One of the reasons we know so much about Captain Cook and the reason he shows up in so many history textbooks is because we have tons of records about him, but they're almost all European records. Even the Hawaiian records we have about Cook have been heavily influenced by later contact with Europeans. 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. Are we making them recognizable, having them respond as we think Europeans would, by flying off the handle? I don't have an answer, but the debate between these two historical anthropologists brings up something that we need to keep in mind. 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.