As the American Indigenous Tourism Association observes National Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we turn to the invaluable insights of Mālia Sanders, our Hawaiʻi Region Representative board member. For Native Hawaiians, the celebration of AANHPI Month can carry both opportunity and tension.
On one hand, the month creates important visibility for Native Hawaiian voices and complicated history, including contemporary challenges. It can open doors for advocacy, education, coalition building, funding opportunities, and access to programs or services under broader AANHPI designations. In spaces where Native Hawaiian stories have historically been marginalized or erased, that visibility certainly matters a great deal.
At the same time, many Native Hawaiians hold understandable concerns about being grouped into a broad category that can flatten very different historical, political, and cultural realities. Native Hawaiians are not an immigrant community to Hawaiʻi; they are the Indigenous people of the islands, and they have never relinquished their ancestral ties to their homeland. The illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and the subsequent annexation remain deeply painful and unresolved issues. Rather than becoming American through immigration or voluntary inclusion, the United States asserted control through political and military intervention, forcing an assimilation process whose impacts continue to shape generations.
The geographic framing of the AANHPI label also encompasses an almost unimaginable scale of diversity across nearly half the planet. From a Native Hawaiian perspective, Moananuiākea, the vast Pacific Ocean, is not an empty expanse of water that separates islands, but a highway that connects peoples, cultures, genealogies, and knowledge systems. Pacific peoples were intentionally voyaging across and settling this ocean world thousands of years before Europeans developed the knowledge to exercise long-distance ocean navigation. Those connections continue today through shared genealogies, voyaging traditions, language familiarities, cultural practices, and enduring relationships across the Pacific.
Recognizing this perspective matters because Pacific peoples are Indigenous peoples with deep ancestral relationships to land, ocean, culture, and one another. The association believes that at its best, AANHPI Month should not erase these truths or flatten these distinctions. Instead, it can create space for deeper understanding about the many groups gathered under this umbrella, including the unique political and ancestral relationship Native Hawaiians have to Hawaiʻi as their homeland.
The ultimate goal is recognition of Native Hawaiians as the Indigenous people of Hawaiʻi, while also building meaningful solidarity. We are proud to share this vital perspective as we advance Indigenous tourism and amplify authentic voices across all Native Nations and communities.
