It should come as no surprise to those of us with even a cursory understanding of the history of U.S. imperialism that the once sovereign Kingdom of Hawai’i became the very first state in the nation to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Hawai’i is an occupied nation, and has been since 1893 when the U.S. launched a coup to overthrow the sovereign rule of Queen Liliʻuokalani. We don’t need to dive that far back into historical memory to discover that even this imperialist overthrow was acknowledged by none other than then president Bill Clinton, who, in 1993 (on the centennial of the coup) issued an official apology to the Hawaiian Kingdom—an apology that notably did not include a return of the land to the people of this occupied island nation.

In fact, we only need to turn the dial of history back less than one year to the devastating wildfires that occurred in Maui in August of 2023 to understand the imperial and settler colonial legacies of U.S. intervention in Hawai’i — a legacy so potent that it even made it to the opinion pages of the New York Times, as Yarimar Bonilla put it,

Settler Colonialism and the Engineering of Historical Amnesia