As Indigenous Peoples Day approaches on October 14th, I feel a deep, simmering anger. It’s a day meant to honor the resilience and cultures of Indigenous communities, but for me, it’s a reminder of the painful truths I wasn’t taught for most of my life. I spent 17 years in school, pledging allegiance to a flag I knew little about—one that never truly felt like it represented me or my history.
I remember learning about Columbus, Captain Cook, the Boston Tea Party, the Constitution. I remember reciting dates, memorizing facts, and writing essays about figures who had no resemblance to the people around me. None of these lessons ever seemed to connect to the world I lived in, here in Hawaii. It all felt so distant, so irrelevant. Yet, I was told that this was our history, the foundation of our country—my country, supposedly a land of freedom and bravery, the world's superpower. But what did all of this mean to me?
Thanksgiving was another mystery. Why were we celebrating a holiday with foods that were foreign to Hawaii? Turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce—it was the quintessential American meal, yet it had no roots in our islands. I ate it, sure, but it never felt right. It never made sense why we were giving thanks for something that seemed so detached from our culture, our land, our people.
For years, I never questioned the narratives I was fed. I believed in the myths, the legends of America’s greatness, of exploration and progress. But when I started digging deeper into these stories, I found a much darker truth. The same explorers we were taught to revere—Columbus, Cook—were the same men who brought death, disease, and destruction to Indigenous communities around the world. The genocide of entire peoples, the erasure of cultures, the theft of lands. It was the same story repeated across continents.
Do you know what Columbus Day is really about? Do you know what he did to Indigenous people across the Caribbean, enslaving, torturing, and killing thousands? The so-called discovery of the New World wasn’t a moment of progress—it was the beginning of centuries of suffering for countless Indigenous communities. And somehow, for generations, we celebrated this as a triumph, as if it was something to be proud of.
Here in Hawaii, we have our own version of this story. The arrival of Captain Cook in 1778 marked the beginning of a new era—one that would eventually see the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the suppression of our language, the loss of our land. It’s hard not to see the parallels between the stories I learned in school and the reality I’ve come to understand. We were taught to celebrate these events without ever questioning their impact on our own people, on our own history.
But it doesn’t end there. This erasure of people and culture is still happening now, even after all this supposed progress. We continue to turn a blind eye to the struggles of Indigenous communities, ignoring the loss of lands, the fight for water rights, and the battle to preserve our languages. And it’s not just in the past or confined to a single place. The genocide of the Palestinian people continues today, with over 20,000 children lost in the ongoing conflict. It’s impossible to ignore the tragic stories emerging from Native American and Canadian residential schools, where the bodies of thousands of children were found buried—hidden in unmarked graves for generations. These were children stolen from their families, stripped of their identities, and left to die in the very institutions that claimed to be civilizing them.
It’s as if, despite everything we’ve learned, we still prefer the sanitized version of history—the one that makes us feel comfortable, the one that allows us to look away. The reality is that these struggles are not just part of the past—they are still unfolding today, and we are all a part of them, whether we choose to see it or not.
As we move closer to Indigenous Peoples Day, I hope that more people begin to see through the myths we were taught. I hope we can reclaim our narratives, tell our stories, and honor our ancestors in a way that acknowledges the truth of what happened. And I hope that one day, this anger I feel can be transformed into something more—into healing, into understanding, into a future where we don’t have to keep fighting to be seen.
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