“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”
–attributed to both Bishop Desmond Tutu and, before him, the president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta

By Phill Courtney
In August of 1966, during the first of my teen years, my father took our family, including his parents (which was my grandfather’s first plane trip), to Hawaii for a regional convention of his service club, Kiwanis. Dad had some history with the islands, having been stationed at Pearl Harbor during his service with the navy, dodging the December 7th, 1941, bombing by mere chance after his ship had left for the San Francisco Bay just a few days before.
Besides the Kiwanis convention in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, our stay also included tours of several other Hawaiian Islands including Kauai; Maui; and what’s called “The Big Island” of Hawaii to distinguish it from the rest of the state itself. Among the many spots we visited were “The Big Island’s” smoking volcanoes (which triggered an attack of my little brother’s asthma), as well as the beach where the European “discoverer” of Hawaii, British Captain James Cook, was clubbed and stabbed to death during his second visit in 1779 while battling some Hawaiians who’d apparently decided that his second visit was one too many.
Although Hawaii had become the fiftieth U.S. state seven years before, to me our trip to these faraway islands seemed like a trip to another country, where I (admittedly with more than my share of youthful naivety) expected to find the proverbial grass huts; pure-blooded Hawaiians; and bare-breasted native girls doing that alluring hula dancing, that is when they weren’t bathing au natural in the ocean. (Hey, what can I say? As I’ve mentioned, I’d just become a teenager.)
Of course, it hardly needs to be said, but I will, that this was not what I found. Although we saw many natural wonders, including Kauai’s Fern Grotto on the shore of Hawaii’s only navigable river there, and what was said to be the rainiest spot on Earth, I was instead hugely disappointed to see just more of what I’ve always found disgusting about what’s known in Hawaii as “the mainland”: trafficked roads everywhere; fast food joints; strip malls; and high rise hotels with chlorinated swimming pools just a few feet from the biggest swimming pool in the world: the Pacific Ocean.
After we’d attended yet another staged luau feast and more hula lessons taught by Hawaiians hired by the hotels, I realized that what had happened to Hawaii’s original culture is what happened to our North American Native American landscape and many other indigenous cultures throughout the world as well: it had been steamrolled by the dominate descendants of Europeans, who had smothered the original culture with their own, replacing it with phony facsimiles in order to please the tourists wearing cameras around their necks and colorful Hawaiian shirts.
At some point, as I recall, I ran this view of Hawaii by my Republican father, who’d almost been bombed at Pearl Harbor; invariably supported our cold war U.S. foreign policies; and was (despite its being conducted by a Democrat president) vigorously backing the war in Vietnan while given to immediately bristling whenever he heard the term “American imperialism.” After listening briefly to my misgivings, he was silent for a moment, and then basically said: I’ve heard enough. Now just eat your pineapple.
Since 1966, I’ve returned to Hawaii three more times; once in 1992 with a former girlfriend and her family, paid for by her father just before she and I would decide to go our separate ways because of my unwillingness to take on the project of starting a family; and then again in 2007 on a honeymoon with the woman who’d eventually become my wife after several attempts to find one who didn’t want children—or human ones anyway.
During that trip we’d visited a friend on “The Big Island,” camping on some raw land she’d purchased north of Hilo on the east and rainy side, and also spent several days on Molokai, “The Friendly Island,” one of the least visited of the main, “touristy” islands, known for its leper colony, which in the 1800’s had been overseen by the Dutch priest, Father Damian: one of my wife’s personal heroes.
The fourth time was on a 2016 journey by cruise ship (still my only one) rather than by air, with stops in Maui and Kauai, where, as I had in 1966, took a trip up that navigable river to the Fern Gratto, this time with my wife, where I was disappointed to discover you could now not enter because of unstable rocks.
We also saw in the distance (as I had in 1966) Niihau, which, at 69 and-a-half square miles, is the seventh smallest of the eight main islands and lies 17 miles across the channel separating it from Kauai. Niihau is called Hawaii’s “Forbidden Island” because it’s privately owned, and the owners restrict tourists to half-day helicopter flights, with no contacts permitted with the small population there who are the only Hawaiians left still speaking Hawaiian as their first language.
