Stardate 20030718.1749

(Captain's log): Carl writes:

I live in Hawaii and have been here for just over 2 years now. I grew up on the east coast and spent 6 years in college. Upon arrival here I discovered that my knowledge of Hawaiian history, and the input that the US has had in it, was quite incomplete. People here hate me because I am white>must be related to Cook>or one of those responsible for the "stealing of our land"... It is frustrating to run into such ignorance regarding this issue. If we had not annexed the Islands then perhaps the Germans or Japanese would have simply overtaken them permanently. Hawaii is quite obviously a critical location for our military...even today.

What are your thoughts about the US annexation of Hawaii? Do you have a message for those who hate the US here (majority of local Islanders) as to why it was necessary AND why we are not evil for doing so?

I don't have any such message. I have a different one: It no longer matters.

In one way or another, all of the territory of the US was "annexed" without permission of those who originally lived there, even including the territory of the original 13 states.

The Louisiana Territory was sold to the US by France in 1803 without the formality of asking permission of the people living there, many of whom weren't even aware that they were considered French subjects. (Indeed, many of them had never even heard of France.) Alaska was purchased from Russia, though most of the Inuit and other tribes had no idea they were subjects of the Tsar.

The ownership by France and by Russia is mainly based on their decision to claim those territories because they were the first Europeans to decide to do so. It's ours because we saw it first. Their dubious claims were then transferred to the US in exchange for token payments.

The Louisiana Territory "belonged" to the French because no one else in Europe claimed it before the French did. But even the French claim, based on their "discovery", was extremely flimsy; they found the mouth of the Mississippi River, explored a few hundred miles up it, and then proceeded to claim the entire Mississippi watershed for France. They didn't even know the geographic extent of the claim, nor did they really care; the main point for them at the time was to get their claim established before anyone else in Europe did. So their right to sell the Louisiana Territory to us, or Russia's right to sell us Alaska, are open to considerable doubt since it's not clear that they owned what they sold us. (I guess it depends on what you mean by "own".)

Indeed, even by the standards of the Europeans, it's not at all clear Napoleon owned it to sell. The Louisiana Territory had been given to the Spanish in 1762, but since Napoleon had conquered Spain, he forced them to transfer title back to him, and then ended up selling it to President Jefferson. Napoleon didn't care about North America, but he did need money, and wasn't too worried about the niceties of how he went about getting it.

Ultimately possession is nine tenths of the law, and there comes a time when such questions are only of academic interest. If you have a dubious claim of ownership, but hold it for 200 years, your claim is no longer dubious. You do own it.

A small part of the Louisiana Purchase eventually became part of Canada, due to the treaty which established the border west of Minnesota at the 49th parallel, but the remainder is now firmly part of the US and there's no question that states formed out of it such as Iowa and South Dakota will remain part of the Union. Equally, whether Russia actually had any right to sell Alaska to the US in 1867, the territory eventually was recognized as being US territory and eventually became a state. No matter how we came by those areas, they're ours now.

The justification for claim of the Oregon Territory is perhaps even more flimsy; it became American territory partly because it was very slightly explored by Lewis and Clark, and partly because a lot of Americans ended up settling there, and never mind what the natives in the region thought of it. The land was rich, and "no one was using it". So trappers roamed the mountains looking for beaver and other pelts, and farmers moved to the Willamette valley (pronounced will-LAMM-ett) and started clearing the land to create farms, in what is one of the most fertile areas on Earth, with fantastic soil and reliable rain.

The Northwest tribes were never anything like as warlike as the Plains tribes, so there weren't the kind of wars with the Tillamook and Chinook as there had been with the Sioux and Crow. Not, mind, that they ultimately did any better out of the situation than the Sioux and Crow.

Was there any justification for the annexation of the Oregon Territory? It depends on your point of view, and what you're willing to accept as justification. There's certainly been a fair amount of debate about it in recent years, what with many attempting to prove that the United States was fundamentally evil and imperialistic and genocidal and racist based on its history, more or less in hopes of proving that the US is still evil-and-imperialistic-and-so-on and must therefore spend the rest of eternity apologizing and paying for its past sins, immobilized by guilt.

What is beyond dispute is that the annexation actually happened, and that Oregon and Washington and Idaho are now states. At the time, the only real political issue the Americans seriously paid attention to was the fact that the British (via their Canadian territory) laid some claim to most of the same area. That was ultimately settled by treaty, after a threat of war. But the Indians themselves were tucked away in reservations, most of which were placed on the most god-forsaken land in the region that no one else wanted. For instance, about three quarters of the Warm Springs reservation is desolate wasteland, which could be farmed extremely profitably except that there's no water with which to do it. There are rivers nearby, but all the water rights are owned by others. The remainder of the reservation is forested, and the tribes do a certain amount of logging on their land, but their main source of revenue is a resort (and associated casino) called Kahneeta. (Which, by the way, is extremely nice and well worth visiting, even if you're not wallowing in guilt.)

