Nate’s Adventures: Pulling Down our Monuments—Hawaiʻi Edition
by Nate Yuen, Chapter Outings Chair | Reading time: 8 minutes
I’d like to confront an issue close to me—the removal of the statute of President William McKinley and the renaming of the high school. You might say, "well this isn't about the environment", to which I would respond "our environment isn't only natural, it's what we surround ourselves with, like the monuments in our public spaces,” a sentiment recently shared by our Chapter chair.
I am a graduate of McKinley High School and I believe that it is time for the school to evolve beyond outdated traditions that no longer serve us. As you will read in my testimony submitted to the Legislature this year, continuing to honor President William McKinley promotes dishonestly and normalizes the lie of the Treaty of Annexation. These are values and beliefs that do not promote a healthy environment in our islands.
All around the world, similar actions are being taken. The Sierra Club itself is reexamining its past addressing its substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy. As Sierra Club Executive Director, Michael Brune, shared in his July 2020 article, "it's time to take down our monuments and start with some truth telling...". If you have not yet read this article, I urge you do to so today (also shared below).
Hawaiʻi is not immune, our islands are riddled with entrenched racism, dishonesty and injustice. Join me as we start to pull down some of Hawaiʻi's monuments.
Close up of the Treaty of Annexation held by President McKinley’s statue at the high school.
President McKinley Statue in its grassy oval.
President William McKinley statue.
My testimony to the House Committee on Education:
Dear Chair Woodson, Vice Chair Kapela, and members of the House Committee on Education:
I strongly support HR 148/HCR 179 which aims to change the name of President McKinley High School and remove the statue of President William McKinley from school grounds.
I am a graduate of President William McKinley High School, class of 1979. When I was a student at McKinley, we were taught to have pride in school traditions. We were told to respect the statue of President William McKinley, which holds a rolled-up document that says "Treaty of Annexation", and to never step foot on the grassy oval where the statue stands.
But when traditions promote a lie, they cannot be allowed to stand. Hawaiians objected to the Treaty of Annexation and signed the Kū'ē Petitions to express their dissent. So overwhelming were their numbers that the Treaty of Annexation failed to pass the US Senate in 1897. The next year, what could not be done by law, was achieved by guile. A joint resolution named the “Treaty of Annexation” was passed and signed by President McKinley which “annexed” the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. It doesn’t matter what they named it, joint resolutions do not have the force of law outside the US. There is no Treaty of Annexation. The statue of President McKinley holding the "Treaty of Annexation" is a lie.
The fraudulent annexation was an act of American business interests to take the Hawaiian Kingdom and establish sugar plantations. Slavery was outlawed in the Hawaiian Kingdom. White supremacy expressed itself in Hawaiʻi through the plantation system and military occupation. Among the most well-documented cases include: the hanging and lynching of Katsu Goto by white supremacists at Honokaʻa plantation in 1889; the “Massie Affair” in 1932, which exposed racism in the military when a Hawaiian man wrongfully accused by a socialite was murdered by white vigilantes; and the illegal internment of Japanese-American citizens, over 2,000 in Hawaiʻi at Honoʻuliʻuli Camp, and over 120,000 across the US in 1942.
The City of New Orleans took down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in 2017. The City of Charleston removed the statue of slave owner John C. Calhoun in 2020. And the US Defense Department announced in 2021 that bases named after Confederate Generals will be changed within 3 years. The time has come for Hawaiʻi to confront its monuments to white supremacy.
The installation of McKinley’s statue in 1911 was during the peak building of confederate statues from 1889 to 1929, well after the South lost the Civil War in 1865. Confederate statues were monuments to white supremacy meant to intimidate black Americans into obedience during the Jim Crow era. In Hawaiʻi, the goal was to promote allegiance to the US and suppress Hawaiian national identify, language, and culture; measures designed to eradicate the practice of being Hawaiian. The statue of President McKinley is a symbol of oppression to Hawaiians.
There were many other traditions at McKinley High School, like the student code of honor we recited, the black and gold colors we wore, and the songs we sang at homecoming and football games. Some McKinley traditions like hazing, where upperclassmen embarrassed/mistreated/ abused underclassmen, were found to be unacceptable and have since been banned.
The statue of President McKinley normalizes a lie and is dishonest. It does not pass the Code of Honor. In 2002, a federal lawsuit forced a change to the Code of Honor because the phrase “love for God” was found unconstitutional. Standards change over time. What was acceptable at one time may not be any more.
Traditions are what we allow of the past to live in the present and continue into the future. When traditions are no longer acceptable we need to evolve. My alma mater deserves an honorable name. I strongly support HR 148/HCR 179.
Sincerely,
Nathan Yuen
If there is any doubt whether white supremacy played a role in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the fraudulent annexation of Hawaiʻi, look at how these events were depicted in American political cartoons of the time:
1898 Political cartoon depicting Annexation. Another shotgun wedding, with neither party willing by C.J. Taylor. Wedding of Uncle Sam and a young woman "Hawaiʻi". A former Confederate general "Sen. Morgan" stands behind them, holding a shotgun "Bluster". The minister is "McKinley" reading from the "Annexation Policy". Morgan was a Confederate General during the American Civil War, a 6-term U.S. senator from Alabama after the civil war who was a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon.