I’ve always been fascinated by tiny countries (earlier that year, while on a European tour with the girlfriend with whom I’d visited Hawaii in 1992, we’d visited three) as well as tiny islands such as Niihau, whose status as the second smallest of the main islands is only surpassed by Kahoolawe, near Maui, at some 44.7 square miles.
Kahoolawe lies in an adjacent island’s rain shadow, in this case Maui’s, and is therefore usually dry; sparsely populated by Hawaiians in the past; and now uninhabited, having been used by the U.S. military as a bomb site for many years—hence its moniker: The Target Island.
That practice was finally halted in 1990, after a time when our military thought that target training was far more important than preserving irreplaceable cultural sites, many of which were destroyed. Work continues today by archeologists and native Hawaiians (basically the only ones permitted there now), who are determined to archive what’s left and return, as much as they can, the fauna, flora, and the land itself to what was there before the bombing.
We’d flown over Kahoolawe in 1966 while bombing was still going on, and I’d caught a glimpse of the bullseye targets laid out on the island with oil drums, and wondered about that island’s history, as I did about Niihau’s of having been purchased in 1864 by a wealthy Scottish woman from New Zealand who’d given King Kamehameha V some $10,000 in gold (about $1.75 million today) after passing on an offer of property at Waikiki Beach, which, of course, would be far more valuable today than the entire island of Niihau.
As for Niihau’s status as “Forbidden:” Kamehameha had imposed some conditions before he’d sell to the woman, which included keeping the original Hawaiian culture intact, and restricting contact with outsiders; conditions she accepted and, as mentioned, have been continued to this day by her descendants, despite occasional grumblings about the family’s paternalistic patronizing of the “natives.”
In addition to the original conditions, among others, the owners have also put the kibosh on cigarettes and alcohol; motor vehicle transportation; running water; plumbing; and—no surprise here—high rise hotels and fast-food restaurants. Like Kahoolawe, Niihau is also in the rain shadow of an adjacent island, in its case Kauai, so droughts are a common occurrence, keeping the population minimal, with its current count the lowest yet.
So, with these short, background stories of Niihau and Kahoolawe, two of the Hawaiian Islands I’ve only seen from a distance, let’s move on to the third island I’ve never been to and only seen: the second smallest of the inhabited islands which has also been privately owned for many years: Lanai (also known as the “Pineapple Island,” which we’ll get to in a moment): the only one of the non-restricted islands I have not visited.
The story of Lanai is also intriguing, paralleling somewhat that of Niihau. Although many would like to think of the pre-European settlement of the islands as a time of peace; perpetual luaus and other “sensual” delights amid a land of abundant natural resources—a romanticization of indigenous cultures that I, too, occasionally embraced in my youth—it seems that the ancient settlers, whose time of arrival is still being debated, were also, of course, members of the same human family as well, given to, yes, much merry-making, but also many of the same drives for conquest; territorial acquisitions; warfare; and internecine rivalries.
Lanai itself may have been settled as late as the 15th century by Hawaiians from nearly islands, who first established fishing villages, then started cultivating crops in the interior and were mostly left alone by other Hawaiians until, that is, the first King Kamehameha started his violent campaign to unify the islands in the late 1700s.
These battles were often viciously brutal, with one on Maui leaving a bay filled with floating bodies, and another where the defending warriors from a rival king were forced off a cliff by the hundreds. Only Kauai and Niihau were spared such a fate when the king there saw the writing on the wall (and Kamehameha’s massive armada) and surrendered his control without a fight.
However, Lanai did not go that route, and the residents there apparently did put up a fight (which, of course, proved futile), and by 1792 were mostly killed off judging from explorer George Vancouver’s “sail by” that year after which he reported his decision not to land because he saw no villages.
After that period, sugarcane arrived on Lanai before the pineapples did when a man from China brought a simple stone mill to crush the cane setting up shop in 1802. Later, Mormons arrived in 1854, and by the 1870s, their leader, despite opposition from the mother church (and excommunication), had consolidated control of basically the entire island, where he ran cattle.
