Amid official preparations for a 50th anniversary of statehood celebration–including the lei-bedecked arrival of the USS Hawaii, a $2.5 billion nuclear submarine billed by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin as “7,700 tons of aloha”–a counter movement is offering a different narrative of how, and why, Hawaii became part of the Union.

One leading spokesman of this movement is Dean Saranillio, a Maui native now at the University of Michigan whose dissertation is entitled Seeing Conquest: Colliding Histories and the Cultural Politics of Hawaii Statehood. He has been speaking in venues around the Islands this summer in an attempt to drum up discussion of competing narratives.