1893 Political cartoon depicting Overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani. In 1893, marines from the USS Boston landed in Honolulu armed with Howitzer cannons and carbines. A group of American business interests staged a coup, proclaiming themselves the "provisional government" of Hawaiʻi. Imprisoned Queen Liliʻuokalani yielded to the superior force of the United States of America.
1893 Political cartoon. “See-saw! Uncle Sam in Hawaiʻi", The Evening World, November 14, 1893, Brooklyn Last Edition. Uncle Sam leveraging sugar.
1897 American political cartoon by J.S. Pughe predicting a real estate boom following the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands.
Pulling Down Our Monuments
By Michael Brune, July 22, 2020
The Sierra Club is a 128-year-old organization with a complex history, some of which has caused significant and immeasurable harm. As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.
It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history. That will be followed by posts on how we’ve had to evolve on issues of immigration and population control, environmental justice, and Indigenous sovereignty. We will also devote a post to a discussion of how the Sierra Club is working to center the voices of people we have historically ignored, so we can begin repairing some of the harms done.
The most monumental figure in the Sierra Club’s past is John Muir. Beloved by many of our members, his writings taught generations of people to see the sacredness of nature. But Muir maintained friendships with people like Henry Fairfield Osborn, who worked for both the conservation of nature and the conservation of the white race. Head of the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn also helped found the American Eugenics Society in the years after Muir’s death.
And Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life. As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.
Other early Sierra Club members and leaders -- like Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan -- were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudo-scientific arm, eugenics. Jordan, for example, served on the board of directors during Muir’s presidency. A “kingpin” of the eugenics movement, he pushed for forced-sterilization laws and programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children -- mostly Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and poor women, and those living with disabilities and mental illness. He cofounded the Human Betterment Foundation, whose research and model laws were used to create Nazi Germany’s eugenics legislation.
In these early years, the Sierra Club was basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through -- wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years. The Sierra Club maintained that basic orientation until at least the 1960s because membership remained exclusive. Membership could only be granted through sponsorship from existing members, some of whom screened out any applicants of color.
The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea -- one that’s still circulating today. It’s the idea that exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs. Such willful ignorance is what allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks. It allows them to overlook, too, the fact that only people insulated from systemic racism and brutality can afford to focus solely on preserving wilderness. Black communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color continue to endure the traumatic burden of fighting for their right to a healthy environment while simultaneously fighting for freedom from discrimination and police violence.
The persistence of this misguided idea is part of the reason why we still get comments from our own members telling us to “stay in our lane,” and stop talking about issues of race, equity, and privilege. But as writer Julian Brave NoiseCat says, “The environment is no longer a white sanctuary. The messy business of society, power, and race is everywhere and intertwined.”
The Sierra Club that I want to belong to not only acknowledges that reality, it also works to counter racism and exclusion wherever it occurs -- in our parks and wilderness areas, in our communities, in the halls of power, and especially among our own staff, volunteers, and 3.8 million members and supporters.
I know that isn’t the Sierra Club that has historically existed. People within the organization have had to push the Sierra Club to evolve for the better and to affirmatively place itself on the side of justice, often at great personal cost. In future posts in this series, we’ll talk more about the struggles Indigenous people, people of color, and their white allies went through to get this organization to evolve on issues like immigration and environmental justice.
For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry. I know that apologies are empty unless accompanied by a commitment to change. I am making that commitment, publicly, right now. And I invite you to hold me and other Sierra Club leaders, staff, and volunteers accountable whenever we don’t live up to our commitment to becoming an actively anti-racist organization.
To begin with, we are redesigning our leadership structure so that Black, Indigenous, and other leaders of color at the Sierra Club make up the majority of the team making top-level organizational decisions. We will initiate similar changes to elevate the voices and experiences of staff of color across the organization. We know that the systems of power that got us here will not enable the transformational change we need.
Pending approval from our board, we will shift $5 million from our budget over the next year -- and more in the years to come -- to make long-overdue investments in our staff of color and our environmental and racial justice work. We will create a dialogue with, and resources for, our members about the intersection between racism and environmental justice issues, and invest in our HR and training capacities to ensure that staff, volunteers, and members are held accountable for any harm they inflict upon members of our Sierra Club community who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. We will also spend the next year studying our history and determining which of our monuments need to be renamed or pulled down entirely.
In subsequent posts in this series, we'll talk in much more depth about the steps we’re taking to rebuild the Sierra Club on a basis of racial and social justice and to try to repair the harm we’ve caused. I know that the steps I’ve outlined above are only the beginnings of what will be a years-long process to reckon with our history, regain trust from the communities we have harmed, and create a diverse and equitable Sierra Club for the 21st century.
Click here to read more and to see reactions to the Michael Brune article.