Assignment 1

I would like to do something about Hawaii for assignment 1.  My topic will probably be that most people have a "single story" of what Hawaii is like.  They believe that Hawaii is just a place of paradise where everyone is happy.  There is never a cloudy day or a day that goes by where Hawaii's inhabitants don't go to the beach to surf.  The truth is that Hawaii has a deeply rooted history that extends further back in time than America's existence.  The "Natives" of Hawaii are said to have arrived from Tahiti.  With them, they brought their ideas and culture to make the new land (Hawaii) their own.  They dominated the people who were already living on Hawaii (who they referred to as "mana hune" or "small power"), and forced the original inhabitants into hiding.  From this, Hawaiian culture began to develop.  The new inhabitants of Hawaii developed the way of life that became common to Hawaiians.  This system worked until foreigners arrived in Hawaii and slowly began taking over.  The foreigners brought greed and diseases that wiped out the majority of the population in the islands.  The Hawaiians were educated in different ways from the foreigners, and they were tricked into selling their land.  Eventually the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown, and people became ashamed to be Hawaiian.  They scraped their skin with coral and washed themselves with bleach in attempt to rid themselves of their dark skin.  The language and culture was forgotten, forbidden even.  In the last 50 years, the Hawaiian culture is starting to make a resurgence.  However, we are not happy.  We are not simply living in paradise.  We are minorities in our own homeland, governed by people who are not from here.  There is much more to Hawaii than most people will ever know.