Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  A HAWAIIAN PACIFIC WORLD

  Hawaiian labor made the Pacific into a “world.” They did this by weaving a web of interconnections across the vast ocean—connections that had never before existed. Over the past decade, historians have debated the concept of a Pacific World. Is, or was, the entire ocean ever a coherent, integrated space? Did people in the nineteenth century see themselves as living and laboring in such a world? What forces make for such a world—the movement of labor, capital, and material, or the transmission and sharing of stories, songs, and culture? Some scholars posit that rising empires are the agents that historically connected disparate peoples and places together, calling the Pacific at times a Spanish Lake or referring to it, in the age of British and American imperialism, as an Anglophone Pacific World.22 Scholars of Asian migrations and diasporas have countered with the study of the transpacific—the worlds made, imagined, and populated by Asian workers, diasporic literatures, and counterhegemonic claims on imperial oceanic space.23 Both of these approaches, however, wholly dismiss Pacific Islander peoples and indigenous perspectives on the ocean. Some scholars have used environment and ecology to argue for a Pacific World, proposing variously that tectonic plates or tsunamis or the extraction of natural resources have geographically placed the ocean’s many peoples upon a singular stage.24 Economic arguments paint the Pacific World as a “sector” of the global economy, or as a “primal site” of globalization. In this vein, transoceanic maritime trade with China made the Pacific into a world.25 But then there are sectors within the sector; scholars have written of the Eastern Pacific and the Northern Pacific as unique arenas of economic and cultural activity.26 Indigenous scholars, on the other hand, have used Native languages and literatures to propose uniquely non-Western ways of conceptualizing the ocean. Historian Damon Salesa has mapped the “native seas” of pelagic fishing and maritime networks, while Hawaiian scholar B. Pualani Lincoln Maielua has celebrated the “situated knowledge” of a canoe’s-eye view of the world.27

  The term Hawaiian Pacific World, as used in this book, is an attempt to build upon the aforementioned approaches while also making three important new contributions: first, this book argues that labor was the glue that held the Pacific Ocean together. Workers, in both body and mind—real people moving through ocean space and thinking about the world beyond Hawaiʻi—were essential agents of transoceanic integration. The Pacific became a “world” to Hawaiians through Native workers’ migrations, their labors abroad, and the stories and songs that they shared back home about their experiences. To argue otherwise—that Western explorers, the movement of ships, climatic or ecological pressures, the spread of disease, or other factors brought the world to Hawaiʻi—is to deny the agency of the thousands of Native men who traveled to distant corners of the ocean and the surrounding continents and carried aspects of the world beyond Hawaiʻi back home with them in their words, in the things they made, and in their altered bodies.

  Second, the term Hawaiian Pacific World denotes an explicitly national conceptualization of oceanic space, time, and belonging. Pacific World historians have shied away from nationalism. Acknowledging that important events occur both below and above the level of the nation-state, and worrying, rightly so, of any interpretation that “elides native histories and reifies imperial agendas,” scholars have instead called for transnational or “trans-local” approaches to the study of the ocean.28 But such approaches may effectively deny the national claims of indigenous peoples who have long understood their engagement with the world as a crucial aspect of their nation’s story. Furthermore, transnational approaches may give the impression that the ocean is, or was, a neutral space or empty stage upon which diverse peoples have historically come into contact. But, as David Chang has argued, Hawaiians, for example, have long understood the Pacific Ocean as a known realm. They peopled the ocean with their bodies as indigenous explorers, claiming the ocean as a space of Hawaiian storytelling integral to larger narratives of national identity and belonging.29 To say that there was a Hawaiian Pacific World, therefore, is to contend that Hawaiian national history goes beyond the borders of the archipelago, including the supranational spaces lived in, embodied, and transformed by migrant workers and diasporic Islanders. This book therefore presents a national history of Hawaiian engagements with global capitalism. The setting? A large swath of the Pacific Ocean and the surrounding continents, what I call the Hawaiian Pacific World.

  Finally, this conceptualization is grounded in both theories of historical materialism as well as the study of culture. To argue that only material linkages, economic and ecological, made the Pacific a world would deny the importance of Hawaiian workers’ own words, through letters home as well as through stories and songs, in making the world beyond Hawaiʻi legible to other Hawaiians. To argue, oppositely, that only intellectual and cultural understandings of oceanic space and time prove the existence of a larger world is to deny the monumental impact of global capitalism on Hawaiian minds, bodies, and movements. Trade networks, commodity chains, labor migrations, and capital flows, in addition to ocean currents, island ecologies, mineral deposits, and animal habitats all have materially shaped the geography of the world that Hawaiian workers came to know as theirs: a world they lived and labored in and brought home to Hawaiʻi.

