A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

extended family, but members did not have to be directly related to form an ‘ohana, they
could be adopted into it. For example, children were adopted and shared freely to
distribute profits and responsibilities evenly. It is important to note that no private
property in the Western sense existed; the land did not belong to the chiefs, they were
merely accepted as “stewards” of it due to their mana and genealogical divinity. 294 This
needs to be stressed because even today, the ‘accepted’ history of the Hawaiian Islands
describes pre-contact culture as an oppressive feudal system, thus portraying discovery,
Christianization, and finally Americanization as the laudable resurrection of a backward
people. The Hawaiian world has been seen through Western eyes and described in
Western discourses for over two hundred years, since its second discovery by Captain
Cook in 1778.
Once the ‘Sandwich Islands’ had been ‘discovered’ by Cook’s crew, changes took
place at an overwhelming speed. Diseases (venereal and other) were introduced with the
first shipload of sailors, along with iron, guns, and alcohol. An inevitable sense of
inferiority emerged in the face of giant ships and Western technology. Environmental
destruction took place from the very beginning, when of course it was not yet an issue.
There are countless examples of how the careless and often well-intended introduction of
a foreign species led to the extinction of a native one. 295 In the aftermath of Cook’s
discovery, whalers and merchants quickly followed. By 1820, the first Congregational
missionary party had arrived. Subsequently, Christianization and civilization through
education were the agenda. Historians never tire of stressing that members of the ali’i
class themselves had already abolished their kapu system when the missionaries arrived,
insinuating that they were waiting for somebody to introduce them to the ‘real’ god. As
Daws puts it,
the Hawaiians had done something so singular that there does not seem to be a
parallel anywhere in the civilized world. They had given up their religion in favor
of nothing, nothing at all. And so they went on into the nineteenth century,
294 For this assertion, see Trask 1999: 115 and passim.
295 Daws mentions the example of one barrel of bad water dumped on shore at Maui. The water contained
mosquitoes that carried a kind of malaria that eventually killed the native honeycreeper bird. He mentions
cattle, rodents, insects, plants, each an agent of disruptive and fatal change (see Daws’ article “Tides” in
Joseph Stanton, A Hawai’i Anthology, Honolulu 1997: 120-130).
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