By 1899, the native population of Lanai had dwindled to some 200, a decline helped (or perhaps harmed is the better word) in no small part by the introduction of communicable diseases when the Europeans arrived, in the widespread and tragic story of indigenous populations with no resistance to those diseases—an effect always there and responsible (besides the violent conflicts, of course) for the basic human holocaust that happened in the New World.
For me the most disturbing scene in the 1966 movie Hawaii [released later in the year of my first visit], a fictional story set amidst the real story of the missionaries who’d arrived there in the 1800s to “convert the heathens” and spread the Gospel, based on the book by James Michener, and starring Julie Andrews as a missionary wife, depicted Hawaiians agonized by disease-born fevers, plunging into the ocean to cool themselves, only to die on the shore like sandflies—deaths unable to be prevented by the also agonized and sincere Christians who were appalled by an unexpected result of what they’d also spread: the diseases and what those had wrought.
(This century also began a period in which invasive species of animals and plants were introduced into the isolated Hawaiian ecosystem, devastating the native fauna and flora, many of which went extinct—a process that continues today.)
After the time covered by the movie, in the latter part of the 1800s various American landholders, seeing the continued existence of Hawaii as an independent nation under the control of a monarchy they found difficult to manipulate (insisting, for instance, that Hawaii should be for Hawaiians, along with other such troublesome ideas) and an impediment to their own rapacious desires for land, schemed to overthrow the current (and final) queen, which they did (bloodlessly) in 1893.
Then eventually, after a period as their own independent country (during which there was one armed rebellion by Hawaiians opposed to the imposed American republic which was quickly snuffed out with no deaths but six hangings for, ironically, treason), the Americans urged and eventually succeeded in persuading Washington D.C. to add Hawaii to the list of Americn territories, despite the repeated protests of native Hawaiians.
Steven Kinzer, in his book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, describes this sad saga as the first in America’s quest for empire (despite repeated assertions that we have no such desires, as well as my father’s outright objections to that word), and while Democrat President Grover Cleveland, who was a friend of the queen and sympathized with the native Hawaiians’ grievances; forthrightly viewed the take-over as illegal and endeavored to back their claims, nevertheless under the subsequent Republican president William McKinley, in the midst of his own acquisitions of colonies taken from Spain after the Spanish/American War (which included Cuba and the Philippines), sided with the American rebels and sealed the territorial deal in 1898.
Meanwhile, by 1907, through a series of yet more American “wheeling and dealing” land buys, much of Lanai was under the ownership of one man and in 1921 the first pineapple plant took root. Then, with a clear vision of the plant’s promising future, James Dole, a name that would soon become almost synonymous with pineapples, swept in the following year; bought the island outright; and basically, turned it into one gigantic pineapple farm—the world’s largest, in fact—hence the island’s nickname.
When I visited Hawaii in 1966, the pineapple and sugarcane industries were still fairly healthy enterprises, and I remember our visit to one processing center where we tikes were given an opportunity to suck some cane sugar directly from the stalk, but, by 1992 (when Lanai’s operations ceased and I returned for my second visit that year), both sugarcane and pineapple farming had, in essence, been phased out by American corporations in favor of foreign sources.
By now the story is quite familiar. Both expensive land prices for areas more profitable when converted to golf courses and high-rise hotels, plus rising labor costs for people working in the United States who apparently expected a living wage and tolerable working conditions, inspired the off-shoring of both crops to places in third-world countries where disparate people are happy with whatever corporate crumbs they can get.
Before its current billionaire owner, Lanai had been purchased in 1987 from the Dole Food Company by another billionaire, David Murdock, who had once been homeless, but then began a series of shrewd real estate investments and corporate take-over downsizing, with many losing their jobs. Besides being a successful businessman, he was also a noted philanthropist and a champion of healthy, plant-based eating, once predicting that with his diet he should live to 125. Although he did miss that landmark (which would have placed him atop the list of the verifiably longest-lived men in history—other than Methuselah, of course) he did make it to an impressive 102.
