![]() ![]() (It is estimated that between the time of European contact and annexation, the islands lost nearly 90% of their population, largely to imported diseases.) Along with the Gospel and some of the benefits of European life came military conquest, enforced imposition of a new religion and its liturgy, slavery, racism, and almost always-disease. I had to learn later that these peoples (including indigenous persons of the U.S.) already had their own civilizations and cultures in place. I am of an age to have been taught that European Christian missionaries “brought civilization” to lands all around the world. The book’s title, incidentally, comes from indigenous historian David Malo, who wrote of the big, unexpected waves that would bring in the large “unfamiliar fishes” of deeper, darker ocean waters-fishes that would then gobble up the smaller fish near the shore. ![]() Christian missionaries (1820), through its demise as an independent nation upon its 1898 annexation by the U.S. The book covers the time period in Hawai’i from the arrival of U.S. Very nearly every time I encounter the term “evangelization,” this line from Sarah Vowell’s book Unfamiliar Fishes briefly pops into my head. ![]() ![]() “Missionaries are a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong.” ![]()
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