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owners, with some Asian groups eventually emerging as economic and political
powers in present-day Hawaii (Espiritu 1992).
This historical narrative of the US-settler colonialism of Hawaii provides a
global context for understanding the early exodus of Asian laborers from their
ancestral homelands, making it clear that Asian settlers have a long and rich his-
tory in Hawaii. It is also clear that the experiences of these settlers are not only
different from those of the indigenous peoples whose land their labor has helped
to colonize, but also that their experiences differ significantly from one ethnic
group to the next. Drawing from Freire’s earlier quote, “being in this situation” has
marked these settlers in many ways, for example, by altering their languages,
sociocultural practices, and even their diet/health. In addition, the racial/ethnic
makeup of early Asian settlers has been marked by change over time as many of
the early male laborers married native Hawaiian women, as well as women laborers
of other races/ethnicities who have since given birth to three, four, and five genera-
tions of Hawaiians over the last 150 years. That about 21% of Hawaii’s population
identified themselves as multiracial on the 2000 Census, a figure nearly nine times
greater than reported in the rest of the USA (Okamura 2008), is indicative of the
complex, social and cultural diversity that exists in Hawaii today, much of it a
result of Asian settlers.
In addition to being marked by the situation of emigrating to this land, these
settlers also “marked the land” on which they toiled, first by clearing forests to
grow sugarcane, and later by building roads, airports, and hotels that have marked
the islands of Hawaii as a popular vacation place. Seen as “progress” from a colo-
nial lens, for the indigenous people of Hawaii, these developments have not only
resulted in a degradation of their homeland but also contributed to a physical/legal
loss of access to ancestral sites of great spiritual significance. In addition, they too
have suffered a loss of language, cultural practices, and sense of continuity of a way
of life as a result of the annexation of their lands and the colonization and destruc-
tion of the social fabric of their society. In the upcoming sections, I provide a wider
context for examining the current-day occupation of Hawaii by both the descendents
of the plantation owners and laborers, and the native peoples who are indigenous to
the islands.

Asian Settlers and Hawaii as a Shared (Contested) Place

Traditionally, settler historiography has tended to conceal the roles different people
have played (and continue to play) in the oppression of the colonized inhabitants of a
land, such as Native Americans on the US continental mainland, Aborigines of
Australia, and the indigenous peoples of Hawaii. Writing from the context of Hawaiian
scholarship on US colonialism, Fujikane (2008) asserts that settlers to Hawaii can-
not “insert themselves into a genealogy of the land,” no matter how long the history of
their oppression in Hawaii. Acknowledging that Native Hawaiians are genealogically