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But Emerson’s tutorial—in essence, that Hawaiians simply lost interest in a number of cultural activities as the annual Makahiki festival was discontinued, the kapu system was abolished, foreign games were introduced, and people’s focus increasingly turned to war making—is much too exculpatory and self-serving.⁴ He and his missionary predecessors bore no responsibility for the destruction of traditional Hawaiian culture, he suggested. They were not invaders or exploiters. The fault lay with the Hawaiians themselves. The missionaries of the early nineteenth century, according to this narrative, were a “dispensation of light” that had “wing[ed] its way as a new Lono [a Hawaiian deity] across the waters.” They filled a “vacuum in Hawaii’s social and religious institutions” following the death of Kamehameha in 1819, and the people embraced the Western arrivals with “enthusiasm.”⁵ The seeds of Christianity were planted, and, as they sprouted, “the old life, its worship, festivals, public games, and festivities with all the abuses that gathered about them” began to dissipate.