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The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani's Enduring Battle with the United States 1893-1917

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"The Rights of My People" follows the campaign waged by Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani to regain sovereignty of her island nation after the coup d'état that deposed her in 1893 placed Hawaii under the rule of a Provisional Government that pursued annexation to the United States. Neil Thomas Proto is a lawyer and adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute who wrote the bill that transferred Kahoolawe Island from US ownership back to Hawaii in 1993. Accordingly, his approach to Liliuokalani's struggles with the United States includes legal analysis and blow-by-blow accounts of congressional hearings and courtroom battles. This is not to the neglect of Liliuokalani's character, however, whose intelligence, principles, and grace are in evidence throughout her 17-year battle.

There were two battles, so this book has two parts. The first was Liliuokalani's attempt to prevent the US annexation of Hawaii by asserting her government's legal right. The Queen had yielded to the superior forces of the1893 coup in order to avoid bloodshed and had been running a sort of parallel government ever since, supported by many native Hawaiians. She appealed to Congressmen and to Presidents Harrison and Cleveland to restore the rightful government of Hawaii. After the Spanish-American War hastened annexation of Hawaii, Liliuokalani pursued remuneration for the Crown lands, which belonged to the Hawaiian monarch and had been taken by the Provisional and then republican governments to be exploited commercially, depriving Liliuokalani of income.

Proto places Liliuokalani's struggle in the context of Christian missionary goals and material interests in Hawaii, the comparative prominence of female political leadership in Hawaii, and racial prejudice intensified by the end of Reconstruction and Asian immigration in the United States. The profit from commercial interests, especially sugar farming, in Hawaii and the conviction that Hawaiians were insufficiently civilized to govern themselves were ever-present obstacles. Nevertheless, Liliuokalani seemed to suffer from allies with inadequate resolve as much as from her enemies. More than one US President, many Senators, and Congressional investigators supported her claims. She was a shrewd spokeswoman, capable of winning the propaganda war in Hawaii and the US. Yet Liliuokalani was overcome by greater political and economic forces.

Liliuokalani's fight seemed to be as much for acknowledgement of an illegal and immoral action against her people as for sovereignty or compensation. Neil Thomas Proto's account of it is well-researched and meticulously presented, though it is dense and a bit dry. Proto focuses so precisely on the persons and events relevant to Liliuokalani's protracted battle with the United States that it sometimes left me wondering about what was happening on the periphery. Queen Liliuokalani's husband was a Caucasian man named John Owen Dominis, for example, and I kept wondering what he was doing all this time and where other Caucasians who had close relationships with Hawaiians stood. But erring in the direction of narrow focus is far better than enlarging a book with filler, so I can't complain too much.

The more American history I read, the more I find myself wishing the delegates at the Hartford Convention of 1814-15 had succeeded in their aims and New England had seceded from the rest of the country and gone its own way. Certainly the people of the remaining United States would have benefited from the change. Maybe that would have helped the native Hawaiians too who, as Winston Churchill might have put it, have suffered in every respect from their association, involuntary as it was, with what author Neil Thomas Proto aptly calls the long echo of seventeenth-century Massachusetts. "The Rights of My People" is an intensely depressing book in its catalog of all the ways religious authoritarianism, racism, mercantilism, and imperialism came together to undermine and overthrow the government, denigrate and (almost) destroy the culture, and seize the land and resources of the native Hawaiians. It's an unattractive story with few heroes. But it's also educational and important for modern readers. Neil Thomas Proto does a fine job in telling it.

"The Rights of My People" is a thoroughly-researched book, especially as concerns the many questions of precedent involved in the legal battle over the former Hawaiian Crown Lands (the "enduring battle with the United States" described in the subtitle is primarily a political and legal battle, though with significant cultural elements as well). The depth of that research is the most notable thing about Proto's work -- that and the skill with which he makes a complex and meandering legal story understandable to the lay reader. He also does a good job portraying the woman at the center of his story, Liliuokalani, deposed Queen of Hawaii. Overall, his prose is pretty good. But it changes sometimes. When he is summarizing history. Then his sentences get short. His style becomes choppy. Almost telegraphic. It's as if he is impatient. He wants to get back to legal questions. This sudden change is distracting. Also a little weird. The reader is relieved when we're past the rapids and the river flows more smoothly again.

Although "The Rights of My People" is a work of history, it's also profoundly relevant to issues of today. Most obvious, of course, is the light this shines on contemporary politics in Hawaii and the issues of importance to native Hawaiians -- issues partially acknowledged but still hardly resolved by the so-called "Apology Resolution" adopted by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1993. The contemporary comment that the post-overthrow government of Sanford Dole replicated in many ways the worst aspects of the monarchy, with all power concentrated in a few hands, reminded me of former governor George Ariyoshi's note in his memoirs With Obligation to All that "In Hawaii we have a tradition of highly centralized government that can be traced to Kamehameha's wars of conquest and the formation of the Hawaiian kingdom" -- in other words, that the worst aspects of the monarchy are still part of the state today. And certainly Proto's mentions of military tribunals as alternatives to court trials when the state is unsure of its evidence or uncertain of the outcome, or the passing reference to the prosecution of American soldiers for waterboarding rebels in the Philippines, were surely not for historical application only.

What the reader comes away with most strongly, though, is an understanding of that aforementioned combination of narrow religious authoritarianism, racism, and covetousness (imperial as well as economic), as well as the extent to which some people will go, then as now, to avoid ever admitting the United States could have made a mistake, let alone committed a crime. A lawyer as well as a historian, Proto is clearly arguing a point in this book, and I've no doubt some readers will react as strongly to his arguments as they have to other suggestions the US has anything to apologize for in its relations with the crown and people of Hawaii. Students of America's descent into empire will want to study these arguments closely. I think there are facts here worth knowing.