Militarizing Hawaiʻi: The Dreadful “Protection” of the United States

Among the friends and comrades who were invited to the June 2024 visit in Denendeh, when the idea of this issue emerged, was Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. The following text is written by her father, Hawaiian language and knowledge scholar Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio. In it, he describes the US invasion and subsequent militarization of Hawaiʻi, the role the kingdom was forced to play during the Pacific War, as well as the interconnectedness produced by US imperialism.

In the Fall of 1965, I was a first year cadet at the Kamehameha Schools, a military institute on Oʻahu. For those cadets and women who boarded at Kamehameha, attendance at Sunday chapel was mandatory. There was a new associate chaplain who had just joined the Schools that fall and, on the second or third Sunday, he preached his first sermon. He acknowledged that Kamehameha was preparing young men for military service among other possible futures and then honed in on the biblical commandment that forbids killing. Instead of the usual justifications for killing that most of us had heard in churches before, that sometimes it was necessary to protect one’s country, one’s family, one’s own life, Reverend Alan Cole said that there was no justification for the taking of life, certainly not in reprisal and not even for self-protection. He insisted that an unwillingness to kill might make one’s life more insecure, but that was an essential part of being a Christian. He professed our faith required that we depend on God to uphold and save us and not our ability to do or threaten violence.

At 14, I thought that was an odd message from a military school chaplain. Reverend Cole was dismissed over the next two weeks and I never saw or heard from him again. But three years later, I composed an oration for a speech contest at Kamehameha called “The Mushroom Grows,” which detailed the threat of nuclear war and the tragedy that this threat had grown from the terrible decision made by the US government to use atomic weapons against Japan. By then, the growing likelihood of being drafted for the US war in Vietnam was always in my mind and those of so many of my classmates. I saw then as I do today that investment in military power is far less protection than provocation, and that the costs of that investment are the wasted lives even of those who survive.

Historical memories work in strange and oppositional ways. They can inspire us to challenge the society around us, but they often work to dull the disappointment and despair caused by the essential oppressive nature of empire. Such is the case of US militarism in Hawaiʻi. There is no one alive today who remembers the moment of the US takeover of our country. But for Hawaiians, that moment is a singular gouging of our own genealogical understanding of ourselves. Before the American occupation at the close of the 19th century we were our own people with an educated and intimate knowledge of our millennia long history, and a proud nation state governed under a modern legal system that was, to the day that the Queen yielded to US aggression, very much the vehicle of our sovereignty and well-being.