's a distinctly Christian name of God, the God of the Bible.

And so not only did salvation penetrate the Hawaiian islands and so infect the Hawaiian people that they were being transformed and sanctified and changed, but it's being changed down to how they viewed how they were to live as a society, their laws.

Tell me about that constitution. What does it say that makes it distinctively Christian?

Well, initially what you see is essentially what the constitution says is that there's not to be any law created that's going to be contrary to the law of Jehovah God, which is amazing, right? It's just amazing.

And so, yeah, you see that transformation. You see it in society, but then you see it start to reveal itself within the government, which is just phenomenal. It really is.

When you think about the fact that Hawaii could legitimately be called at a point in time, a Christian kingdom, when you think about what that means, that the people of Hawaii were so changed by the message of Jesus that they saw him as the centerpiece of all their life.

And the reason you know that's true is because they pointed to God in their system of laws. I mean, that's how radical a transformation that there was in the Hawaiian people.

A lot of churches, when they need a new pastor, they'll kind of look towards the home base. I'm like, hey, do you guys got anybody? You know, and so they'll find like a pastor out there or someone wants to come out and they'll stay for a few years and then they'll be gone.

You know, like to scale this repeating cycle that happens for some reason. Anyway, we had one and he was awesome. He's this young guy and he was great, super humble. He struggled. You know, there's a lot of reasons why he struggled.

Basically, what came out, even though he didn't necessarily mean it that way, but what came out was like, now we're going to worship. You know, like now we're going to do what the Spirit is doing. You know, like, and he didn't say that directly, but that was the message that was pretty much portrayed.

And whether it was his youngness or that's what he really thought, or I don't know, but not only did it cause great like hurt, like division, but it was deep hurt and offense. As you build relationship and friendship and stay, you know, you're going to learn what that culture is.

You know, like you've come a couple of times or a few times and you know, like you got a small glimpse of the culture. You have like the visiting culture, you know, like visiting visiting Kauai and living on Kauai is pretty different.

The initial intent of the missionaries is not to convert their culture, but to convert their hearts. And that's the difference. And that's powerful. A message that if you guys can bring, that would be awesome.

But my biggest advice for anybody coming to Hawaii is go slow. Slow and steady wins the race here. Not come in and just do it all. Cause they're going to view you just like all the others who've tried to take over.

I think something specific that we have that we saw this last trip was our view of the law of God and desiring to understand what Hawaiians have been through, coming to them and understanding their deep hurts, what America, this supposed Christian nation did to them.

Coming to them with understanding and well, forgive us if you have any offense with us. I mean, unfortunately, just because the way we look, those feelings come up in them because we, just how we look, bring those issues to the fore.

And we've got, with the law of God, what America did was all wrong, all through threat of force and stealing, stealing their land literally with sign this or we kill everyone.

The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Sovereignty Movement

My name is Kopa. I was born and raised right here in Hanapepe. So this is where I used to play as a little boy. Used to work in these sub patches and I'm elected House of Nobles for the Hawaiian government.

Someone doesn't understand. I don't understand that history. What happened? Why did that take place? What happened?

Well, history states that in 1880s, there was prior to that, there was a tariff. It's called the Treaty of Rappaprosite. And that we could bring goods into the United States without being taxed. Right at probably the end of the 1800s, 1880s, the United States put in a law to Congress that there wasn't accepted any foreign goods like sugar.

Now all these people who came from the missionaries in the 1850s, they came over here and built all these plantations. Now they couldn't get the sugar out. For them to bring the sugar all the way up there and get taxed, they would lose all their money.

So that was one of the primary motivation factors of them trying to, what they call it, overthrow of our country. But it really, when you look at it, overthrow insinuates that the Hawaiians overthrew their own country.

And that's why they always try to use that term. And we need to be corrected that it was an outright invasion of a foreign country. And a violation of treaties, right? So once they did that, they had to make Hawaii part of them.

So they could bring out the sugar and make money. It was all about money.

And so we have Uncle Timmy and again...

John.

John. Okay, very nice to meet you gentlemen. So tell me, what is the sovereignty movement? What is the purpose of what it is that you're doing right now?

Get back what they took from us. I mean, for one thing, they're trying to tell you what to do of this. It's a no-no. We want back our country, what they took. So how are we supposed to go about by getting back our country?

