learn some Native Hawaiian facts this AANHPI month, why the american flag DOESN'T represent everyone
5/8/24
Excessive over tourism has led to the displacement of the Hawaiian population which has become a minority in their own lands. Homelessness is extremely high among the locals who can't afford to live on the land stolen from their ancestors. Hawai'i has nation’s highest rates of chronic homelessness. There are more native Hawaiians living on the mainland than the islands because they can't afford it- they have been pushed out.
Like all the other indigenous people that the U.S. colonized, the American government desecrated Hawaiian culture. They banned the Hawaiian language and dance in schools where Native children were punished for speaking or performing. Per the government’s own records such tactics were baked into federal policy. According to one excerpt from a 1969 Senate report on Native American education:
“Beginning with President Washington, the stated policy of the Federal Government was to replace the Indian’s culture with our own. This was considered ‘advisable’ as the cheapest and safest way of subduing the Indians, of providing a safe habitat for the country’s white inhabitants, of helping the whites acquire desirable land, and of changing the Indian’s economy so that he would be content with less land. Education was a weapon by which these goals were to be accomplished.”
The U.S. government overthrew their Kingdom and forced Native Hawaiians to part with most of their land. Missionaries embedded themselves in the Native community to “promote Calvinism and claimed civilized practices.” They were “raising up a whole people to an elevated state of Christian civilization.”
As Native communities across the country have long known, U.S. policy directly led to the forced assimilation, family separation, and deaths of Native children through federal boarding schools. Their goal was to stamp out all vestiges of Native cultural traditions and replace them with white, Christian customs and norms - they were indoctrinated. The institutions they did this through operated far more like incarceration facilities than educational establishments.
Through many decades of colonialism of the islands, Hawai’i is still currently illegally occupied. As a result of the illegal annexation of Hawai’i, over 1.8 million acres of Hawaiian land was ceded to the U.S. which continues to negatively impact the people to this day.
Indigenous children are pressured into daily rituals at school requiring them to pledge allegiance to a flag that to a large degree, forced the assimilation and even the genocide of their ancestors. This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that students can’t be forced to salute the US flag or say the pledge because doing so violates their free speech under the First Amendment. These children should not be bullied into pledging an allegiance to a country that stole their land, murdered their people, and continues to impose genocide on them.
Before people jump on the SHAME! and ‘PaTrIoTiSm’ wagon against those who don't stand for the pledge check your white privilege and consider that the American flag is literally the symbol of oppression and genocide of Native people.
*More info on the Hawaiian sovereignty movement in the comments of this post and check out this short video!
#youreonstolenland #landback #RefugeesOnTheirOwnLand #NativeLivesMatter #RememberWhoseLandYoureOn #Decolonization #Independence #FreeHawaii #HawaiianKingdom #PonoOverProfits #DefendTheAina #HomesNotHotels #IllegalUSOccupation #AANHPIHeritageMonth
