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This book tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the “yellow peril” to “model minorities”—peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values—in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As the book shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, the book provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. It highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. It also demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaiʻi statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, the book reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawaiʻi's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawaiʻi that few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawaiʻi. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. This book uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the SFF. The book supplies an analysis of how the carefully crafted staging of Hawaiʻi's cultural diversity was used to serve a national narrative of utopian multiculturalism while empowering Hawaiʻi's traditional artists and providing a model for cultural tourism that has had long-lasting effects. The book positions the 1989 Hawaiʻi program within a history of institutional intervention in the traditional arts of the island's ethnic groups as well as in relation to local cultural revivals and the tourist industry. By tracing the planning, fieldwork, site design, performance, and aftermath stages of the program, the book examines the uneven processes through which local culture is transformed into national culture and raises questions about the stakes involved in cultural tourism for both culture bearers and culture brokers.

A lively, rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belonging, this natural history takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the Hawaiian Islands' beautiful birds and a variety of topics including extinction, evolution, survival, conservationists and their work, and, most significantly, the concept of belonging. The text is built around the stories of four species: the Stumbling Moa-Nalo, the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, the Palila, and the Japanese White-Eye. The book offers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native, the book argues, is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, short-term evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms. This book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawaiʻi, and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work.

This book discusses both the historical and contemporary experiences of Hawaiʻ's Japanese Americans and interprets these experiences from racial and ethnic perspectives. The transition from race to ethnicity is demonstrated in the transformation of Japanese Americans from a highly racialized minority of immigrant laborers to one of the most politically and socioeconomically powerful ethnic groups in the islands. The book has produced a racial history of Japanese Americans from their early struggles against oppressive working and living conditions on the sugar plantations to labor organizing and the rise to power of the Democratic Party following World War II. It goes on to analyze how Japanese Americans have maintained their political power into the twenty-first century and considers the recent advocacy and activism of individual yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) working on behalf of ethnic communities other than their own. The book's analysis elucidates the differential functioning of race and ethnicity over time insofar as race worked against Japanese Americans and other non-Haoles (Whites) by restricting them from full and equal participation in society, but by the 1970s ethnicity would work fully in their favor as they gained greater political and economic power. The book reminds that ethnicity has continued to work against Native Hawaiians, Filipino Americans, and other minorities—although not to the same extent as race previously—and thus is responsible for maintaining ethnic inequality in Hawaiʻi.

Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, this book delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawaiʻi have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity. In particular, the book speaks to the processes of identity making and the politics of representation among immigrant communities striving to resist marginalization in a globalized, transnational era. Critiquing the popular image of Hawaiʻi as a postracial paradise, the book reveals how Filipino immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) where they've settled, and how these discourses shape their identities. It also shows how struggles for community empowerment and identity territorialization continue to affect how minority groups construct the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves and others. The book follows the struggles of contemporary Filipino immigrants to build community, where they enact a politics of incorporation built on race, ethnicity, class, culture, and language. It focuses on two sites of building and representation, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu.

This book explores the development of Hawaiʻi as a model for liberal multiculturalism and a tool of American global power in the era of decolonization. The establishment of Hawaiʻi statehood in 1959 was a watershed moment, not only in the ways Americans defined their nation's role on the international stage but also in the ways they understood the problems of social difference at home. Hawaiʻi's remarkable transition from territory to state heralded the emergence of postwar multiculturalism, which was a response both to independence movements abroad and to the limits of civil rights in the United States. Once a racially problematic overseas colony, by the 1960s, Hawaiʻi had come to symbolize John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. This was a more inclusive idea of who counted as American at home and what areas of the world were considered to be within the U.S. sphere of influence. Statehood advocates argued that Hawaiʻi and its majority Asian population could serve as a bridge to Cold War Asia—and as a global showcase of American democracy and racial harmony. In the aftermath of statehood, business leaders and policymakers worked to institutionalize and sell this ideal by capitalizing on Hawaiʻi's diversity. Asian Americans in Hawaiʻi never lost a perceived connection to Asia. Instead, their ethnic difference became a marketable resource to help other Americans navigate a decolonizing world. As excitement over statehood dimmed, the utopian vision of Hawaiʻi fell apart, revealing how racial inequality and U.S. imperialism continued to shape the fiftieth state—and igniting a backlash against the islands' white-dominated institutions.

