Concerned friend of Hawai'i

by Richard Swing
(Seattle, WA USA)

Thank you, Mahalo for allowing me to present my mana'o
First I would like to say that the issue about sovereignty is not about punishing haloes, maluhini or others in Hawai'i and freinds elsewhere My family and I have been to Hawai'i a few times and fell in love with its' people and culture. We also owned property on Kauai. I became interested in the sovereignty issue. I thought for once after reading parts of Dr Sai's excellent doctoral thesis on the history and "annexation" of a sovereign kingdom/nation that here is a people whose lands were not ceded but stolen, their culture not only abused but negleted and their very language made illegal to be spoken all in the name Chrisitanity and missionaries who were really businessmen in disguise after profits and land.

How could Dr. Conklin, basically a mouthpiece for the Caucasian elite, disrespect and present such patently false facts about the issue of sovereignty about which a fellow academician wrote? How could he be so unpro-
fessional as to call Dr. Sai's presentation of the true facts, not the popular image or even the spin put on the events by the U.S. government, a scam. He distorted every aspect from the number of native Hawaiians that died because of the introduction of diseases brought by the New Englanders and others to the fact that the King-
dom of Hawai'i was a sovereign nation recognized by other sovereign nations. The overthrow in 1893 was an illegal act recognized right away by President Cleveland, then, as being brought about by the forced, temporary abdication of Queen Liliokalani by the intervention of US troops Expresident Clinton apology, recently. My remarks are more in the nature of a synopsis rather than an exhaustive commentary. unfortunetly there are some people listening to Dr. Conklin.