Quote by Haunani-Kay Trask: “I am not an American. I am not an American. I am not an American.”

Repeating a statement three times is not stubbornness — it is insistence against erasure. For Indigenous Hawaiians, American statehood was not liberation but annexation. This declaration is a refusal to accept an identity imposed by colonisation, and a fierce claim to a prior, deeper belonging.

Trask published From a Native Daughter in 1993, the centennial of the illegal US overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The 1990s saw a resurgence of Hawaiian sovereignty activism as Native Hawaiians reclaimed language, land rights, and cultural identity suppressed since annexation in 1898.

Native Hawaiian scholar, poet, and activist who was a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a leading voice for Hawaiian sovereignty. Her 1993 book From a Native Daughter challenged Western academic accounts of Hawaiian history. She co-founded the Kamana Hawaiian Studies program.