Like Indians, Kanaka Maoli perished overwhelmingly from disease rather than direct clashes with the Europeans. Sailors, traders, and missionaries brought venereal disease, measles, small pox, influenza, and a wide variety of other maladies to the unsuspecting and un-inoculated islanders. Estimates vary, as always, but from an indigenous population at the time of Cook’s arrival of at least 400,000, and perhaps more than twice that amount, only about 135,000 Hawaiians remained in 1823. In 1893, the year of the US takeover in Hawai’i, the native population had plummeted to about 40,000. By that time many Hawaiians, who had long circulated throughout Oceania, had left the islands as seamen or to pursue other opportunities.10
As Europeans began to arrive in the islands in large numbers—British, Spanish, French, Russian, and American—they exploited Hawai’i as a port of provisioning for whaling and for trade. The Europeans traded guns, ammunition, nails, cloth, trinkets, and grog to the Kanaka Maoli for water, food, vegetables, firewood, and women. More and more of these Europeans chose to stay in the island paradise, already renowned for its beauty and astonishingly agreeable weather.11
The United States ultimately proved to be the most tenacious colonizer of the Hawaiian Islands. With experience and colonial discourse honed over decades of Indian dispossession, the Americans were well equipped for the colonizing project across the Pacific. “American settlers largely applied their view of Indians and land ownership to Native Hawaiians,” Linda Parker notes.12
Beginning in the 1820s, the Americans—mostly from New England—began to insinuate themselves into Hawaiian society and gradually to subvert it. Hawaii was thus “drawn within New England’s circuit of Pacific transactions, which included both commerce and missions.” Established in 1816 at Williams College, the Foreign Mission School trained missionaries for service in Hawai’i and also brought Hawaiians back to the college in far western Massachusetts for religious study.
Fired by the Second Great Awakening and the antebellum reform movements in the United States, missionaries flocked to Hawai’i. They marked progress in saving souls, as by mid-century more than 20 percent of Hawaiians had converted to Protestantism. The civilizing mission included industrial education. In 1836 the Americans opened the Hilo Boarding School for Boys on the eastern coast of Hawai’i, which became a model for the Hampton (Virginia) Institute for the education of freed slaves. “The negro and the Polynesian have many striking similarities,” opined Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the son of missionaries. “Of both it is true that not mere ignorance, but deficiency of character is the chief difficulty, and that to build up character is the true objective point in education.”13
Weakened by disease, Hawaiians saw little prospect in violent opposition against the technologically superior Europeans hence they sought to use the Westerners for their own ends. Like the American Indians, the Hawaiians had contended amongst themselves for supremacy in the islands before the Europeans arrived. Kamehameha I eagerly traded with the haole for guns and other technologies that helped him defeat his domestic opponents in violent conflict and unite the Hawaiian Islands under his monarchy in 1795. The king subsequently employed carpenters and other skilled Europeans to bolster his power, giving many of them land to live upon and to farm in return.14
Kamehameha I and other Hawaiians, like the American Indians, had no concept of private property or individual appropriation of land in perpetuity. When Kamehameha gave the Europeans land in trade or in exchange for services, he meant that they could use it, not that they could own it. The Europeans, of course, saw things differently and from the outset pressed the Hawaiians for conversion to a Western system of legally sanctioned fee simple individual land ownership.
