Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  Several years ago, a friend from Hawaiʻi told me about kuleana, a Hawaiian word that means both “privilege” and “responsibility” but cannot be reduced to either translation. She said that I needed to figure out what my kuleana was in regards to this project. She, as well as others, pointed me to the critical work of scholars such as Haunani-Kay Trask, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Julie Kaomea, who have all called for the decolonization of research and writing about Hawaiʻi and the Pacific.46 Here goes: I am not Hawaiian. I am not from Hawaiʻi. As a haole from the mainland, I see that my kuleana is the “privilege” to think and write about the Pacific from the outside looking in, to imagine creative and alternative interpretations to dominant discourses; my kuleana is to bring outside concerns, methodologies, and research questions to bear upon local and indigenous stories, to offer new ways of seeing and to give voice to concerns that may or may not resonate with current stakeholders in the archipelago. These are all privileges that come with great responsibilities. My kuleana is also my “responsibility” to understand that outsider historians for centuries have committed discursive violence against Hawaiians, labeling and interpreting their bodies and behaviors and falsely claiming to speak for them on the privileged academic stage. My kuleana is to respect and pay witness to the historic and contemporary wrongs that have been (and are) committed against Hawaiian people, by academics and by others, including the maintenance and perpetuation of U.S. colonialism and the denial of legitimate Hawaiian claims to self-determination.

  THE STORY

  Chapter 1 begins with the story of the opening of a trans-Pacific triangular trade in the 1780s among the United States, China, and Hawaiʻi. Boki was an aliʻi (ruling chief) and kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu who in the 1820s became obsessed with the sandalwood trade and the riches flowing into Hawaiʻi from the Qing Empire of China. The story of Boki’s predicament—how to ensure enough indigenous sandalwood supply to keep pace with Hawaiian leaders’ increasing consumption of foreign goods and their debts owed American merchants—is our entryway into understanding the emergence of the Pacific World as an integrated segment of the global capitalist economy, and one in which Hawaiian workers took center stage. In the 1840s, Western concepts of free labor and free trade revolutionized the trans-Pacific economy with the imposition of treaty port restrictions on the Qing Empire following the Opium War (1839–1842) and the imposition of a free-labor ideology in Hawaiian land and legal reforms. By 1850, the Māhele—a process of land privatization and redistribution—had dispossessed the majority of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous people, leading many to seek work abroad or on foreign ships.

  Chapter 2 begins with the story of Make, a Native Hawaiian whale worker on an American ship in 1850. Make was just one of thousands of Hawaiian men who served on foreign whaling vessels in the nineteenth century. As the global whaling industry emerged in the period from 1820 to 1860, transoceanic economic and ecological factors conditioned Hawaiian workers’ experiences of both whales and the ocean. Movement and mobility are key to understanding the “whale worlds” inhabited by both Hawaiian workers and migratory whales. Hawaiian migrant workers were modern-day “whale riders.” Their experiences of ocean space and ocean time were influenced not just by global economic and ecological forces, including the geographical distance of the commodity chain from production to consumption, but by the nature of the ocean itself. Our story continues by following the movement of workers from Hawaiʻi to New England and beyond; the movement of whales from feeding grounds to breeding grounds; and the movement of whale parts from sites of production to sites of consumption in the United States.

  From 1848 to 1876, most Hawaiian whale workers toiled in the icy climes of the Arctic Ocean. Chapter 3 begins with the story of Kealoha, a Hawaiian whale worker who in the 1870s lived among the Inupiat of Alaska’s North Slope for over one year. Bodies—both cetacean and human—are a central category of analysis for understanding Hawaiian experiences of Arctic whaling. In the Arctic Ocean, Hawaiian men interacted not only with ice, wind, cold, and snow, but also became intimate with whale anatomy as well as their own bodies through work. European and Euro-American discourses on the kanaka body held that Hawaiian men were not fit for work in nontropical climates, but Kealoha and thousands of other Native men challenged these racialized ideas, proving their fitness and their manliness in the “cold seas” of the North.

  Another front of extractive industry in the 1850s and 1860s was guano mining. Kailiopio was one of approximately one thousand Native Hawaiian men who worked on remote equatorial Pacific Islands mining bird guano. Chapter 4 bridges themes in animal studies and the history of the body to explore the guano workscape. The guano island work environment was a hybrid world made and maintained interdependently by both human and avian actors. Millions of nesting seabirds, and their engagements in transoceanic work—connecting distant feeding grounds with local breeding grounds—constituted the nature of Hawaiian migrant workers’ experiences of this remote world.