The Hawaiian islands were taken away from the Hawaiian people, the natives, with so much malice and, I mean, evil. I think that the American people generally have a portrait in their mind of America where we would never do such a thing.

We would never treat people this way. It couldn't be true that the United States of America was involved in a treacherous deal, that the United States of America was involved in something so low and so obviously theft.

I mean, we couldn't possibly have our hand in something like that. But when you look at the history, when you really understand what took place there, you understand that what took place was evil. It was theft.

It was wrong on so many levels. So help me understand this. So from what I understand and the people that I've talked to that are natives, there was in many ways some tragedies and there was sin, of course, initially when the missionaries made contact.

But there were also a lot of blessings, tremendous blessings, with the missionaries making contact with Hawaiians. There was obviously, from a Christian perspective, the gospel. There was help in many ways.

But from what I understand, and again, correct me, help me with this, it seems about two generations or so later, that's where there was a lot of corruption that came in in terms of, you mentioned financial, a lot of monetary gain-fueled corruption with the tariffs and the sugar.

And so that entered in. The Queen, I've read a lot of what the Queen said and some amazing, beautiful things she said about God, about the Hawaiian kingdom, about righteousness, perpetuate righteousness.

She actually said perpetuate the righteousness of Christ. I've read about the laws of the Hawaiian kingdom. It was stated that no laws can be invariant with the laws of Jehovah God. So it seems like there was a lot of justice and peace and goodness.

And then there was a lot of sin and corruption that entered. But from my perspective, just listening and hearing your stories, it seems like after there was a hostile takeover, that there began to just be this pattern of injustice and oppression upon the natives and Hawaiian people for a long, long time until this day.

Do I have the basic picture there? Am I missing anything?

Well, it's true what you said about the missionaries. Their primary intent was there when they came to educate the people on the gospel and to show them a better way.

How does the sovereignty movement and the movement for independence, how do they feel about the queen and the Hawaiian kingdom then? How was the feeling about her and the laws of the Hawaiian kingdom?

The laws of the Hawaiian kingdom were not rescinded. So actually, these are the laws. These were the laws of the Queen Liliuokalani. She was the last one. And everybody speaks about her with great respect.

When the missionaries came in in 1820, a lot of people don't understand that Hawaiian kingdom didn't have a written language until 1830. And there are sovereignty movements that say that, oh, this is us.

But the language is written by some white person from Boston. And they say, oh, that's us. Yeah, go talk to your therapist or something. But the thing is that what happened with the missionaries, it brought the literacy in Hawaiian Islands to 90-something percent.

You know, everybody could read. You know, they could read both languages. They were very literate. So that was a good thing. What they did at that time is still, the foundation of that still exists now.

So time really begins to move. Transformation is still occurring. Some glorious things. And so from like 1820 to the 1890s, Christianity and the gospel has really taken root in the Hawaiian kingdom. To the degree that the queen of the Hawaiian kingdom actually acknowledges Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

She writes about Jesus. She writes songs about Jesus. She points to Jesus and says, I love him.

Right?

And so one of the mischaracterizations of the Hawaiian people at this time, where they were basically acting like the Hawaiian people were like savages. Right? Like they're like savages. And one of the things the queen said about that was like, do you think the gospel fell on like bad soil?

Like they didn't take root? I mean, we've been impacted by the gospel. So they were really a people that was really blessed by God. Where do things start to go south? Where does injustice start to creep in?

Well, you see it, I think, initially when Kamehameha III, he's king, he's monarch, right? And so you start to see these influences of the sugar industry. And so there's these land leases, there's exports of sugar.

The Americans, and I believe there were some Europeans there also, they wanted to start to have more of a say in the government.

Okay.

And so it escalates to a point where you see Kamehameha dies, King David Kalakua, he comes to power. And what occurs is essentially you get to a place in 1887, where this new constitution is written, and he essentially is forced to agree to this constitution by threat of bodily harm.

Really?

And it's because of these essentially landowners. It's about money and land. This is really what it's all about. And the unfortunate part of that is those that are participating in this, many of them are children of the missionaries who originally came to the islands.

Okay.

So you start to see fracture, you start to see a divide there. And again, he essentially, again, agrees to this constitution. But what ends up happening is he travels to the United States, and what he's attempting to do is gain really confidence from the United States in attempting to sign a new treaty.

Okay.

And he eventually dies in San Francisco.

