This week on the Lectures and History podcast, when Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959,

it marked a turning point not just an American expansion, but in the preservation of a unique cultural identity.

Gonzaga University professor Veta Schlumingen chronicles Hawaii's path from an independent kingdom to U.S. territory and eventually statehood,

examining how native Hawaiian traditions, language, and political activism endured through decades of change.

From the overthrow of Queen Lale O'Kalani in 1893 to the statehood vote in the mid-20th century, Professor Shlemingen

explores the tensions between American governance and indigenous sovereignty, and how cultural

revival movements helped ensure that Hawaii's history did not disappear into the broader American

story. More after this. C-SPAN and lectures in history are made possible with support from Disney.

Okay, the question we're going to address today, how did Hawaiians recover traditions and

practices, is one that fits really nicely with the context that we've been looking at and the history we've been examining.

So my preliminary argument is that Hawaiians recovered traditions and practices at a specific time and for very necessary reasons.

And I'll give you details on how how that came about.

We're going to start by identifying when, how, and why they did this.

So the when is that they began to recover practices in the 1960s.

They did this by tapping into the knowledge of elders,

and most of these elders were Hawaiian but not all of them were

Hawaiian and the why is many reasons so among those many reasons are that Hawaiian

tradition culture and language were disappearing and the population of non-native

Hawaiians people who are not Kanaka Maoli, they were decreasing on the island,

proportionate to the other residents.

The other thing that we already know about

is the anti-colonial movements that were happening throughout the Pacific.

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