  Meanwhile, the California Gold Rush opened up yet another front in the Hawaiian migrant experience. Eighteen-year-old Henry Nahoa wrote a letter home from California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1850s to express his “aloha me ka waimaka [aloha with tears]” to family members in Hawaiʻi. Nahoa was not alone in his tears: at least one thousand Hawaiians migrated to California in the period before, during, and after the Gold Rush. Chapter 5 explores workers’ experiences in Alta California from the 1830s to the 1870s. During this time, men like Nahoa lived and labored under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule. They worked in sea otter hunting, cattle hide skinning, gold mining, and urban and agricultural work, from the coasts to the sierras to cities and farms. Nineteenth-century California was an integral part of the Hawaiian Pacific World.

  Native workers returning to Hawaiʻi in the second half of the nineteenth century found an almost unrecognizable economy and environment. Following the Māhele, Euro-American settlers had made Hawaiʻi their home and were intent on reorganizing labor and land to serve global capitalism. Chapter 6 examines the rise of the sugar plantation system in Hawaiʻi, and how Hawaiʻi’s sugar history—so often linked with histories of U.S. empire—was actually part of the same trans-Pacific story of oceanic industrialization through sandalwooding, whaling, guano mining, and gold mining. But the new migrant workers at this time were not Hawaiian kanakas, they were Chinese coolies. George Beckwith’s plantation at Haʻikū, Maui, is used as a case study for exploring the intersections and entanglements of Hawaiian and Chinese labor in this period. By 1880, Chinese and other non-Natives outnumbered Hawaiian workers in the sugar industry, and across the Pacific World the collapse of extractive industries such as whaling, guano mining, and gold mining left Hawaiʻi’s diasporic working class disjointed and disempowered. The end result was the dismemberment of the Hawaiian working class.

  In the Epilogue to this book, I consider how the story of the rise and fall of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous workers—and the diasporic, migratory nature of their experiences—revolutionizes what we think we know about the place of Hawaiʻi in the Pacific, and the place of the Pacific in the world. I also raise questions about what this story can contribute to twenty-first-century struggles over capitalism and colonialism in Hawaiʻi as well as across our globalizing world.

  ONE

  Boki’s Predicament

  SANDALWOOD AND THE CHINA TRADE

  FRENCH CAPTAIN AUGUSTE DUHAUT-CILLY could not believe his eyes. He was standing inside Boki’s home in Honolulu. From the outside it was humble, built “of wood and straw,” and “quite the same as all other houses in the town of Honolulu.” But “the interior,” he continued, “carpeted with mats like the others, differed only in its European furniture, standing in every corner and mixed with the native furniture. Nothing could have been more strange than to see a magnificent porcelain vase of French manufacture paired with a calabash, a work of nature,” or to see “two hanging mirrors with gilded frames meant to display beauties in their most elegant toile
tte but reflecting instead dark skin half covered with dirty tapa cloth.”1 In other words, Boki’s hale (house) was full of stuff—Native stuff, foreign stuff, simple stuff, exotic stuff.

  Just one year later, Boki was off on a fantastical adventure. In 1829 he outfitted two ships with nearly five hundred men and set sail from Honolulu to Eromanga, an island in the New Hebrides Islands (today’s Vanuatu), thousands of miles to the south. Boki’s intended goal was to harvest Eromangan sandalwood. Sandalwood paid for all the nice things that Boki had in his home. But Boki never made it back home. Some speculated that his ship was lost at sea; others that he had fled to live out his years in exile.2 Boki faced an awful predicament. He and the other aliʻi (chiefs)—the men and women of Hawaiʻi’s ruling class—had purchased so many goods from foreign ships and foreign merchants that they now owed tremendous debt to American creditors. The U.S. Navy had just recently sailed a gunship into Honolulu Harbor to support American private business, coercing the Hawaiian government to give up their wood. Everybody wanted sandalwood. Throughout the 1820s, Boki and the other aliʻi forced thousands of Hawaiian men to cut wood in the mountains on every Hawaiian Island, and still they were not able to pay off their debts. Only by conquering and colonizing a foreign land, and by taking their wood, he reasoned, could the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi free itself from the grasp of American economic predation and imperialist maneuvering.

