Hawaian flag day
<p>On the morning of 31 July 1843, on a dusty plain east of Honolulu, a British rear-admiral named Richard Darton Thomas ordered the Union Jack lowered and the flag of the Hawaiian Kingdom raised in its place. For five months Hawaii had been, against London’s wishes, a British possession; now it was a kingdom again. King Kamehameha III, watching the colours change, spoke a sentence that the islands have never forgotten: “Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono” — “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” Those words are the state motto of Hawaii to this day, and the date became Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea, often known in English as Hawaiian Flag Day.</p>
<p>The day is a celebration of the Ka Hae Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian flag, and through it of the islands’ history as an independent kingdom and the survival of Native Hawaiian identity through annexation, territory and statehood.</p>
<h2 id="how-hawaii-came-to-lose-its-flag-and-get-it-back">How Hawaii came to lose its flag, and get it back</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The crisis of 1843 is called the Paulet Affair. In February of that year, a Royal Navy captain, Lord George Paulet, sailed the frigate HMS Carysfort into Honolulu Harbour and, acting on inflated complaints from British residents and with no authorisation whatever from his government, threatened to bombard the town unless Kamehameha III ceded the kingdom. On 25 February 1843, the king ceded Hawaii under protest, appealing over Paulet’s head to Queen Victoria. For five months the Union Jack flew over Honolulu. When Admiral Thomas, Paulet’s superior in the Pacific, arrived and reviewed the case, he found the seizure unjustified and restored Hawaiian sovereignty on 31 July. The plain where the ceremony took place is now Thomas Square in downtown Honolulu, named in his honour.</p>
<p>The flag itself is older than the affair. The Ka Hae Hawaiʻi carries eight horizontal stripes of white, red and blue for the eight main islands — Hawaiʻi, Maui, Kahoʻolawe, Lānaʻi, Molokaʻi, Oʻahu, Kauaʻi and Niʻihau — with the British Union Jack in the upper canton. Its design dates to the reign of Kamehameha I, the conqueror who unified the islands into a single kingdom by 1810, and reflects the close relationship he and his successors cultivated with Britain. That British corner has remained through every change of government since.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h2>
<p>For Native Hawaiians, the events of 1843 and the flag that flew that day are bound up with the much larger and unhealed story of the kingdom’s later fate: the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani by American business interests in 1893, annexation by the United States in 1898, and statehood in 1959. Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea recalls a moment when sovereignty, once taken, was actually given back — which is precisely why the day has become important to the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, who read it as evidence that the kingdom’s independence was internationally recognised and wrongly lost.</p>
<p>The Paulet Affair also matters because of how it ended. Admiral Thomas did not merely lower a flag; his restoration was an explicit acknowledgement, by an officer of the same empire that had seized the islands, that the seizure had been wrong and that Hawaii was a sovereign state entitled to its own government. King Kamehameha III declared a ten-day celebration after the restoration and made the date a holiday, so the meaning of the day was set by the monarch himself, in the moment, rather than assigned by later generations. That is a rare thing in the history of colonised peoples, and it gives the modern observance an unusually firm historical footing.</p>
<p>Beyond politics, the day is a focus for the broader revival of Hawaiian language and culture that has gathered force since the 1970s. Like other observances rooted in restored civic rights — India, for instance, keeps <a href="/specialdate/india-national-voters-day/">India National Voters’ Day</a> to honour the franchise — Hawaiian Flag Day ties an emblem to a principle, here the principle that a people’s right to govern their own land was once formally affirmed.</p>
<h2 id="two-flag-days-one-date">Two flag days, one date</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>There is a genuine tangle of names worth untangling. The 31 July observance is properly Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea, Sovereignty Restoration Day, commemorating the 1843 return of the kingdom. The phrase “Hawaiian Flag Day” is often used for it because the central act of 1843 was the literal lowering of the Union Jack and raising of the Hawaiian colours, but the day is about sovereignty as much as the flag itself. The observance is in fact very old: Kamehameha III himself established Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea as a national holiday of the Hawaiian Kingdom, making it arguably the kingdom’s first. It lapsed for much of the twentieth century and was revived in the later twentieth century alongside the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, with annual gatherings at Thomas Square growing year on year. In 2022 the Hawaii state legislature passed House Bill 2475, signed into law as Act 82, formally designating 31 July as a special day of observance and giving the long-running grassroots commemoration official recognition at last — though not the status of a full state holiday.</p>