However, before that century-long life had ended, he, in turn, had sold Lanai in 2012 to one of Donald Trump’s bosom, billionaire buddies: the current owner, Larry Ellison, who’s actually a centibillionaire—in other words someone with over $100 billion—who’d co-founded the Silicon Valley software company Oracle Corporation; made the news in 2025 with his successful take-over bid acquiring Paramount Studios; and was recently ranked briefly as the wealthiest person in the world. And while we’re on the topic of bosom buddies, he’s also tight with war criminal, Benjamin Netanyaho, who took a family vacation on Lanai in 2021.
Today, Ellison (who, in a fascinating footnote, like Lanai’s previous owner, David Murdock, has been married six times) is considered by some as Lanai’s new king, but unlike Kamehameha, took over the island with money not military mayhem. However, there are other similarities between the these two “kingdoms,” where most of Lanai’s residents (who only own some two percent of the land), are still, as in Hawaii’s past, basically in a caste system of unlanded serfs at the beck and call of Ellison who now literally looks down on them from his multi-million-dollar castle there after moving to his “kingdom” in December of 2020.
Ellison’s also taken heat for not following through on some of the sweeping promises he’d made to the residents shortly after his purchase—such promises as turning Lanai into a model of sustainable living; cutting-edge, technological methods to transform farming; and other visions of a new future, from which all, according to the latest reports, he’s since backed away from and have not “panned out.”
Perhaps his million-dollar yachts; race cars; and jet airplanes (none of which, some have said, an ecologist should be interested in—with the possible exception of the yachts); along with other hobbies like art collecting (and, apparently, wives), which include four Van Gogh paintings, have diverted his attention.
So, from here we can see the big picture alluded to in the opening epigraph of this column when white men arrived in the lands of dark skinned people who had the land, while they had the Bible (or, in Ellison’s case, the Torah) and now the exact opposite is true, with perhaps Hawaii being a textbook example. Two of their islands are now owned by white men, where indigenous Hawaiians (when you can find them) are basically landless in their own land. It’s been estimated that by 2015 some 95 percent of Hawaii was owned by just 82 landholders.
Yes, let’s recognize that the arrival of the European explorers (exploiters?), followed by the missionaries; and then the take-over by American investors, did result in some beneficial outcomes, like the end of incest and infanticide, along with Hawaii’s own version of the caste system under the oppressive rule of kings and queens; and, of course, the introduction of western progress like modern medicine. But to see Hawaiians now living in makeshift shelters in front of some of the most expensive real estate in the world (as my wife and I did during our two trips) is heartbreaking.
In 1993, one hundred years after the coup, president Bill Clinton signed an Apology Resolution, which recognizes the blatant illegality of the queen’s overthrow and the obvious fact that the Hawaiians had never acknowledged the take-over claims, nor relinquished their land to the American rebels; a fact that has continued to fuel the long-standing sovereignty movement which has called for Hawaiians to demand independence from the U.S.—a demand I’ve frankly supported since I first visited Hawaii in 1966.
It would have been interesting to see what the Hawaiians would have done with their islands if they’d remained their own nation. Perhaps they would have compromised much of it too, with those high rise hotels and fast food drive-throughs (and let’s remember that King Kamehameha V “sold out” the people on Niihau for his own “thirty pieces of silver”—or, in his case, bars of gold), but I’d like to think that they might possibly have resisted much of the corporate corruption that basically wrestled Hawaii away from Hawaiians, and we would not have what we have now: a place where many native Hawaiians can’t afford to live.
But let’s not for a moment forget that what happened in Hawaii is basically a microcosm for what’s happened in the world as a whole, where a few billionaires, like Larry Ellsion, now, in effect, own the world, while billions own basically none of it.
In 1778, after the Hawaiians first greeted Caption Cook and his crew with garlands of flowers; banquets galore; and I’m sure, other sensuous delights, they were wise enough to quickly realize that the greed of the European explorers knew no bounds, so when Cook came back a second time, they said in effect: Once was enough. Now you can all go home. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and rest, as they say, is the history of Hawaii.
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Phill Courtney has been a high school English teacher, and twice a candidate for Congress with the Green party. His email is: pjcourtney1311@gmail.com