  Specific contours of this Hawaiian Pacific World are explored in the chapters that follow. Hawaiian workers moved their bodies north, south, east, and west. Whale workers brought Hawaiian words with them to Alaska and Russia, then returned to Hawaiʻi with songs about ice and snow as well as a penchant for whale blubber and strong drink. Gold miners in California subscribed to Hawaiian-language newspapers, writing letters to editors, then finally receiving their words in print weeks or months later as these newspapers arrived in the mountains of North America. Hawaiian sandalwood cutters came to see the exchange-value of their toil in the fine Chinese cloths and furniture items in a chief’s home in Honolulu. Through labor, workers set a Pacific World in motion.

  They were also one of the most literate working classes in the world. They uniquely wrote about their experiences abroad, and read their comrades’ words and stories in Hawaiian-language newspapers that were printed in Honolulu and shipped out across the ocean, wherever ships sailed. As Hawaiian scholar Noenoe K. Silva has shown, this was a diaspora of newsprint as much as a diaspora of people. Through the circulation of stories and songs, in print as well as through oral cultures, Hawaiians came to see themselves as part of a transoceanic diaspora.30 Workers’ words are crucial to this transoceanic imagining of diasporic Hawaiian space. Indigenous newspapers and Hawaiian-language geography textbooks, as demonstrated by David Chang, mapped out the ocean as a bounded and known world. To some it was ʻĀinamoana, literally “ocean land.”31

  Other people experienced their own Pacific Worlds. There was no one common sense of oceanic space or transoceanic integration shared by all Pacific peoples, indigenous or foreigner. Yet it is also possible to speak of the ocean as an increasingly integral part of the larger processes of globalization. The Hawaiian Pacific World was influenced by forces not just beyond Hawaiʻi, but beyond the Pacific. Capital flowed into Pacific industries from Boston, New York, and London. Specie from Latin America exchanged hands on Hawaiian shores. Consumers in China and the United States touched and tasted Hawaiian-made products. Scholars have traced the emergence of a “world economy” in the early modern era, prior to the period of Hawaiʻi’s integration into that economic system.32 By the nineteenth century, global capitalism had expanded to yet new frontiers, forcing open distant markets and recruiting workers among indigenous societies in Africa, North America, and in Oceania, including Hawaiʻi.33 Globalization did not, and will not, homogenize the world’s peoples into one culture. Rather, contacts and confluences among local and global forces create hybridity as well as “friction.”34 Hawaiians influence the world just as the world influences Hawaiian society. The history of how Native Hawaiians engaged in (and against) the global capita
list economy can tell us something about how globalization was experienced in local, national, and regional contexts, from the shores of Honolulu outward to the far corners of what was then the Hawaiian Pacific World.

  HAWAIIAN CAPITALISM

  Historians have long studied capitalism as a unique mode of production, the way that capital moves across space, transfigures peoples’ sense of time, and drives workers off the land and into new relations of production. Narratives of primitive accumulation, the globalization of labor flows and markets, and the dispossession and proletarianization of indigenous peoples are commonplace themes in nineteenth-century world history.35 As Hawaiians became “enmeshed in the capitalist net” of the global economy, to use Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa’s words, how did indigenous workers and consumers experience this brave new world? What were the unique features of Hawaiian capitalism?36

  The dominant narrative of capitalism in Hawaiʻi focuses on changes in ka ʻāina (the land). Westerners colluded with Native leaders to push through land reforms in the 1840s that privatized millions of acres of the former commons, thereby dispossessing the makaʻāinana, the “people of the land.” This land was initially distributed among the aliʻi only, but soon much of it ended up in the hands of foreign owners. By turning the land into a commodity, Hawaiians lost their land and thereby lost their sovereignty.37 Or so the story goes. This narrative is not false, but there is more. While Hawaiʻi’s capitalist class sought to “free” the land—that is, to convert it into private property—they also simultaneously pushed for “free” trade and “free” labor. Western powers such as the United States and Great Britain employed gunboats to coerce states from the Qing Empire in China to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi to open their ports to foreign commerce. So-called free trade led to the decline of indigenous industries, such as the production of kalo (taro) and kapa (cloth), while consumer debts fostered by increasing global commerce linked both individuals and states to the demands of foreign creditors.38 The dehumanization of the kanaka body, on the other hand, with Christian missionaries seeking to kill the Hawaiian but save the man, and employers’ belief in the nature of Hawaiian men as fit workers, also directed capitalism upon the human body.39 Workers experienced capitalism in intimate, personal ways, from the changing rhythms of working days and seasonal voyages to the changing meanings of once-familiar plants such as sandalwood and sugarcane.40