Although little remains of Hawaiʻi's plantation economy, the sugar industry's past dominance has created the Hawaiʻi we see today. Many of the most pressing and controversial issues—urban and resort development, water rights, expansion of suburbs into agriculturally rich lands, pollution from herbicides, invasive species in native forests, an unsustainable economy—can be tied to Hawaiʻi's industrial sugar history. This book unravels the tangled relationship between the sugar industry and Hawaiʻi's cultural and natural landscapes. It is the first work to fully examine the complex tapestry of socioeconomic, political, and environmental forces that shaped sugar's role in Hawaiʻi. While early Polynesian and European influences on island ecosystems started the process of biological change, plantation agriculture, with its voracious need for land and water, profoundly altered Hawaiʻi's landscape. The book focuses on the rise of industrial and political power among the sugar planter elite and its political–ecological consequences. It opens in the 1840s when the Hawaiian Islands were under the influence of American missionaries. Changes in property rights and the move toward Western governance, along with the demands of a growing industrial economy, pressed upon the new Hawaiian nation and its forests and water resources. Subsequent chapters trace island ecosystems, plantation communities, and natural resource policies through time—by the 1930s, the sugar economy engulfed both human and environmental landscapes. The book argues that sugar manufacture has not only significantly transformed Hawaiʻi but its legacy provides lessons for future outcomes.

In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men left Hawaiʻi to work on ships at sea and in nā ʻāina ʻē (foreign lands). Beyond Hawaiʻi tells the story of these forgotten indigenous migrant workers and their experiences of global capitalism. Each chapter tells a unique narrative of a different Pacific Ocean industry and those Hawaiian workers who traveled and toiled there: from sandalwood harvesting to whaling to guano mining to gold mining—in Hawaiʻi, California, the Arctic Ocean, China, and beyond. Using the writings of the workers themselves, published in nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers, Beyond Hawaiʻi argues that Native Hawaiian migrant workers and the global capitalist economy they served are essential to understanding how the world’s greatest ocean became a “Hawaiian Pacific World”—the world that Hawaiian labor made.

In the early 1900s, workers from new U.S. colonies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico held unusual legal status. Denied citizenship, they nonetheless had the right to move freely in and out of U.S. jurisdiction. As a result, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans could seek jobs in the United States and its territories despite the anti-immigration policies in place at the time. This book takes an in-depth look at how the two groups fared in a third new colony, Hawaiʻi. Using plantation documents, missionary records, government documents, and oral histories, the book analyzes how the labor migrants interacted with Hawaiian government structures and businesses, how U.S. policies for colonial workers differed from those for citizens or foreigners, and how policies aided corporate and imperial interests. As the book shows, the workers' advantages came with significant drawbacks. Unlike foreign nationals, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans lacked access to consular and other officials with the power to intercede on labor and other issues. Instead, workers often had to rely on unofficial community mediators who also served employers in positions of authority. A rare tandem study of two groups at work on foreign soil, the book offers a new perspective on U.S. imperialism and labor issues of the era.

Hawaiʻi is a rare and special place, in which beauty and isolation combine to form a vision of paradise. That isolation, though, comes at a price: resources in modern-day Hawaiʻi are strained and expensive, and current economic models dictate that the Hawaiian Islands are reliant upon imported food, fuels, and other materials. Yet the islands supported a historic Hawaiian population of a million people or more. This was possible because Hawaiians, prior to European contact, had learned the ecological limits of their islands and how to live sustainably within them. Today, Hawaiʻi is experiencing a surge of new strategies that make living in the islands more ecologically, economically, and socially resilient. A vibrant native agriculture movement helps feed Hawaiians with traditional foods, and employs local farmers using traditional methods; efforts at green homebuilding help provide healthy, comfortable housing that exists in better harmony with the environment; efforts to recycle wastewater help reduce stress on fragile freshwater resources; school gardens help feed families and reconnect them with local food and farming. At the same time, many of the people who have developed these strategies find that their processes reflect, and in some cases draw from, the lessons learned by Hawaiians over thousands of years. This collection of case studies is a road map to help other isolated communities, island and mainland, navigate their own paths to sustainability, and establishes Hawaiʻi as a model from which other communities can draw inspiration, practical advice, and hope for the future.