Kanaka Maoli elites soon grasped the threat posed by the Western intruders and sought to preserve Hawaiian sovereignty through ambivalence and adaptation. “The Hawaiian king and chiefs adopted aspects of ‘civilized’ society in an effort to claim an autonomous space in the world of nations,” Sally Engle Merry explains. They recognized the powers that inhered in Western law and culture and sought to appropriate them. Kamehameha III and his chiefs accommodated missionaries, sanctioned conversion to Christianity, and adopted Anglo-American law as the “central act of appropriation.” Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaiian monarchs prepared meticulously, adorned themselves in European-style clothing, and had their portraits taken and circulated to show they were legitimate and civilized in appearance.15
The adoption of Christianity destabilized spiritual life in the islands and further undermined the popular authority of the chiefs. In response the chieftains “chose to ally themselves with the American missionaries and take on the mantle of Christian authority.” Hawaiian elites gradually syncretized the Calvinist message with Hawaiian spirituality as a means of “shoring up their hegemony” in the society. The chieftains made a practical decision to accommodate the missionaries rather than traders, who might be inclined to cheat them, or sailors prone to drunkenness and violence. From the missionaries they could learn English and Western ways to better adjust to the colonial condition.16
Neither acceptance of legal structures nor conversion to Christianity could preserve Hawaiian sovereignty. Thus no matter how much Western culture they proved willing to appropriate, the Hawaiians, like the Indians, ultimately would be constituted as landless premodern others in the eyes of the haole. Hawaiians thus “never escaped their racially inscribed difference.”17
Before all of this had become clear, the Hawaiian monarchy sought to advance its own position by tapping the Western settlers for their cosmopolitan knowledge, trade goods, and technical expertise. The monarchs and their chiefs adjusted Hawaiian society, law, customs, and culture as part of the broader strategy of resistance through appropriation of Western ways. Hawaiians allowed missionaries and others to live on land only to discover that the haoles now claimed the land as their own. As the chiefs and other elites accommodated the Westerners, they gradually lost control of their authority over the land and Hawaiian society.
Indigenous Hawaiian sovereignty thus succumbed to a “slow, insinuating invasion of people, ideas, and institutions.”18 The settler colonials had a program— taking command of Pacific colonial space—and possessed a variety of modernist means to achieve it. Under no circumstances would they allow Hawaiians to impede their path to progress, profits, and the extension of American imperial destiny. “The idea that this floating, restless, moneymaking, go-ahead white population can be governed by natives only, is out of the question,” the missionary Richard Armstrong declared in 1847. “The time has gone by for the native rulers to have the management of affairs, though the business may be done in their name.”19
Kanaka Maoli turned from accommodation to more direct means of resistance when they perceived that the settlers intended to hold the land permanently, but these efforts withered before Western legal precedents, technology, racial formation, and, when necessary, gunboats. The Americans sent warships in 1829 to secure collection of debts owed by chiefs to US merchants. The US warships revisited in the 1830s as the Western interlopers put pressure on Hawaiians to reform their land tenure practices by giving the haole more power to exploit the land and to own it. The British and French also menaced the monarchy for land rights and the right to transfer land ownership. Between 1836 and 1839, the appearance of the American, British, and French warships “secured the protection of certain property rights for foreign residents” of the Islands.20
The strategy to adjust to colonialism through appropriation and accommodation not only proved futile, but also further divided Hawaiians amongst themselves. As Hawaiian elites sought, for example, to meet the increased demand for sandalwood, they exploited the commoners ruthlessly in the tropical forests. Cut out of land ownership and subjected to hard labor, heavy taxes, and cruel treatment, their lives often rigidly controlled, the common people of Hawai’i did not live in an island paradise, rather many lived in fear and subjection. Rank and file Hawaiians could see that the
haole were changing the landscape, denuding the sandalwood forests, and spreading disease, yet colonialism offered a ray of hope to commoners for potentially improving their plight.21
Whether consciously or unconsciously, the settler colonials exploited divisions among indigenous Hawaiians to their own benefit. American missionaries frequently expressed sympathy for the plight of commoners and sought to uplift and convert them. “Native conversion to Christianity and Western laws enabled haole to become powerful authorities in Hawaiian society while managing the systematic destruction of the relationship between chiefs and people,” Jonathan Osorio explains. “It was the dismembering of that relationship that crippled the Natives’ attempts to maintain their independence and identity.”22
