Return to Kahiki: Native Hawaiians in Oceania

Abstract

There have been few Native Hawaiians among the historians who have defined Hawaii’s history from the decades between the indigenous kingdom of the mid-nineteenth century to the islands’ incorporation as a U.S. territory at the century’s end. This makes doubly welcome the appearance of Native Hawaiian Kealani Cook’s book, Return to Kahiki, which offers a fresh and challenging interpretation of this crucial period. Most nonnative historians have evinced sympathy toward Native Hawaiians— Cook uses the term kanaka Hawaii— whose lives from the late eighteenth century underwent abrupt change with the advent of American and European outsiders, but these historians tended to normalize, if not justif..