African Americans in Hawai'i (Images of America) - Softcover

Guttman, D. Molentia; Golden, Ernest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 073858116X ISBN 13: 9780738581163

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

During the early 1800s, about two dozen men of African descent lived in Hawai‘i. The most noteworthy was Anthony D. Allen, a businessman who had traveled around the world before making Hawai‘i his home and starting a family there in 1810. The 25th Black Infantry Regiment, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, arrived in Honolulu at the Schofield Barracks in 1913. They built an 18-mile trail to the summit of Mauna Loa, the world’s largest shield volcano, and constructed a cabin there for research scientists. After World War II, the black population of Hawai‘i increased dramatically as military families moved permanently to the island. Hawai‘i has a diverse population, and today about 35,000 residents, approximately three percent, claim African ancestry.

About this title

About the Author:

Author D. Molentia Guttman is married and has three children. She came to Hawai‘i in 1973 to work at the University of Hawai‘i as a grants administrator. Coauthor Ernest Golden came to Hawaii at age 19 in 1943 as a defense worker at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. He is married and has four children, seven grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. The African American Diversity Cultural Center Hawai‘i was founded in 1997 to preserve historical documentation about the black community’s contributions and impact in Hawai‘i's civic life, military, medicine, religion, and politics.

Review:

Title: Two New Books

Author: KARIN GALLAGHER

Publisher: HONOLULU MAGAZINE

Date: 3/1/2011
The first in a series of books on race and ethnicity in Hawaii planned by the University of Hawaii Press, Judy Rohrer’s Haoles in Hawaii engages in a scholarly, if not entirely objective, dissection of the uniquely Hawaiian concept of haole. Rohrer recounts two centuries’ worth of the term’s incarnations both as a noun (colonizers, missionaries, usurpers, capitalists, oligarchs, oppressors, conspirators), and an adjective (acting haole―or someone who’s “haolified”―suggests “acting superior,” “with hubris,” or “a certain set of attitudes and behaviors that are distinctly not local”).
Rohrer, a self-proclaimed “haole girl,” raised and educated in Hawaii, emphasizes the need to recognize the history that accompanies the term. “To understand haole, you really have to understand the colonization of Hawaii, because haole was forged in that history,” she explains. “[A] well-developed caution comes from 200 years of disease, dispossession, cultural appropriation, the banning of language and hula―all of that gets carried into the present. Haole is the name for that, which comes from the Hawaiian experience.”
A celebration of multiculturalism this book is not; any suggestion that Hawaii is a modern-day model of racial harmony is summarily rejected and quickly framed against the backdrop of divestiture and current inequities facing Native Hawaiians.
“The legacies of colonization are much bigger than we tend to acknowledge,” asserts Rohrer, who points to tourism, militarism and recent legal attacks on Native Hawaiian programs and entitlements as manifestations of this ongoing legacy. “We think of colonization as something in the past, but the reality is that it’s very much a part of our lives today in Hawaii. I’m hoping this book will allow for a conversation about what we can do individually and collectively to try to build a more just Hawaii.”
Images of America: African Americans in Hawaii (Arcadia Publishing), by D. Molentia Guttman and Ernest Golden, takes a visual approach to documenting the presence of African Americans in Hawaii, through the use of photographs with lengthy captions.
“Since the 1770s, the Islands have been home to people of African descent, who have made tremendous contributions to Hawaii for over two centuries,” says Guttman, who, in 1997, founded the African American Diversity Cultural Center Hawaii (aadcch.org), a nonprofit museum archiving 200 years of African American history in Hawaii.
Guttman and Golden identify the earliest African Americans in Hawaii as maritime laborers, arriving on merchant and whaling ships from the Cape Verde Islands, the Caribbean and the United States’ Atlantic seaboard―many from the latter escaping slavery to build new lives in the Islands. Today, the authors estimate about 35,000, or approximately 3 percent, of Hawaii residents claim African ancestry.
“We wanted to uncover this history,” says Guttman. “It’s there, it’s just not talked about. My job is to make it available to the public, make it a more visible history.”

About this edition

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 073858116X
• ISBN 13: 9780738581163
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128