Decolonizing API

With the advent of European colonialism brought to the Pacific Islanders, we see a perversion of traditional ideals to an over-sexualization of a “savage” peoples. The islands freedom for its individuals, especially women, was incorrectly seen as a weakness and a lack of control. As a result,  the Pacific Islanders have been wrongly viewed as over sexual or at least made to seem that way to justify the rape of their culture by the colonizers. Furthermore, not only has white heteronormative capitalist colonialism perverted Pacific Islander ideas but it has caused a conglomeration of cultures where Asians and Pacific Islander have been conglomerated together. This causes a slow but steady genocide of the culture and peoples of the Pacific Islands.  The way Pacific Islanders try to overcome the ignorance and “planned disappearance” of their peoples is acknowledging the illegalities of settler colonialists via criticism of appropriation of their culture. The appropriation of a culture and the silent erasing of the narratives of native people is a disgusting way of claiming someone’s lifestyle as your own. Another thing that I found horrible was the way that the “spirit of aloha”, a symbol of kindness was used to exploit the Hawaiian culture for their own benefit. Through the juxtaposition of good traits into weaknesses, colonialism has been able to flourish. Between misunderstanding freedom as a lack of control and then self-imposing their own control, and using kindness as a weakness, colonizers have taken good and wreaked havoc on indigenous narratives. Yet, what would happen if we took kindness at face value and didn’t take advantage of it? How would this affect the thoughts of coloniality? Would it cause a slow deconstruction of the colonial settler ideas and push us to a more indigenous like mindset of freedom? Or would it make way for repercussions for those indigenous lives loss?