Princess Ka'iulani

There are real issues related to Hawai'i and this film is set in the time that all that happened, but it does not scratch the surface of the real history.
This is a kind of Disney approach to history--ie. do not confuse me with the facts. The person depicted here is a real person, who dies at a tragically young age, and who was involved in the civil war in Hawai'i. The impreialist vision of the events is well depicted, and certainly a piece of the story, but not the whole story, and when President Clinton apologized for the United States intervention, he acknowledged we didn't do a good job. Not for the first time, nor are we repairing that damage, of siding with non-native plantation owners over all others.

Victoria Ka’iulani Cleghorn was born in Honolulu in 1875, the daughter of Princess Miriam Likelike (sister of the reigning King Kalakaua) and Archibald Scott Cleghorn, a prominent Scottish businessman. Since both King Kalakaua and Lili’uokalani, the sister who was to succeed him, were childless, the birth of Ka’iulani (meaning “royal sacred one”) assured the future of the dynasty.
As a child, Ka’iulani led a charmed life. She lived at Ainahau, a sprawling estate in Waikiki, a then-pristine rural area east of Honolulu. Her mother was a wonderful entertainer who welcomed many people into their home, including the poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson, who befriended the young Ka’iulani. It was Stevenson who first referred to Ka’iulani as “the island rose” in a poem he wrote for her and inscribed in her autograph book. She died at age 23, at a time when her country was subsumed under U.S. rule.