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No Makou ka Mana: Liberating the Nation, by Kamanamaikalani Beamer. Honolulu: Kamehameha Publishing, 2014. isbn cloth, 978-0-87336293-1; paper, 978-0-87336-329-7; ix + 268 pages, maps, tables, photographs, notes, references, index. Cloth, us$30.00; paper, us$15.00.
Three decades ago, historian David Routledge reflected on the shortcomings of previous works of Island history and postulated for future works of Pacific history to be valuable, "not only that the Islands must constitute the environment but that Islanders must be the main actors. The history must not only be Island-centred but Islander-oriented" ("Pacific History as Seen from the Pacific Islands," Pacific Studies 8 [2]: 90). While this "Islander-oriented" school of Pacific history has for the last couple of decades been dominant in Australian, New Zealand, and South Pacific universities, until recently it had been all but absent from the historiography of Hawai'i. Thanks to the work of an emerging school of Hawaiian scholars, a comparable approach to history writing has finally made its way to the islands in the north. Although a few earlier pioneers whose research moved in similar directions should be acknowledged, Kamanamaikalani Beamer's No Makou ka Mana: Liberating the Nation provides a well-written outline of this new line of thought and may serve as a milestone in Hawaiian historiography.
In the introduction, Beamer states that in pronounced contrast to previously dominant narratives of the "fatal impact" type in which Hawaiians were portrayed as passive objects or victims of Western interests and actions, his work is "not concerned with what missionaries or foreigners ers did for, or to, 'Oiwi [aboriginal Hawaiians], but rather what 'Oiwi did for themselves, in the midst of depopulation and the constant threats of colonialism" (12). When looking at the Hawaiian Kingdom from this angle, or in the author's words, through "'Oiwi optics," the perspective on the postcontact development of Hawaiian society and politics shifts radically. Applying 'Oiwi optics shows a continuity of traditional concepts of statecraft in...