Washington Post columnist George F. Will's distasteful column on the Akaka Bill, published in the Star-Bulletin Friday, demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of Hawaiian history and insensitivity to the rights of native people in Hawaii and across the nation. It is disappointing and outrageous to compare the systematic atrocities of the Nazis against Jews to the efforts of our host culture to exercise control over their culture and their destiny.
Hawaiians, like our nation's other indigenous people, share a history as political entities, exercising governance on lands which later became the United States.
The U.S. government played a key role in this sad saga in 1893, when U.S. Minister to the Kingdom John Stevens formally supported Westerners seeking to overthrow Queen Liliuokalani by ordering armed U.S. troops to land in Honolulu and take up military positions at key government buildings to intimidate the queen. To avoid bloodshed, she agreed to step down temporarily, believing that the United States would restore her to the throne when it learned what had happened. And, in fact, after incoming President Grover Cleveland received a full accounting of the facts, he characterized the action of Minister Stevens and the U.S. troops as an "act of war" and called for restoration of the kingdom.
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