  Indeed, capitalism conditioned workers’ environmental experiences in revolutionary ways.41 In addition to seeing native plants such as sandalwood and sugarcane transformed by their own hands into globally circulating commodities, Hawaiian laborers also engaged in new relationships with Pacific Ocean animals.42 Migrant workers’ hunt for wages actually turned them into real live hunters. Yet, animals were not just passive victims; they actively disrupted capitalist production through their movements and actions. In Pacific Ocean industries such as whaling and guano mining, human and animal labor collectively co-made the environment as a “workscape,” a fluid and dialectical interface of human and nonhuman inputs.43 Hawaiian migrants also caused environmental damage through their work. Their impact on local environments threatened floral and faunal habitats, disrupted other Native peoples’ lifeways, and even endangered their own ability to exit the wage economy and live off the land and the sea as a commons. Capitalism in Hawaiʻi disrupted and displaced Native Hawaiian relationships with ka ʻāina, but on the flip side it opened the door for common Hawaiians to develop cosmopolitan environmental experiences. Hawaiian migrants accumulated environmental knowledge and wisdom about the wider world that made them ambassadors for sharing stories and songs about the rare and raw natures that flourished beyond Hawaiʻi.44

  But how Hawaiians became migrant wage workers in the first place was a messy process. Hawaiian proletarianization came about only in complex ways.45 As early as the 1810s, some Hawaiians worked for wages while others engaged in corvée labor. Some provided labor to aliʻi as hoʻokupu (tribute) while others labored independently for their own wealth. Some Hawaiians signed contracts aboard foreign ships and even worked overseas for foreign corporations. Hawaiian whale workers often labored for a combined share of total profits as well as a cash advance and sometimes wages for certain work but not for others. These complex entanglements of different modes of production and different relations of production, sometimes in the same places at the same times, marked Hawaiian capitalism as a bottom-up process of increasing engagements with the global economy rather than a top-down process imposed by elites or outsiders upon the people. There was no one moment when Hawaiian commoners became wage workers, and no one factor that propelled them into new forms of labor. In fact, many Hawaiian men sought out these opportunities. Capitalism was certainly embraced by some Hawaiians from the highest chief down to the lowliest worker, while it was also resisted in extraordinarily creative ways, on ships and on plantations all across the Pacific World. Workers lived capitalism in their bodies, in their diets, in the things that they made and they consumed, and in the stories and songs that they told about a changing world.

  ON SOURCES AND ETHICS

  In the 1820s, Christian missionaries from New England brought the printed word to Hawaiʻi. In the 1830s they began to print the Islands’ first English- and Hawaiian-language newspapers. Mission schools trained Hawaiians in ka palapala, reading and writing. Many Hawaiian workers learned to read and write, and their words not only helped to make a Pacific World in the nineteenth century, but they are also crucial tools for reconstructing Hawaiian history in the twenty-first century.

  The government-run newspaper Ka Hae Hawaii (1856–1861) was the first paper to regularly feature letters to the editor by Hawaiian authors. The independent newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa (1861–1927) also regularly featured letters to the editor. These Hawaiian-language letters, written for and published in Honolulu newspapers, are one of the few means available for reconstructing the lives of Native Hawaiian migrant workers in the nineteenth century. From California to equatorial guano islands to wherever ships sailed, Hawaiians abroad frequently sent letters home to let family and friends know about their work experiences. These letters to the editor capture nineteenth-century migrant laborers telling their story in their own words, a rare documentary source for any time period or place, much less nearly two centuries ago at the onset of global capitalism’s influence in the Pacific World. These letters are complemented by archival sources that more often portray foreigners’ points of view. Sometimes records such as ships’ logs, work contracts, and government censuses do not record much beyond the existence of a certain number of “kanakas” at any given place at any time. All available sources—from workers’ writings to Hawaiian-language songs to ships’ logs to employers’ diaries and government reports—are used in this book to tell the story of the thousands of Native men who worked in the global capitalist economy.

  This book includes numerous Hawaiian-to-English translations. The act of translating from one language to another necessarily alters the meanings and messages embodied in words. Especially in the case of Hawaiian-language letters, essays, and songs, any translator is apt to completely miss the kaona (the hidden meaning) of the words and what they meant at the time, if not also what they might mean to ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) speakers today. I am blessed to have had the guidance and encouragement of several gifted teachers in the Hawaiian language. They have patiently read and assisted with these translations. Still, English-language translations do not do justice to Hawaiʻi’s nineteenth-century writers, and I therefore include in the backnotes the original Hawaiian text to accompany each and every English translation. All errors and misrepresentations are entirely my own.

  I first traveled to Hawaiʻi in 2010 as a doctoral student looking for an interesting topic for my dissertation. I spent three days in Honolulu, visiting ʻIolani Palace and the Bishop Museum, and walking around Honolulu’s streets, my head pulsing with thoughts about sandalwood, China, the ocean, history. What was I looking for? I was determin
ed to find an actual sandalwood tree. I spent four days on Kauaʻi looking for one. I was naïve, but more than that, I was reenacting colonialism. Here I was, a white person from the East Coast of the United States, bumbling my way through a foreign land looking for something that I could “sell” as a research project. I did not find an actual sandalwood tree, but I did find a story that propelled me to write this book. I have always wondered whether this is actually my story to tell, and if I am to tell it, how should it be told?