The untold story of Queen Lili’uokalani

For the award-winning journalist Elinor Langer, it all started on a family vacation to Hawaii 15 years ago. Langer was critical of a misleading statement in a guidebook to Maui, and she realized that there was more to the story of America’s annexation of Hawaii than she knew.

“[It said] that in 1893, American business interests overthrew the queen and that they all lived happily ever after,” Langer said. “A voice in my head said, ‘no way, they didn’t live happily ever after.'”

Langer’s research led her to the most prominent figure of the time at the end of the Independent Kingdom of Hawaii, Queen Lili’uokalani.

The queen, who often fell victim to a distorted view during and after her lifetime, was treated very poorly in newspapers and schoolbooks that portrayed her as being unintelligent and deceitful. Langer explains that this notion couldn’t be further from the truth.

“None of [these representations] had any reality,” Langer said. “The queen was very intelligent, and a gifted politician despite being overthrown. She worked really hard, and is a great figure that has been first misrepresented, and neglected.”

Not only did her people admire her because of her position; she was also a prolific composer, which is evident in past and present-day Hawaiian music. Contemporary artists draw from her authentic Hawaiian songs and plays.

Although Queen Lili’uokalani’s songs and plays can be easily found today, and she even wrote an autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, personal records of the queen have been hard to locate.

Langer explains that a lot of these documents may never be recovered, because a lot of them were destroyed when she and a couple hundred Hawaiians were imprisoned two years after American businessmen overthrew the kingdom.

“A lot of papers were gone through and scattered among several archives—several in Honolulu, and some in peoples’ families,” Langer said. “It makes it hard to get a strong sense of her own passage, but it’s not impossible.”

For her upcoming visit, Langer will be sharing some of her research thus far, for a book about Queen Lili’uokalani that should be released in or after 2013. But for now, you can find her published article in the Special Issue of The Nation from 2008, “Famous are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then and Now.”

Queen Lili’uokalani is honored and commemorated in Hawaii today, being the subject of five or six formal occasions a year. There’s also a statue of her between the Iolana Palace and the state capitol that is draped with fresh leis everyday.

“On days that there are other commemorations at the palace, which are frequent, she’s so heavily draped in those [leis] she’s literally covered. You’d think the statue would fall down,” Langer said.

Langer sees connections between some of her previous work to her recent research. She is the author of A Hundred Little Hitlers, released in 2004, about the neo-Nazi movement in the U.S., as well as her first book, a biography of the radical Josephine Herbst.

“There are some connections to the racism in this country at that time in the 1890s,” Langer said. “The birth of the imperialist movement was very strong, even the anti-imperialist movement had a very strong radical movement.”

One of the ways this ties into American annexation of Hawaii had to do with the fact that some anti-imperialists didn’t want to accept Hawaiians as Americans because of their race.

Langer explains that her book about Josephine Herbst, about the radical movement in response to the capitalist movement, as well as her work about the skinhead movement, are related to her recent work because they seek to explain and expose strong social movements.

“There’s a strong element of social movement in the queen’s story to preserve her kingdom,” Langer said. “I like to tell the stories that people don’t know very much about, the stories that aren’t exactly popular subjects. Those are the stories that interest me.”

In Search of Lili’uokalani with Elinor Langer
Presented by PSU Friends of History
Smith Memorial Student Union, Cascade Room 236
1825 SW Broadway
Tonight, 7 p.m.
Free