Week 2 Discussion

I’d like to start out by saying how glad I am that we’re giving Native Hawaiians any thought at all. In all of my years within the US education system, I can count the amount of times we’ve included the perspectives of Indigenous peoples on one hand. So I’m extremely glad that we’re highlighting the terrible hand that Native Hawaiians were dealt by settler colonialism. Moving on from that, I’ve always found the concept of settler colonialism very interesting. From my previous understanding of US history, settler colonialism is a very common way for the US to annex territory. It was settler colonialism that inspired the US to intervene between US settlers and the British in the PNW, and it was the same deal in Texas, the American West, and Hawai’i. Looking at Hawai’i as an event of multiple cases of settler colonialism from competing nations really opens my eyes to the importance that the Pacific Theater played in the United State’s goal to “manifest destiny”. To me it seems similar to Europes “scramble for Africa” in which the ruling European powers of the time, now armed with the anti malarial properties of quinine, rushed to colonize vast swaths of the African continent. I think it was this new “popularity” of imperialism that inspired both America and Japan to look towards the Pacific Islands as their next colonial interests. Sharing imperial sensibilities, both nations took off to conquer as much of the pacific as they could, with the United States taking a rather oxymoronic stance in places like the Philippines where they claimed to be “liberating” the country by taking control from the Spanish. In reality, the island chain was just swapping hands, from one imperial power to the other. I find China’s, position in all of this very interesting. With the number of conflicts already plaguing the ever growing nation, colonization wasn’t a top priority. But even still the sheer number of refuges fleeing from conflicts like the Taiping Rebellion created a force large enough to constitute its own colonization efforts. It’s within these Chinese refuges that I see the strongest cases of settler colonialism. I think I view it this way because of the anecdote about members of the Hakka ethnic group referring to themselves as Chinese once in places like Hawai’i. It was almost definitely a side effect of white supremacy clumping all of the hundreds of Chinese ethnic groups into a singular Chinese monolith, but nonetheless I think it had extreme influence on the idea that if the US didn’t annex Hawai’i, China or Japan soon would. The idea of a nation, China, rather than the idea of a single ethnic group, the Hakka, settling in Hawai’i was much more terrifying.