Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 38, Number 9, 1 September 2021 — He Inoa nō Lili'uokalani [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

He Inoa nō Lili'uokalani

By Dr. Ronald Williams, Jr. Grace isfree sovereignfavor to the ill-deserving. - Benjamin B. Warfield The gift of grace is an "undeserved love, favor, or blessing." It involves "going beyond a contractual view of life that sees living only in terms of rights and doing things for rewards." Sometimes percieved as a weakness of the naive, grace ean only be born of prodigious strength. It rejects normal behavior and calls us, by example, to strive for a higher way of living. In the best of times grace is extra-ordinary; in the worst, it feels beyond the reach of mere mortals. Yet, grace was the eonsistent offering of Her Hawaiian Majesty Queen Lili'uokalani during Her, and Her nation's most difficult days. Following the 17 January 1893 eoup that removed the Queen from Her throne, brazen men, hungry for power and fearful of the consequences of their treasonous actions if their plan failed, attacked Queen Lili'uokalani's character in the pulpits, newspapers, and meeting halls of both Honolulu and Washington D.C. On the Sabbath following the overthrow, the Rev. Thomas Gulick preached a sermon titled "The Evils of Monarchy" to his audience at Central Union Church. The Queen noted the event in a diary entry of 5 February, writing, "I never saw a more unchristian like set as these Missionaries and so uncharitable as to abuse me in the manner they do from the pulpit." The Rev. Sereno Bishop hid behind the pen name "Kamehameha" to produce over īoo columns for U.S. newspapers that declared Kānaka 'Ōiwi unfit to rule and the Queen an "incubus of the Palaee" and particularly debased. Yet, it was perhaps the Rev. Oliver Pomeroy Emerson who was the Queen's personal nemesis. In the summer of 1887, after an armed militia supporting the secret all-white "Hawaiian League" imposed a new eonstitution upon Her brother, the reign-

ing sovereign, King David Kalākaua, ■ Emerson proudly described "the nohle stand the sons of the mission took." Later, in an attempt to justify minority rule in the islands, he heeame one of the most vociferous of the many voices seeking to discredit the Queen. In a December 1893 speech from the historie Metropolitan Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., Emerson explained to the gathered statesman, judges, and business leaders "how intimately the political issue in Hawai'i was connected with the struggle of heathenism, revived by the Monarchy." Months later, Emerson offered infantalizing statements about the Queen in congressional testimony supportive of the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, explaining that She and other Ali'i Kānaka 'Ōiwi would have been allowed to continue rule "so long as they behaved themselves." In 1896, Her Majesty Queen Lili'uokalani, freed from an imprisonment ordered by the white minority oligarchy that had stolen Her nation and was now looking to hand it over to a foreign power, traveled to Washington to fight for Her subjects. Of all the kuleana carried with Her to this foreign land amidst this trying battle, one that She certainly kept to the fore was that of Ka Makua o Ka Lāhui (Mother of the Nation). In a personal letter of 31 October 1899 to Henry Cushman Carter - the college-aged son of Her financial agent Joseph Oliver Carter whom She had been mentoring - Queen Lili'uokalani mentioned that Oliver Emerson was in Washington. She also took the opportunity to share a prior incident that had occured between the two and add a bit of context: "Mr. Emerson was one of those who were most active in overthrowing my government and was the one who used to take note of all who eame to see me and how long they stayed. He used to paee back and forth in front of the Church spying my gate and he had the eheek to eome to my house." She continued, explaining Her response, "Well, I extended my hand to him when he called and remembered the words our Savior said, 'when he offends you seventy times seven, forgive

him' - and so I did shake hands with him." Tried again and again by tremendous loss - her husband in 1891; her Crown in 1893; Her freedom in 1895; Her nation in 1898 - her Majesty Queen Lili' uokalani eame face to face with those who had caused her ostensibly unbearable misery, and She rose above. Make no mistake, this Queen was a fierce and competant defender of both Herself and Her people. She fought mightily and successfully, helping to defeat two treaties of annexation before Her nation was simply stolen. And grace ean be separate from forgiveness. Some of Her most explicit thoughts, She kept within. What we know beyond any doubt is that while men all around Her grappled over ill-gotten gains, using fear and anger to power their quest, Lili'uokalani called us higher, conferring dignity on

the lives that were graced to cross Her path. He inoa nō Lili'uoklani! (A Name Indeed, Lili'uokalani) ■

Dr. Ronald Williams Jr. holds a doctorate in history from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa with a specialization in Hawai'i and Native-language resources. He is aformerfaculty member ofthe Hawai'inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, UH Mānoa, and was founding director of the school's Lāhui Hawai'i Research Center. He haspublished in a wide variety ofacademic andpublic history venues including the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America, the Hawaiian Journal ofHistory, and Hana Hou! Magazine.

One of Hawai'i's most beloved queens, Lili'uokalani reigned for less than two years before her crown was stolen in a eoup d'etat perpetrated by white businessmen and representatives of the U.S. government. - Photo: Hawai'i State Archives.