1819, the Overthrow, and a Renaissance

The kapu system was ended by Hawaiians. In 1819, after Kamehameha I died, the regent Kaahumanu and the young king Liholiho broke the eating restriction in public, the temples were ordered destroyed, and the state religion was abolished. American Congregational missionaries arrived the following year into a religious vacuum that Hawaiians had made, which is a large part of why conversion proceeded as rapidly as it did.

What followed was demographic collapse from introduced disease, the transfer of land into private and foreign hands, and, in 1893, the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani by a group of American and European businessmen with support from United States forces, followed by annexation in 1898. The Hawaiian language was excluded from schools for most of the twentieth century.

The Hawaiian renaissance from the 1970s reversed a good deal of that. Hula was restored as a religious and historical practice rather than an entertainment, the language was brought back through immersion schooling, and the voyaging canoe Hokulea sailed to Tahiti in 1976. Religious claims followed: the protection of burials, the return of ancestral remains and of objects, and the dispute over the summit of Mauna Kea, where the state established a new stewardship authority in 2022 after protests over telescope construction. Sam Low's account of the voyaging revival records how closely all of it is connected.