During the 1840s, while American settler colonials on the mainland seized Texas, New Mexico, and California, their brethren oversaw the enactment of a constitution and new laws securing Western land rights in Hawai’i. Hawaiians resisted the threat to their sovereignty whether posed by the British or the French but now increasingly by the United States. The Kanaka Maoli assembled in mass meetings to protest the accelerating dispossession and attendant loss of sovereignty. In the end, however, “The haoles’ power and influence proved too strong for the Hawaiian government to withstand.”23
Legalizing Dispossession
As with treaties made with the Indians, Americans sought to dispossess the Hawaiians under the law, the primary form of disavowal of the colonizing act. The establishment of the new land laws provided a veneer of legality, increased the indigenes’ sense of powerlessness, and legitimated dispossession as a marker of inevitable progress, under God. “Most significant transformations in nineteenth century Hawai’i came about as legal changes: in ruler-ship, in land tenure, in immigration, and especially in the meaning of identity and belonging.” The law provided “not just the instrument for the dispossession of Natives,” Osorio explains, “but continual evidence of superiority of the West, a superiority that made that dispossession, in the minds of the haole, inevitable.”24
In 1848, the year the Americans secured their gains from Mexico by treaty, the Great Mahele or land division proposed to convert the ancient Hawaiian land tenure system to the Western mode of individual ownership in fee simple. The Western businessmen as well as the New England Protestants perceived the primitive Hawaiian monarchy as failing to develop the land in the name of progress. A Western system of individual land holding would attract more investors and settlers, ultimately enhancing land values and advancing their own economic interests on the islands. The Americans assured the Kanaka Maoli elites that “the influence of Anglo-Saxon energy in the councils of the nation would operate more than any other cause to the benefit and preservation of the Hawaiian race.”25
At first the King and the chiefs “laughed very heartily” at the notion that they could be duped into giving up traditional land tenure system for the Western colonial model. Gradually, however, through their “great cunning and perseverance,” as Kamahameha put it, the Americans insisted that the Mahele by increasing land values would bolster the power of the monarchy and the Hawaiian elites. Many chieftains were dubious, warning the king, “You must not sell the land to the white man,” but in the end, as Stuart Banner notes, “As in most settler societies throughout the world, it was the settlers’ desire that would prevail.”
In 1850 the Hawaiian monarchy acquiesced to the Great Mahele. Henceforth land that had for centuries belonged to the Hawaiian monarchy could now be sold to anyone. Aware of developments in the wider colonial world, Kamahameha knew that the British had assumed sovereignty in New Zealand in 1840 while France in 1842 took Tahiti and the Marquesas. The Americans had defeated Mexico and secured control of the North American Pacific Coast. The king’s haole lawyers and advisers emphasized that in the event of conquest of the Islands as opposed to the Mahele, the monarchy and the elites would forfeit their land rights and lose everything. In the end Kamahameha acquiesced and the Mahele did enable many elite Hawaiians to retain land holdings.26
In the ensuing years, as the pressures of colonialism mounted, both the chiefs and commoners sold their lands to foreign buyers. Well-meaning albeit ethnocentric US missionaries had ensured that under the Mahele, commoners could secure ownership of their land by filing claims, but many did not understand the provision and were soon dispossessed of what little land they held. Many Hawaiians “did not realize that they surrendered all rights to use of the land.” Still others lost their land to indebtedness, failed mortgages, or unpaid taxes amid the steady erosion of indigenous land rights. As with Indians, some Hawaiians lost their land to unscrupulous methods, as drunk and illiterate people signed away their rights.27
Coincident with the Mahele, the California gold rush propelled a wave of American migration across the Pacific, as many of the men and far fewer women made their way from California to Hawai’i. Sailors, whalers, and missionaries, still mostly from New England, flocked to the Islands. “Some of the New Englanders came to do good, others to do well for themselves, and some to do both,” Merry observes.28
In addition to establishing Western legal and economic structures, the settlers sought to infuse their morality in the islands. Colonialism was heavily gendered and intent on regulating the physical bodies as well as the minds of the Kanaka Maoli. As with the campaign for Indian assimilation, to the extent possible the settlers implanted and policed Western gender roles and the notion of the nuclear family. These policies toward indigenous Hawaiians often “were modeled after Native American prototypes.”29
While plantation owners focused on exploiting the bodies of the predominately male labor force, the Americans also insisted that Kanaka Maoli women define themselves as wives and mothers who would anchor the domestic sphere. The change may have brought a measure of relief for some Kanaka Maoli women, who also worked in the sugar fields for a wage that was less than half of what men were paid.30 Yet these women found that the missionaries could be just as harsh and uncompromising in the domestic sphere as the planters were with the men in the fields.