Kalakaua got sick, he had fever or something. He said they let him rest, they took him to San Francisco. He was here a doctor, now that's what, maybe a month on a ship.

Right.

So all that shows, when you look at it from an open point of view, that they were waiting for him to die. Because now a lady would become a queen.

Prior to his death, he names Lili 'uokalani as he was going to take the throne if he should perish. And she does, and in the course of events, she essentially wants to change the constitution back to the way it was prior to 1887.

The first thing she wanted to do was to bring the 1863 constitution back into effect. So our people, the Hawaiian natives, the nationals, would have the power again over their own government. They took away all the people from the government, so now all these foreigners was voting.

They had the power to vote, all the communists couldn't vote.

And that's what caused, really, the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. And there were some very central figures in that. A gentleman by the name of John Stevens, he was a diplomat in the United States.

And he was one of the cohorts that was involved in the overthrow. And in his background, which is actually pretty interesting, he was originally a minister. He attended seminary in Maine and became a universalist pastor.

He eventually leaves the universalist church, and he gets into the newspaper business with a guy by the name of James Blaine. And James Blaine, he winds up becoming the United States Secretary of State and appoints Stevens to the position in Hawaii.

So you see this, you see the politics of it. You can just see this.

The roots.

The roots of just this corruption that was occurring and what eventually led to the overthrow.

And it was the grandchildren of the missionaries that were involved in this takeover of the Hawaiian kingdom. They essentially captured the queen, and they told her to sign documents that would essentially hand the kingdom over.

And, I mean, in a short way of saying this, they, in a very hostile way, took over the Hawaiian kingdom. And the queen herself, when she's essentially locked away, she's thinking about her people. She doesn't want bloodshed.

She has these United States Marines and this group that are essentially threatening her, that if you don't hand it over, there's going to be bloodshed. And so in order to stop bloodshed, she doesn't agree that this is okay.

She just essentially signs over her authority temporarily, hoping that, in the hopes that, the United States government would eventually see what was taking place, investigate, and then stop it, and then hand the kingdom back over to her.

And the best way I can put it, as I think that when the United States government realized that they had the Hawaiian islands, it didn't matter what took place. It didn't matter how it happened. It belonged to us now.

What they did may have been legal according to the mainland's law, according to American's law, but it was not legal according to God's law. They stole. They moved their boundary markers to where they did not belong.

They extended their reach and they threatened the queen with genocide, with the murder of her people, unless she signed this document. Hate in their hearts. Covetousness. They wanted what was not theirs.

They wanted control of it, over it, and were willing to murder for it. There's clearly hatred in their heart towards these people.

On the actual day of annexation, the queen shuttered herself at Washington Place, surrounded by her court, by the princes, by her ladies-in-waiting, and they had a solemn picture taken. On the other side at Iolani Palace, there were sharpshooters pointed out.

There was still tension in the air that something might happen. But when the Hawaiian flag was lowered, it was said that it was cut into small little two to three inch ribbons and given out as tokens of remembrance to the sons and daughters of the missionary families, so that they could keep those as little tokens of their great victory over the Hawaiian kingdom and the end of the tyranny of the Hawaiian monarchy.

That's why I say they should beg forgiveness from these people and from God.

The queen of the Hawaiian kingdom was a believer. She loved Jesus. I mean, even when she was essentially captured and held, she is writing songs about Jesus.

I live in sorrow, imprisoned. Your glory is my support. Behold, see the sins of man. And instead of malevolence or anger, please forgive.

You've got to admit, that's pretty amazing. In the midst of trial and difficulty, she's writing songs about Jesus. And she is such a Christian that she even says things like, the life of the land is perpetuated in the righteousness of Christ.

Who says that? I mean, what modern leader says that sort of a thing? Who has said that sort of a thing in the last 200 years in the history of the world? What queen, what king has talked like that? Our hope is that Hawaii and the Hawaiian people would be healed through Jesus Christ.

And that the laws of God would be actually there to protect the kingdom of Hawaii.

That's our hope. Right.

And to have a church that, again, when you see that injustice occur, you have a church that's willing to engage the culture, not step away from it and turn their back to it, but to be able to engage even politics and say, look, this is the law of God, this is who we are, this is what we stand for.

It changes everything.