In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship because they were not “white,” dismissing the plaintiff's appeal to skin tone. Unable to claim whiteness through naturalization laws, Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi developed their own racial currency to secure a prominent place in the Island's postwar social hierarchy. This book explores how different groups within Japanese American society staked a claim to whiteness on the basis of hue and culture. It demonstrates how the meaning of whiteness evolved from mere physical distinctions to cultural markers of difference, increasingly articulated in material terms. Nisei consumer culture demands examination because consumption was vital to the privilege-making process that spilled over into public life. The book builds on recent scholarship that considers ethnic communities within a trans-Pacific context, highlighting ethnic fluidity as a strategy for material and cultural success. Yet even as it assumed a position of conformity, the Japanese American consumer culture that took hold among Honolulu's middle class was distinct. It was at once modern and nostalgic, like the wayo secchu ideal—a hybrid of Western and Japanese notions of beauty and femininity that linked the ethnic group to the homeland and mainstream U.S. culture. By focusing on the marketing of whiteness that connected the old world and new, the book reveals the dynamic commercial and cultural environment that underwrote the rise of the Nisei in Hawaiʻi.

Land use in Hawaiʻi remains the most regulated of all the fifty states. According to many sources, the process of going from raw land to the completion of a project may well average ten years given that 95 percent of raw land is initially classified by the State Land Use Commission as either conservation or agriculture. How did this happen and to what end? Will it continue? What laws and regulations control the use of land? Is the use of land in Hawaiʻi a right or a privilege? These questions and others are addressed in this second edition of this book, which will guide readers through the many layers of laws, plans, and regulations that often determine how land is used in Hawaiʻi. It provides the tools to analyze an enormously complex process, one that frustrates public and private sectors alike, and will serve as an essential reference for students, planners, regulators, lawyers, land use professionals, environmental and cultural organizations, and others involved with land use and planning.

This book attempts to recover Hawaiian voices at a significant moment in Hawaiʻi's history. It takes an unprecedented look at the Hansen's disease outbreak (1865–1900) almost exclusively from the perspective of “patients,” ninety percent of whom were Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). The book tells the story of a disease, a society's reaction to it, and the consequences of the experience for Hawaiʻi and its people. Over a span of thirty-four years more than five thousand people were sent to a leprosy settlement on the remote peninsula in north Molokaʻi traditionally known as Makanalua. Their story has seldom been told despite the hundreds of letters they wrote to families, friends, and the Board of Health, as well as to Hawaiian-language newspapers, detailing their concerns at the settlement as they struggled to retain their humanity in the face of maʻi lepera. Many remained politically active and, at times, defiant, resisting authority and challenging policies. As much as they suffered, the Kānaka Maoli of Makanalua established new bonds and cared for one another in ways that have been largely overlooked in popular histories describing leprosy in Hawaiʻi. The book, although primarily a social history of disease and medicine, offers compelling evidence of how leprosy and its treatment altered Hawaiian perceptions and identities. It changed how Kānaka Maoli viewed themselves: By the end of the nineteenth century, the “diseased” had become a cultural “other” to the healthy Hawaiian. Moreover, it reinforced colonial ideology and furthered the use of both biomedical practices and disease as tools of colonization.

Over the last forty years, surfing has emerged from its Pacific islands origins to become a global industry. Since its beginnings, surfing's icon has been the surfboard. To a surfer, a board is more than a piece of equipment; it is a symbol, a physical emblem of cultural, social, and emotional meanings. Based on research in Hawaiʻi, southern California, and southeastern Australia this book traces the surfboard from regional craft tradition to its key role in the billion-dollar surfing business. The surfboard workshops of Hawaiʻi, California, and Australia are much more than sites of surfboard manufacturing; they are hives of creativity where legacies of rich cultural heritage and the local environment combine to produce unique, bold board designs customized to suit prevailing waves. The globalization and corporatization of surfing have presented small, independent board makers with many challenges stemming from the wide availability of cheap, mass-produced boards and the influx of new surfers. The book follows the story of board makers who have survived these challenges and stayed true to their calling. In addition, it explores the heritage of the craft, the secrets of custom board production, the role of local geography in shaping board styles, and the survival of hand-crafting skills. From the olo boards of ancient Hawaiian kahuna to the high-tech designs that represent the current state of the industry, the book offers an entrée into the world of surfboard making.