Protestant missionaries compelled Kanaka Maoli women to comply with Western norms pertaining to clothing, cleanliness, eating habits, sexual restraint, and other cultural practices. The New England missionaries insisted that Hawaiian women’s bodies should be enveloped in clothing and made available only to their husbands. Under the dictates of civilized society, Hawaiian women could not be allowed to go about in the nude or only semi-clad, especially with so many Western men around the islands. Sexuality, the Westerners stressed, should be confined to marriage and otherwise quarantined in brothels to meet the demands of the hopelessly sinful sailors and other transient males.31
Colonial discourse pertaining to Kanaka Maoli men and women did not always reflect a benevolent desire to uplift the indigenes. As in North America, many missionaries deployed the “rhetoric of revulsion” toward the “wretched creatures.” They judged Hawaiian women as “filthy … ignorant and lazy … lack everything like modesty,” and generally “in great need of improvement.” Many Americans viewed the Hawaiians as fearsome in their “wild expressions of countenance, their black hair streaming in the wind as they hurried over the water.” Protestant missionary Hiram Bingham perceived “destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering and almost naked savages.” Given their “deep pagan gloom” one had to wonder, “Can such beings be civilized? Can they be Christianized?”32
Ultimately, the Hawaiians could only be seen as primitives. “As to the multitude,” the Missionary Herald declared in 1833, “they are without feeling, without serious reflections, and without thought. Their minds are dark, their hearts insensible.”33
Sounding very much like Narcissa Whitman amidst the Cayuse in the Walla Walla valley of Washington, the missionary Clarissa Armstrong could not abide the people whose souls she was ostensibly trying to save. “Week after week passes and we see none but filthy, wicked heathen with souls as dark as the tabernacles which they i
nhabit,” she complained in 1831. The more extreme the hostility they expressed toward the indigenes, “the more the missionaries could present themselves as courageous, righteous, and worthy,” Houston Wood notes. “Whether depicted as animals or as children, Kanaka Maoli remained in the missionaries’ rhetoric as beings who require the supervision of settler Americans.”34
With their ethnocentrism trumping their ambivalent desire to uplift, the Americans displayed almost complete contempt and intolerance for Kanaka Maoli culture. They targeted sex, drinking of spirits, gambling, and recreation involving display of the body such as dancing, swimming, and surfing. “Anything that was not customary for Americans was deemed wrong for Hawaiians,” Patricia Grimshaw explains. The Western-imposed judicial system made criminals of Kanaka Maoli for practices in which they had engaged for centuries. The settler colonials imposed fines, imprisonment, forced labor and public humiliation for nakedness, multiple sexual partnering, and spiritual observances, all deeply rooted in indigenous culture. As Wood points out, “Missionaries and their friends loudly proclaimed that dancing, flirting (lewdness), making love, sharing possessions (spendthriftness), taking off clothes, drinking awa and sour potatoes were crimes” though they “had practiced forms of these customs probably since before Jesus was born.” Adds Merry, “The arrogance of the Americans and their certainty of their cultural and, by the end of the nineteenth century, biological superiority became unmistakable.”35
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 27