Evangelism, Cultural Sensitivity, and the Hope of Justice in Hawaii

We are waiting for the rest of the team to get here. And then we're going to head out downtown Kapa 'a, try to get a feel for what it's like to do open evangelism in Kapa 'a, which is kind of the central hub of where we're going to be at when we plan Apology of Hawaii.

So we're going to check it out. What do you think is like the normal spiritual climate of the Hawaiian Islands?

What is it?

Is it just sort of like a believe whatever you want, like sort of a thing? Or what's like, what's dominant? What do you think are like dominant religious or spiritual influences in Hawaii?

Kind of like more like mother earth, like nature has like its own kind of like...

Yeah.

Yeah, kind of like spirits and stuff.

Don't take anything.

What do you mean take something?

Because if like you take like a rock or something, they're like, put that back. Okay. The bike path is over there somewhere. And we met this one crazy German beach guy. Yeah, he's German. He had like a...

His name is Nice Bard, something like that. But we were talking to him. We were talking to him and like one of the first things he said when Manu asked him if he believed in a religion, he said that he can't be a Christian.

And he gave us three reasons why. He said he wasn't originally born with any type of sin. And then he said he has like the power to better himself. And then he said, so therefore he doesn't need a savior.

Do Christians in Oahu and Kaua 'i, do they go out a lot to like actually get like... Foreign relational ministry. That's what I was at. I was wondering.

Yeah.

Not a lot of outreach.

Okay.

So make friends.

Yeah.

Over time, talk stories. But you don't see a lot of like going out and walking up to a random person and be like, Hey, what are you about? Like, let's talk about Jesus. Nothing like that.

That's what I want to do.

That's it.

Yeah. Yeah.

It takes longer to learn the culture. And so I just, I would, I would strongly recommend like just taking it slow and building relationships and meeting other pastors and making friends as best you can, you know, asking those pastors to set you up with like one or two families and just having dinner at their place if they would let you, you know, like if they would welcome you somehow and just, and just learning and growing and having conversations like these and, you know, and just, and just coming in with humility and learning.

We were told that like Waimea and Western Waimea on the south side of the island, like there's a lot of natives there and they don't necessarily take too kindly to a lot of Haoles. There's, you know, there's still a lot of angst and difficulty and, and, you know, I understand in many ways why.

So, but those are our people.

We want, we love those people. We want to get to know them. We want to serve them, want to love them. So we went down to the south side of the island where we were told like, that's not the best place for you to go.

When Marcus and I showed up to the beach that we were told that we've been told numerous times not to go to because there are rough people down there. There's rough characters down there. We went anyway, and Jeff and Luke were there already.

And when we pulled up, there was this truck that had kingdom of Hawaii and flags and stuff all over this truck. And like, that's the guy we got to talk to.

Yeah.

Find that guy.

And I remember that I could look in the eyes of these amazing people and there was, there was some indifference or slight hostility. Like, why are you here today? Like, don't you know, you're not supposed to be here on this day kind of a thing.

I don't know. You've got the sense that maybe I'm not supposed to be here today. They don't want this Haole showing up. But we were there because we wanted to hear them. We want to hear their story. Wanted to love them.

We wanted them to be able to share with us, like, what is it like living here? And what is your history?

Boy, did that flip, flip me on my head. I was not prepared for what at all was going to happen.

And then I ended up having conversations with all these wonderful natives with so much love and grace to them. And they just welcomed us.

They fed us.

They're pouring food on our plates and they're letting us drink from the same community cup and they're just putting their armors around us.

And then the feast started. He just kept coming with, I don't remember. It was just a plethora of seafood on my plate. And after piling all the seafood, he tops it with the chicken. This is so good. I'm going to have to stop, but I don't want to stop.

They just kept feeding us, feeding us.

And I just felt welcomed by them and so loved and cared for. It was, my heart was so full. And like this whole community was so tightly knit together. They all knew one another and cared for one another and they welcomed us.

They let us listen to them and be a part of their story. And it was such an amazing experience because we didn't anticipate it in God's providence. He carried us there. He granted us this opportunity to sit with some of the most amazing people I've ever met in my entire life.

And I mean that and to just be loved by them and get to love them back and to get to hear their story. It was truly an amazing experience that I'll never forget.

For someone who's coming to start a church in Kauai, what would you not want them to.

Do? Well, to tell you the truth, we have a lot of churches. We don't need no more churches no more. Like we need golf course. We don't need no more golf course here too. I mean, you know.