Also it's important to note that the way we tell the history of Damien, who is the subject of several popular biographies in the 20th century, has actively underwritten colonial history-telling that reproduces lots of dangerous myths about Hawaiians and Hawaii. https://twitter.com/zacdayvis/status/1289306594782490624

My dad, a Catholic doctor, lived in Hawaii for many of years before I was born, and Fr. Damien was someone I heard about *a lot* when I was growing up. I read several biographies of him on the plane to bury my dad on Oahu after he passed. To me he was a saint before canonization.

Fr. Damien clearly did do some incredibly sacrificial things, and, notably, was supported by Princess, later Queen, Liliuokalani, the last reigning native sovereign of Hawaii before she was deposed in a capitalist coup.

But Damien's moralism and his perceptions of the social problems in Kalaupapa reflected many paternalistic and colonial attitudes, which are often glorified and glamorized in his hagiographies.

Pennie Moblo wrote a classic essay in 1997 called "Blessed Damien of Moloka'i: The Critical Analysis of Contemporary Myth," where she looks at archival records of how Hawaiians actually perceived Fr. Damien, something many biographers simply ignore.

Moblo's essay cals attention to the fact that Damien was *not* universally loved by everyone in Kalaupapa, including some of his own patients, who at one point successfully lobbied to have him removed as an administrator.

What's especially useful about Moblo's essay though is that it complicates the way we remember Damien, as the "image of the humane haole (Caucasian): one who was willing to sacrifice all, including his life, for love of his brown children."

Moblo contextualizes Damien's biographies in a long history of routine tropes about frontier colonizers, stereotypes about Indigenous people, paternalism, etc. Damien's story has been an integral part of the myth-making colonialism that denies Hawaiian sovereignty and dignity.

It's not just about complicating Damien's character or his reception among the population he worked with, although that's immensely important; it's also about how the story of Damien operates in the political machinery of US domination--which should be very troubling!

As a person who grew up with Damien as a role model, I get that it's very difficult to engage this stuff. But that's no reason not to, and if Damien really is a saint, I'm sure he would prefer his life to not be used, as it so often is, as a colonial weapon in his death.

And most importantly, we owe it to the people who suffered in Kalaupapa to not erase their own interpretations of their experience, even if that means not being able to maintain our rosy hagiographies and heroes.

Anyway as always decolonize Hawaii!