AT A COOL new bookstore in Honolulu called Da Shop, I met the foreign minister of the 
Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands, Leon Kaulahao Siu. He spends much of his time lobbying
 at the United Nations and at international missions in Europe. His biggest challenge is 
persuading diplomats that the Kingdom of Hawaii exists. When they ask if Hawaii is not 
part of the United States, Mr. Siu hands them a pamphlet called, “The Basis for the 
Restoration of the Hawaiian Kingdom.”

“The Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands is actually an existing, sovereign, independent
 country,” the pamphlet asserts. “The United States never lawfully acquired the 
Hawaiian Islands. The so-called ‘State of Hawaii’ is a fictional entity fabricated by 
the United States in order to make its presence in the Hawaiian Islands appear to 
be legitimate.”
Hawaii is the only American state that was once a kingdom. The royal family was
 overthrown in 1893 with decisive help from President Benjamin Harrison and US Marines
. Soon afterward a new president, Grover Cleveland, condemned the overthrow as 
“an act of war” and asked Congress to return the royal family to power. Congress refused. 
Instead, in 1898, it voted to annex Hawaii. In 1959 Hawaii was admitted to the
 Union as our 50th state.

The foreign minister insists that all of this was illegal. He has a good case. 
Nations, however, usually follow international law only when it suits them. 
The prospect that the United States would allow Hawaii to resume its place as an 
independent nation seems far-fetched. Nonetheless, visiting these islands 
makes clear that while Hawaii is in the United States, it is not of
 the United States.n Up
A few dedicated activists like Siu are working for Hawaiian independence. What Hawaiians 
call the “sovereignty movement,” however, has various faces. 
Many of its supporters would like something short of independence — a form of autonomy, 
still undefined, that would give Hawaii more self-government than other states have. 
Washington should hear them out.
Native Hawaiian culture is enjoying a renaissance. Cities and towns have passed 
ordinances stipulating that most streets should bear Hawaiian names. Clubs have
 sprung up to promote traditions ranging from hula dancing to navigation with 
double-hulled canoes. The University of Hawaii has opened a center for the study of
 native Hawaiian law. Courses in the Hawaiian language, which not long ago seemed on 
the brink of disappearing, have become steadily more popular. Some elementary schools 
offer instruction in Hawaiian only — a far cry from days when schoolchildren were required
 to speak English and punished if they did not.The Hawaiian archipelago is more than 
2,000 miles off the coast of California. Less than a quarter of its inhabitants are white
. Nearly 40 percent are Asian. Tokyo is closer than Washington. The press is full of 
stories from Japan and the Philippines, and rarely carries reports from further-off place
s like New York or Massachusetts.
History, like ethnicity and geography, makes Hawaii distinct. The arrival of European 
and American mariners set off a series of devastating plagues. 
Within sixty years of Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778, the native population had
 fallen by more than 70 percent. The mariners were followed by hundreds of 
Christian missionaries, most of them from New England. They were horrified by
 native customs and worked tirelessly to suppress them. Some of their descendants 
went on to assemble vast sugar and fruit plantations, depriving natives of their 
traditional land. A handful of them organized the 1893 uprising in which
 Queen Lilioukalani was deposed, ending a monarchy that had ruled for nearly a century. 
They succeeded only because the United States, by prior arrangement, immediately
 recognized them as the legal government and landed Marines to secure their power.
The annexation that followed this overthrow, according to Siu and other advocates
 of Hawaiian independence, was illegal because it was accomplished by an act of 
Congress rather than a treaty — unlike, say, our annexations of Puerto Rico, 
the Philippines, and northern Mexico. He and three other Hawaiians have 
constituted themselves as a “regency council,” modeled after the self-appointed “
governments in exile” that claimed to speak for Belgium, Poland, and other 
countries occupied by Nazi armies during World War II. They have filed legal complaints
 at the United Nations and the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

The sovereignty movement has not won any substantial concessions from Washington, 
where Hawaiian statehood is an article of faith. Hawaii is heavily militarized, with 
nearly twenty bases including the Pacific Missile Range. All American military activity
 in the Pacific — where tensions seem certain to rise in the coming years — is directed from
 a base in Oahu. 

This month, the world’s largest international naval exercise will begin in waters
 near Hawaii. Given increasing tensions in the Pacific, and especially China’s assertive 
naval ambitions, the United States would hardly be willing to let Hawaii go. 
An independent Hawaii might be able to remain neutral, but could just as easily be
 pulled into another country’s sphere of influence. Hawaii is as intimately tied 
to the United States militarily as it is politically and economically.
Even without political independence, sovereignty activists can achieve much. 
They already have. Their movement both reflects and encourages the revival of cultural 
and historical consciousness. People took notice last year when Attorney General 
Jeff Sessions referred dismissively to Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific.” 
He was recognizing that Hawaii is a Polynesian archipelago, thousands of miles from
 North America. Congress should do the same. Hawaii’s unique history,
 including our evidently illegal annexation, qualifies it for some form of special status
 within the United States.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/06/23/hawaii-quest-for-new-type-independence/UUcAdtMnwgqEeaNcx01j8L/story.html