Between 1850 and 1907, Native Hawaiians sought to develop relationships with other Pacific Islanders, reflecting how they viewed not only themselves as a people but their wider connections to Oceania and the globe. Kealani Cook analyzes the relatively little known experiences of Native Hawaiian missionaries, diplomats, and travelers, shedding valuable light on the rich but understudied accounts of Hawaiians outside of Hawaiʻi. Native Hawaiian views of other islanders typically corresponded with their particular views and experiences of the Native Hawaiian past. The more positive their outlook, the more likely they were to seek cross-cultural connections. This is an important intervention in the growing field of Pacific and Oceanic history and the study of native peoples of the Americas, where books on indigenous Hawaiians are few and far between. Cook returns the study of Hawai'i to a central place in the history of cultural change in the Pacific.
“With this remarkable book, Kealani Cook dramatically expands our understanding of the Native Hawaiian and Oceanic past and speaks powerfully to the Pacific present,” wrote reviewer Dr. David Chang, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s History Department whose own work has focused on indigenous people, colonialism, borders, and migration in Hawaiʻi and North America. “Meticulously researched and yet sweeping in its scale, Return to Kahiki reveals the often complex, sometimes contradictory, and always fraught way that Hawaiians thought about their place in the Pacific and engaged with other Pacific Islanders.”

The result of Cook’s research and analysis is Return to Kahiki, the title of which alludes to ancestral Hawaiian ties to Kahiki, a term often used to describe the South Pacific region that the Hawaiian people originally migrated from. The book looks at Native Hawaiians’ attempts to call upon and develop relationships with other Pacific Island peoples, focusing on the three specific Native Hawaiian travelers or sets of travelers: Native missionary efforts in Micronesia and the Marquesas, King Kalākaua’s 1887 legation to Sāmoa, and politician and businessman John Timoteo Baker’s 1907 tour of Polynesia.

In general, Cook finds that Native Hawaiians most interested in maintaining strong connections to the Hawaiian past and the culture that emerged out of it tended to embrace trans-Oceanic connections and sought to strengthen relationships with other islanders. Those more interested in distancing themselves from the Hawaiian past often sought to develop and proclaim a cultural distance from other islanders as evidence of their “progress” along European and American norms.
The analysis also results in an expanded view of Native Hawaiians — They were not one-dimensional and geographically static, but were more complex and had more dynamic views of the region and world than is sometimes represented.