Hawaii Today

Hawaii was annexed by the United States without significan resistance from the democracy-loving American people. After much struggle, island-based white-American politicians managed to have it made the 50th state of the Union. Its traditional subsistence agricultural economy has been replaced by three cash staples: export-driven mono-crop plantation agriculture, employing fewer and fewer people in poorly paid jobs; uncontrolled and uncoordinated tourism development, with its slave-wage labour conditions; and a strategic military presence, staffed by "mainlanders", and carrying with it extensive environmenetal abuse.

Today, Hawaiians are a tiny percentage of the islands' population, a state under the American federal government. The Hawaiian language is all but obliterated. Like non-European native peoples around the world, Hawaiians have been shunted aside, abused and ignored.

American dominance is complete, though immigrants from Japan and the rest of the Pacific rim nations are changing Hawaiian society and demanding greater independence from mainland American control.

Modern Hawaiian society is profoundly multi-cultural and multi-racial. Hawaii has become one of the most progressive states in the American union. It's a model of diversity for an America riven and torn by ethnic, racial and social strife and almost completely dominated by white, "Christian", Anglo-Saxon American culture.

In recent years, there's been a revival of Polynesian and Hawaiian culture similar to the renaissance of native cultures in mainland North America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. Great international gatherings of polynesians have been held regularly for over a decade. They're passing on and rediscovering their ancestors' rich naval traditions, social skills and cultural heritage. A more enlightened non-Polynesian Hawaiian population is embracing this cultural reconstruction. Hawaiian traditions and native culture are taught to a generation of schoolchildren who no longer need to pay lip-service to farcical ideas of European cultural superiority.

The modern Hawaiian Independence movement is gaining a lot of strength and has significant public support. Visit the a web-site of the Hawai'ian Nation Independence Movement: