Economic Recovery – Hawaiian Style
This is an essay I wrote for a Native Insights contest on Economic Recovery. This essay was one of five winning essays and was chosen in the Native Hawaiian category. There was once enough for everyone. That was before Captain Cook “discovered” our Hawaiian islands on his way to find a northwest passage, before the missionaries came to save our heathen ancestors and before the American businessmen called in the U.S. Navy to protect their land investments. For centuries before western contact, the Hawaiian people flourished. There was no disease, no hunger, no homelessness, no economic recession. That was then. Today, we who call Hawaiʻi home are mostly mainstream Americans, often holding two or more jobs just to survive, and are dependent on the outside world for virtually everything, even bottled water. When Captain Cook arrived on our shores in 1778, the population size was somewhere between 400,000 and a million. [Read More...]