There were treaties involved in establishing those reservations, too, but the process by which those treaties were made was less than fair by our modern standards, with the tribes agreeing at the point of a gun. Many of the terms of those treaties (such as fishing rights) were ignored by the US until the Federal Courts started to enforce them. Some parts of those treaties are still being ignored.

Fair? Probably not. But that's what happened, nonetheless, and Oregon and Washington and Idaho are states and will remain states. No member of any of the NW Tribes seriously talks about secession or regaining their traditional lands, because they're not idiots. At a certain point, you have to accept reality. You can't turn back the clock. The United States is not going to remove the Dalles Dam and uncover Celilo Falls, so that the Indians can go back to using nets on poles to catch salmon migrating up the Columbia. They're not going to tear down Seattle and give it back to the tribes in its original pristine state. Washington and Oregon are States now, and they'll stay that way.

Once a territory becomes a state, that is permanent. Article IV of the Constitution grants Congress power to administer territories and describes the process by which new states can be added to the Union, but nothing in the Constitution describes a way by which they can leave again (not even the Tenth Amendment). States don't get to secede; we fought a civil war about that, and proved it. In order for secession of any state to take place legally, we'd have to ratify a Constitutional amendment to create a mechanism, and the chance of that is nil, in my opinion.

Hawaii took the irrevocable step of becoming a state in 1959. Until that point, independence was still legally possible. Now it isn't.

Puerto Rico is an American territory but not a state. For the moment its residents are treated as American citizens, though not totally. They travel on American passports, and they can travel freely or permanently emigrate to the rest of the US without a visa. Puerto Rico is a "commonwealth", which means it has a locally-elected governor and legislature, but the residents of Puerto Rico do not participate in Federal elections. They have a non-voting member of the House of Representatives and no membership at all in the Senate, and they're not permitted to vote for the President. They also pay no Federal taxes, but get a lot of economic aid from the US and are protected by our military. Their rights under the Constitution (e.g. free speech, free expression) are guaranteed by the US. By the standards of the Caribbean, they're extremely well off, and most of them know it. Certainly the residents of Puerto Rico are doing a lot better than Haitians and Cubans, to take two examples. (Not too many people take to boats to try to escape from Puerto Rico.)

Since Puerto Rico is not a state, it is still legally possible for it to become independent. That choice has been informally offered to its people a couple of times. If they actually wanted independence, it probably would happen. Some there do want independence, but most do not.

We granted independence to the Philippines. The United States captured the Philippines as one of the many territories seized in the Spanish-American War. Just as with all the other territories discussed here, it's not at all clear that the Spanish had clear title to the Philippines; their claim lay in military conquest. But the US seized it from Spain, and for a while we considered it ours.

Initially there was a revolt, and the US fought against separatists there, in a little-known but quite brutal suppression effort. But after the revolt was put down, there was eventually a mutual recognition that the Philippines should become independent, and in 1934 Congress passed a law which scheduled full independence for the Philippines in 1946, and granted them commonwealth status immediately. That happened long before Pearl Harbor, and the vast majority of the people of the Philippines treated the Japanese as invaders (and not as liberators) and fought hard against them during WWII. The majority of Filipinos believed that if the US defeated Japan that we'd honor that agreement, especially since it was not something forced out of the US by the situation in the Pacific (e.g. "Fight for us now, and we'll give you your freedom later"). So a lot of Filipinos died in the war in active guerrilla action against the Japanese. And after the war, once Japan had been defeated, the Philippines did become independent on July 4 1946, right on schedule.

What was required was an act of Congress, in this case the Tydings-McDuffie act. A similar act of Congress could grant Puerto Rico its independence. But Oregon cannot become independent that way, nor can Hawaii.

The process of annexation of Hawaii was not dissimilar to the way in which the US acquired the Oregon territory: it was there, and no one else had taken it yet. Except, of course, for the darker-skinned people already living there, who didn't count.

The Hawaiian natives had about as much choice in their annexation as the Chinook did. But that no longer matters. Oregon became a state in 1859, and it will remain a state as long as the United States continues to exist as a nation.

Hawaii became a state in 1959, exactly a hundred years after Oregon. Once Hawaii applied for statehood and it was granted, the question of independence was answered permanently (with the answer being "no"). Whether annexation of that territory in the 19th Century was "legal" or "justified" no longer matters.

Hawaii is a state, and Hawaii will remain a state.

The historical grievances of the Hawaiian natives has become a political issue in the state of Hawaii, or so I've heard, with the legislature there granting various kinds of compensation to natives, and with the usual problem of determining just who is a "native" and entitled to compensation and preferences (which ain't easy, given the extent of intermarriage with Chinese, Japanese and Nord-Americanos also living there). But it is not a political issue for the United States, and the question of continued statehood or independence for Hawaii is also not in question.

So if I have any message for those Carl says "hate the US", it is this: get used to it.