Hawaii State Coat of Arms

The coat of arms appears on the Hawaii state seal, used on official documents, government buildings, and state correspondence. It is the central heraldic design on the seal and has been part of Hawaiian governance since the Kingdom era.

The design combines Hawaiian royal imagery with American national symbols. The core heraldic arrangement dates to 1845; the 1959 state version updated the surrounding text and added a central star to mark Hawaii's admission as the fiftieth state.

Hawaii became the fiftieth state of the United States on August 21, 1959. The coat of arms was adopted that same day as part of the new state's official seal. The design was created to mark the transition from U.S. territory to full statehood while preserving visual connections to the Hawaiian Kingdom.

The Hawaiian Islands had been governed as a kingdom under the Kamehameha dynasty from 1810 to 1893. The coat of arms places King Kamehameha I, the founder of that kingdom, as one of the two supporters of the shield, directly linking the new state's identity to its royal past.

Before statehood, Hawaii operated under a territorial seal adopted in 1900. The 1959 coat of arms replaced the territorial design and introduced the phoenix, which references both Hawaii's volcanic origins and its transition to statehood.

The state motto on the coat of arms predates statehood by more than a century. King Kamehameha III spoke the words Ua Mau ke Ea o ka Aina i ka Pono on July 31, 1843, after Hawaiian sovereignty was restored following a brief British occupation. The phrase became the official motto when Hawaii was a kingdom and was carried forward into statehood.

The Hawaii coat of arms combines a two-part shield, two human supporters, a sun crest, a phoenix, tropical foliage, and a motto scroll. Most elements appear in the original 1959 design.

The coat of arms places two histories on equal footing. King Kamehameha I on the left represents the Hawaiian Kingdom that governed the islands for most of the nineteenth century. The Goddess of Liberty on the right represents the United States that Hawaii joined in 1959. Neither figure stands behind the other.

The shield between them splits that same duality into two halves: a rising sun for the new beginning of statehood, and eight island stripes to name every one of the main islands by number. The design does not describe Hawaii as one anonymous land mass; it counts the islands.

The phoenix at the bottom frames the entire image in the language of transformation. Hawaii's islands were built by volcanic fire over millions of years. The same fire imagery describes the political change of 1959, when a territory became a state. The motto above the phoenix says what that change meant in the words a Hawaiian king spoke in 1843.

The heraldic core of Hawaii's design long predates statehood. The royal coat of arms of the Kingdom of Hawaii was established in the 1840s and remained the foundation for later territorial and state versions.

When Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900, officials kept the royal arms and motto but changed the surrounding seal text. At statehood in 1959, the same heraldic tradition was carried forward again into the modern state coat of arms.