From 1971 to 1973, the nascent grassroots political organization known as Kokua Hawaii independently published and distributed Huli, a semiregular newspaper featuring radical economic analysis, community news, organizing strategies, political education, social documentary photography, and illustrated agitprop graphics. Kokua Hawaii, based on Oʻahu and active across the Hawaiian islands, was influenced by legacies of militant labor unions in Hawaiʻi; Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and Chicano struggles in the continental United States; and ongoing Third World national liberation movements abroad. The organization amplified and merged these varying emancipatory traditions to thoroughly analyze local material conditions, taking a decidedly class-conscious and anticolonial approach to fighting for Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty and self-determination. With a political line forged through cadre study of Marx, Lenin, and Mao and tested by ideological strife, such convictions make Huli, the mouthpiece of Kokua Hawaii, an invaluable resource for contemplating historical contradictions of Hawaiʻi in relation to contemporary aspirations for abolition, decolonization, demilitarization, deoccupation, and independence.

In ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian language, the word huli contains multiple kaona (contextually dependent meanings) and thus evokes many layered interpretations and political overtones. In their coauthored Hawaiian Dictionary, the scholar and composer Mary Kawena Pukui and the linguist Samuel H. Elbert recorded the following definitions of huli: “To turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living. To look for, search, explore, seek, study. Section, as of a town, place, or house. Taro top, as used for planting.” More pointedly, the prominent Hawaiian sovereignty leader, anti-imperialist activist, poet, and political science scholar Haunani-Kay Trask described huli as the desire to “overturn,” or “the need to transform the current political and economic system to construct a new order, not merely soften up the existing one.” Alluding to these interdependent meanings of knowledge, agriculture, and revolution, Huli the periodical encouraged the people of Hawaiʻi to commit to shared class struggle across racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in opposition to intensifying capital investment and military entrenchment in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian archipelago, following US “statehood” in 1959.