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Kahana: How the Land Was Lost, by Robert H Stauffer. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8248-2590-x; x + 265 pages, maps, tables, photographs, appendixes, notes, glossary, references, index. Cloth, US$38.00.
Robert H Stauffer has been credited for uncovering "thousands of pages of old documents that a trust company clerk had saved from the trash bin, that had been given to the state archives in the late 1970s or early '80s by a local trust company" (Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 16 Nov 2003). These documents were foreclosure records linked to an 1874 nonjudicial foreclosure law enacted by the Hawaiian Kingdom Legislature. Stauffer was quoted as saying, "The 1874 law created a system in which lenders could foreclose on property without any judicial oversight" (Perez 2003, A-8). He attributes the loss of native Hawaiian lands in the nineteenth century to this law rather than to the 1848 Mahele (land division), as commonly believed by most scholars today.
I found Stauffer's book to be riddled with opinions and incorrect information. As a former land title abstractor and a person who participated in international legal proceedings concerning the Hawaiian kingdom as an independent state, I have a working knowledge of what Stauffer covers in many parts of his book, and I found many of his assessments and explanations to be completely inaccurate. Without fully elucidating point by point-which would definitely turn out to be a lengthy article or even a book that I will need to write later-I will only identify two areas and briefly provide some counterpoints to Stauffer's contentions.
First: The intent of the 1874 non-judicial foreclosure law was to relieve the justices of the Supreme Court from an excessive number of equity cases, which included, among other things, foreclosures. It was not a conspiracy by the haole (nonaboriginal Hawaiian nationals) to seize control of the native lands. Stauffer gives the impression that the passage of this statute, An Act to Provide for the Sale of Mortgaged Property Without Suit and Decree of Sale (1874), was orchestrated by a few haole and a naive Hawaiian Legislative Assembly, which comprised a majority of aboriginal Hawaiians. Stauffer states, "For all its broad effects, the law caused little notice...