Native Hawaiians are being imprisoned in alarming numbers in our own ancestral homeland, making Hawai'i's incarceration rate one of the fastest rising in the country.1 With increasing deportation of Native inmates to U.S. continental private prisons, criminalization is yet another tool of American colonial power to control Native lands and deny Hawaiians sovereignty. In 1820 the first Calvinist American missionaries arrived in Hawai'i to "civilize" Natives by criminalizing their cultural practices.2 At first sight, these missionaries proclaimed Hawai'i's indigenous peoples to be "savage," speculating that they had indeed found the missing link between brute and man.3 Imposing their perverse sense of morality upon the Native peoples, they were instrumental in instituting settler laws in Hawai'i, criminalizing traditional Hawaiian cultural ways, including hula,4 surfing,5 and the Native language.6 Hawaiians were charged with vagrancy, whereas for millennia we freely traveled to the mountains and ocean to gather food and fish. For these colonial crimes, Hawaiians were imprisoned and fined. Th ough we were an independent nation, Hawai'i was colonized because of American imperial, strategic interests in the Pacific and Asia. The United States supported the illegal overthrow of our government in 1893 and stole two million acres of Native lands. By the time the United States annexed the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1898, white and Asian settlers outnumbered the Native population three to one, with Japanese laborers constituting the largest settler group. Today, the ratio is approximately 80 percent settlers to 20 percent Natives.9 Local Japanese settlers have ascended to ruling-class status and, with white settlers, direct the American colonial system. Now a colonized people, Hawaiians inhabit the islands' lowest socioeconomic strata, with nearly half of the Hawaiian population classified as poor or low income.10 For Hawaiians, land is familial, the source of material, cultural, and spiritual existence and political power. One devastating outcome of land dispossession today is the disproportionate rates of incarceration of Native adults and children. Aft er more than a century of violent colonial rule, poverty-stricken, landless Hawaiians are now stereotyped as criminals in Hawai'i. Settlers institute laws and policies to maintain their control over Hawai'i's lands and resources, warehousing Native Hawaiians into correctional facilities. © 2008 University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.