After Europeans first arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1778, the Native Hawaiian population collapsed from an estimated 300,000 to roughly 40,000 within a little over a century. That catastrophic decline was driven by introduced diseases, but disease was only the beginning. Over the following decades, Native Hawaiians lost control of their land, their language, their economy, and ultimately their government.
A Population Devastated by Disease
Native Hawaiians had no prior exposure to the pathogens that European and American sailors carried. Diseases that were survivable childhood illnesses in Western countries, like measles, killed up to a quarter of the entire population in a single outbreak, striking healthy young adults as hard as children and the elderly. Venereal disease, tuberculosis, and bacterial infections spread from ships’ crews into communities that had no immunity and no frame of reference for what was happening to them.
The speed of the die-off was staggering. By 1804, just 26 years after Captain James Cook’s arrival, an epidemic (likely a severe form of dysentery spread by ship crews) killed so many people that the living could not bury the dead. Estimates for that single outbreak range from 5,000 to 15,000 deaths. Smallpox later reached the islands as well, and its extraordinary lethality prompted quarantine efforts, though not before it had done significant damage. By 1819, the population had already dropped from 300,000 to roughly 144,000. By 1850 it was 84,165. By 1896, only about 40,000 Native Hawaiians remained.
Loss of Land Through the Great Mahele
Before European contact, land in Hawaiʻi was not privately owned. It was managed communally under a system where chiefs distributed access and commoners (makaʻāinana) worked the land for their families and communities. In 1848, under pressure from Western advisors and merchants, King Kamehameha III enacted the Great Mahele, a sweeping land division that introduced private property to the islands for the first time.
The results were devastating for ordinary Hawaiians. The transformation alienated roughly 70% of Native Hawaiians from the land, and commoners retained less than 1% of it. Many did not understand the new Western legal processes for filing land claims, and those who did often lacked the resources to survey and register their parcels in time. The privatization of land proved indispensable to the sugar plantation industry that was already expanding across the islands. White merchants and plantation owners, who understood Western property law, accumulated vast tracts. Within a generation, the people who had lived on and worked the land for centuries were largely dispossessed.
An Economy Remade for Profit
The economic transformation began even before the land division. When Kamehameha I monopolized the sandalwood trade in the early 1800s, ordering commoners into the hills to harvest it for export, he inadvertently shifted Hawaiʻi from a production-for-use economy to a production-for-profit one. Traditional skills like farming, fishing, canoe-building, and net-making gave way to wage labor and imported goods. By 1870, the Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau lamented that his people had become destitute, their clothing and provisions all imported, their traditional crafts abandoned.
Sugar plantations became the dominant economic force by the mid-1800s, and their owners needed cheap, controllable labor. Native Hawaiians largely resisted plantation work, preferring their traditional way of life. The plantation owners’ solution was to import contract laborers from abroad, starting with Chinese workers brought in on five-year contracts at $3.00 a month plus basic provisions. This pattern continued with Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino, and other immigrant groups, rapidly changing the demographic makeup of the islands. By 1890, non-Native residents outnumbered Native Hawaiians for the first time: about 49,000 non-Natives compared to roughly 40,000 Hawaiians. White merchants, or haole, grew wealthy while Hawaiians were increasingly marginalized in their own homeland.
The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom
On January 17, 1893, a group of American and European businessmen, backed by the landing of United States troops, overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani and the constitutional government of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The queen yielded not to the conspirators themselves, but to what she described as “the superior force of the United States of America,” whose minister in Honolulu, John L. Stevens, had ordered the troops ashore and declared he would support the new provisional government.
President Grover Cleveland investigated and called the overthrow “an act of war, committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without authority of Congress.” He described it as the toppling of a peaceful and friendly government. Despite this finding, the provisional government held power. It could not secure the two-thirds Senate majority needed to ratify an annexation treaty, but five years later, on August 12, 1898, Hawaiʻi was annexed as a U.S. territory through a joint resolution of Congress, bypassing the treaty process entirely. Native Hawaiians were never consulted.
Suppression of Language and Culture
Hawaiʻi had one of the most literate populations in the world before the overthrow. The Hawaiian Kingdom established Hawaiian-language schools as early as 1841, operating about 1,100 of them, including the first high school west of the Mississippi. The Native Hawaiian literacy rate exceeded 90%.
After the monarchy fell, the new provisional government banned Hawaiian-language education in 1896 and discouraged families from speaking Hawaiian at home. The effects were profound and cumulative. Over the following decades, generation after generation grew up without fluency in their own language. By 1985, only 32 children under 18 in all of Hawaiʻi (outside the isolated island of Niʻihau) could speak Hawaiian. The near-extinction of the language threatened to sever the connection between Native Hawaiians and centuries of accumulated knowledge, oral history, and cultural identity embedded in the language itself.
A Formal Apology, a Century Late
In 1993, one hundred years after the overthrow, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 103-150, known as the Apology Resolution. It acknowledged that the overthrow was illegal, that it was carried out with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States, and that it resulted in “the suppression of the inherent sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people.” Congress formally apologized to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow and for “the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.”
The resolution carried no enforcement mechanism or reparations. For many Native Hawaiians, it confirmed what they had always known but changed little about the material reality of their lives. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, approximately 680,000 people identify as Native Hawaiian alone or in combination with other ethnicities, and about 200,000 identify as Native Hawaiian alone. These numbers represent a recovery from the catastrophic lows of the late 1800s, but they exist within a context where Native Hawaiians still face disproportionate rates of homelessness, poverty, and health problems in their own homeland, and where the question of sovereignty remains unresolved.