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Please tell us all about the people who were already on Hawaii before the Polynesians arrived there more than a thousand years ago.

Hawaiians lived there for a thousand years, then we just took it at gun point, “Because Manifest Destiny.”

If Russian Crimea has to be handed over to Ukraine, again, then surely you must support giving Hawaii back to the Hawaiians.

The Russians purchased Crimea from the Ottomans in 1783, before America had a Constitution.

We outright grabbed Hawaii from the Hawaiians at gunpoint in 1893.

Surely you must support giving Hawaii back to the Hawaiians.

Sure. The original habitants came from the Marquesas.
According to archaeology they were quite peaceful.

The second wave to Hawaii came from Raiatea, very warlike invading people who conquered the first. Archaeology finds lots of signs of battles and torture from this point.

This differs quite considerably from your conception of a Hawaiian people who were peaceful bambi’s and were just always there as one people. It’s the same wherever you look, history is never so clean and clear.

In Crimea, there were many peoples before the Russians or the Turks. The Greeks were there many many centuries before the Tatars. Catherine the great moved a whole bunch of the Greeks to Mariupol and elsewhere. Stalin moved some tatar out after WWII, though a lot have since moved back.

The problem of history and “making things right” is picking your baseline year, and which migrations and movements to accept and not accept. You can choose a year depending on which argument you want to make. Is a population migration something that should be confirmed or undone?
“Making things right” can often mean killing and forcibly moving a whole lot of people, and is only “right” from a certain angle of view. It is wrong from many others.

If you gave Hawaii “back” to the Hawaiians, what does that mean? There are effectively no pure Hawaiians left. The ones who are mixed, usually with only a few percent Hawaiian and are a small percent of the population. Maybe they could give it “back” to those who genetically test closest to the original Marquesas inhabitants? What about the people there for generations, you really going to make two classes of people?

Crimea is quite different from other historic examples, in that it has been Russian since 1783. The people who are there overwhelmingly identify as Russian and want to be part of Russia. More so than any territory of Ukraine including Donbas and Luhansk. So if you are going to arbitrarily pick some people to hand it to you will doing so against the inhabitants will. When Crimea was taken back by Russia, there was almost no killing or conflict involved. Lots of the Ukrainian navy simply defected to the Russian and handed over the vessels.

Even the few years when it was technically part of Ukraine, it had special constitutional autonomy granting it special rights including Russian language preservation.

You can look at the 1893 census. About a third Russian, third tatar, 20% ukrainian, the rest a grab bag of others. Now it’s more Russian and less tatar. What’s it mean? I don’t know.

These questions are pretty unclear and there are a huge number of examples all over the world. What about Kosovo. That’s where the USA and Europe ripped Serbia’s territory it had for long centuries. NATO did massive bombing to make it happen. That set the precedent for all borders to be changed and undone.

With Kosovo now you can make an argument for everything all over the place. All sorts of parts of Europe have territories that would like to be independent. The worst atrocities in history are often from people trying to “correct” things. I’m not saying that means these border changes are always wrong. A lot of borders don’t respect which grouping of people is where.