Hawaiian customary rights

The native Hawaiians

Polynesians originally came to Hawaii during the eighth century AD, bringing Polynesian culture that included agricultural practices and domestic animals. Beginning with Captain Cook in 1778, numerous European explorers brought European artifacts – as well as diseases to which the Hawaiians had no immunity. Missionaries followed and began to convert the people to Christianity and to try to eliminate some aspects of Polynesian culture that they believed to be immoral.

Meanwhile, there had been a great deal of infighting among various groups of Polynesians on the various islands, which largely ended with the accession of Kamehaha I as the acknowledged King of the Hawaiian Islands. Mercantile interests from Europe and the United States began to use Hawaii as a trading base and vied with each other for control of the islands and domination of the local Polynesian culture and politics. Eventually, American interests persuaded the Hawaiian monarchy to cede control of the political structure of the islands to the United States, which annexed Hawaii as a territory.

The Polynesian economy, which had been based on small-scale agriculture and hunting and gathering, was replaced by plantation agriculture with sugar and pineapple as the dominant crops, and by international trade and military activity. Waves of immigrants from various Asian countries, other Pacific islands and the United States came to fill the jobs created in this economic expansion, bringing with them elements of their own cultures that blended with the earlier Polynesian and European elements into a uniquely Hawaiian culture.