So if we cast Cook’s death as part of a Native ritual, we’re implying that Hawaiians were just performing a ritual script, which takes away all their agency as human beings.

… Very often in history, we make statements about people who haven’t written their own story, whether it’s Hawaiians, or Native Americans, or working-class people. And we try to imagine that we’re seeing the world as they have seen it. But the best we can really do is offer an approximation.

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much as they’re processes.
That for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today.

Just as today we’re making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.