<p>That history of lapse and revival is itself part of the day’s meaning. Unlike a fixed federal holiday handed down from above, Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea was kept alive by Native Hawaiian communities and only later acknowledged by the state, which is why the celebrations retain a distinctly community-led, ceremonial character rather than the parade-and-fireworks formula of larger national days.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>The flag is raised and displayed at homes, schools and community centres, and ceremonies feature Hawaiian songs (mele), chant (oli) and the recounting of the 1843 story to younger people. Since its modern revival, the day has been marked most prominently at Thomas Square itself, where cultural organisations gather for hula, music, speeches, shared kalua pork and poi, and educational programmes that explain both the flag’s symbolism and the Paulet Affair that gave the date its meaning. The communal meal is integral rather than incidental, in the same way food anchors observances elsewhere — a Hawaiian potluck at Thomas Square serving much the same social function as the shared bowls of <a href="/specialdate/us-national-guacamole-day/">National Guacamole Day</a> on the mainland. Because the occasion carries political weight, it is also a rallying point for sovereignty advocates, who use it to press for recognition of Native Hawaiian rights.</p>
<h2 id="beyond-hawaii-a-much-travelled-design">Beyond Hawaii: a much-travelled design</h2>
<p>The Hawaiian flag has had an oddly wide afterlife. Because British and American whaling and merchant ships called constantly at Honolulu in the nineteenth century, the design became a familiar sight across the Pacific, and it long predates Hawaii’s statehood — it was the flag of an internationally recognised kingdom that signed treaties with Britain, France and the United States. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, the same basic flag was kept by the short-lived Republic of Hawaii, then by the US Territory of Hawaii after 1898, and finally by the State of Hawaii from 1959, an unusually unbroken run for a flag through so many changes of government.</p>
<p>That continuity is itself meaningful on Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea. Where most countries adopt a clean new flag at each constitutional rupture, Hawaii kept flying a banner first raised by a Hawaiian king, Union Jack and all. For Native Hawaiians, the survival of the design is a thread of identity running unbroken beneath all the political changes imposed from outside, which is one reason the flag, rather than any later official seal, remains the emblem people gather around on 31 July.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-meaning">Symbols and meaning</h2>
<p>Each element of the Ka Hae Hawaiʻi tells part of the story. The eight stripes stand for the eight inhabited islands. The Union Jack records the kingdom’s friendship with Britain and the protection Kamehameha I sought from a great naval power. The red, white and blue echo both Hawaiian and Western flags of the era, which is partly why the design survived under American rule with so little change. Above all, the motto Kamehameha III spoke on 31 July 1843 threads the whole observance back to the single morning that gave it its name.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>Hawaii’s flag is the only US state flag to include the Union Jack of the United Kingdom, a relic of the islands’ independent kingdom.</li>
<li>The British occupation of 1843 lasted about five months and was never sanctioned by London; Queen Victoria’s government disavowed Lord Paulet’s actions.</li>
<li>The same flag design has flown over Hawaii as a kingdom, a provisional government, a republic, a US territory and a state, with only minor changes to the number and proportion of stripes.</li>
<li>The state motto — “Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono” — comes directly from the words Kamehameha III spoke at the 1843 restoration.</li>
<li>The site of the ceremony, Thomas Square, is named not for a Hawaiian but for the British admiral who handed the kingdom back, Richard Darton Thomas.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>Most national flag days celebrate a flag going up for the first time. This one celebrates a flag going back up — an act of return rather than founding, a wrong briefly righted by a foreign officer who decided his own country had overreached. There is something instructive in keeping a holiday for that, because it insists that sovereignty was real and recognised, and that what happened to it later was not inevitable. The motto Kamehameha III chose for the moment was about land and righteousness, not victory, and the day has kept that quieter register: less a boast than a reminder that the life of a place endures in how justly it is held.</p>
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