  This was Boki’s predicament. But more broadly, it is also the story of how capitalism came to Hawaiʻi. This narrative involves thousands of actors spanning the globe. It pairs northern Chinese fur consumers with southern Chinese merchants in the great emporium of Guangzhou (Canton). It matches European and Euro-American ships and their crews to the men and women of Hawaiʻi who willingly and often unwillingly fed appetites for exploitation. The narrative also involves thousands of Hawaiian workers, accustomed to an indigenous political economy based on agricultural and household production, who now sailed away on ships at sea, lived and worked abroad in foreign lands, and climbed into the mountains of their own land to cut down trees so that other people could buy mirrors and porcelain vases.

  This is the story of how Hawaiian land and labor became part of the Pacific World, linked to the global economy through ships, salt, sea otters, and sandalwood, and through the labor of thousands of Hawaiians who by the second half of the nineteenth century had become “free,” a landless proletariat set adrift upon the ocean to find work wherever they could.

  SHIPS, SALT, AND SEA OTTERS

  Some say that Captain Cook discovered Hawaiʻi in 1778. But it was also the other way around. Hawaiians discovered the world. By 1800, Hawaiians had met people and consumed goods from China, North America, Europe, and Latin America, and some had even traveled to these places to see it for themselves. After Hawaiians killed Cook in 1779, his crew continued onward, selling sea otter furs that they had harvested on the northwest coast of North America at the great emporium of Guangzhou (Canton), the main commercial entrepôt of the Qing Empire.3 Within one decade, multiple ships of European and American origin began visiting Hawaiʻi as part of a new trans-Pacific fur-and-tea trade among China, the northwest coast of North America, Hawaiʻi, and points Atlantic.4 These ships called at Hawaiʻi in order to procure “refreshments”: fresh fruits, fresh water, and fresh bodies—women for sexual pleasure and men for manual labor.

  Foreigners visiting late eighteenth-century Hawaiʻi encountered a unique land, with a distinctive mode of production. Hawaiians structured relationships of land and labor according to indigenous economic values and longstanding religious and cultural traditions. In eighteenth-century Hawaiʻi there were, broadly speaking, two major socioeconomic classes. Relations of production were divided among makaʻāinana (commoners) and aliʻi (chiefs). The makaʻāinana lived on the common lands of ahupuaʻa, pie-cut-shaped districts, in which commoners had access to the resources of upland forests, lowland valleys (suitable for agriculture), and near-shore fisheries. Hawaiians’ bodily labor was not, however, directed solely toward subsistence, as commoners were also required to periodically give hoʻokupu (tribute) to aliʻi who, on their behalf, maintained proper relations with nā akua (the gods) who, in turn, ensured the fertility of the land. This circular process—what historian Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa has called mālama ʻāina (care for the land)—was dependent upon the pono conduct of all parties. Pono, a salient concept in Hawaiian political economy, is often translated as “just” or “proper,” but it also implies a state of balance that can be both ecological as well as bodily. It refers to things being the way they are supposed to be. In summary, the key peoples in Hawaiʻi’s indigenous economy were the two classes, makaʻāinana and aliʻi, and a key moral value was pono, the “right conduct” that governed relations of production between classes as well as relationships among ka ʻohana (the family), ka ʻāina (the land), and ke kino (the body).5

  Commoners’ tribute most often took the form of corvée labor. Aliʻi periodically requisitioned labor for building fishponds or heiau (temples) or to serve as foot soldiers in intra-Hawaiian wars. In the nineteenth century, under the rule of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (until government reforms in the 1840s), makaʻāinana were required to pay a labor tax that built upon this tradition of hoʻokupu. Penal labor was also a feature of early Kingdom rule. Hawaiian commoners were often forced—either as corvée or as convicts—to labor in state-owned industries such as sandalwood harvesting or at the royal salt works at Āliapaʻakai, Oʻahu.6

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, traditional labor practices and class relations were already changing. Two commodities irrevocably changed Hawaiʻi’s place within the global economy. One was found in abundance in Hawaiʻi: salt. The other was only available thousands of miles away: the fur of the sea otter (Enhydra lutris). In many ways, trade in sea otter pelts is what made the Pacific World go round in the late eighteenth century.7 The players in this grand dance were manifold. There was the Qing Empire. They were at the powerful, strategic epicenter of the fur-and-tea trade. The Qing had what everyone else in the world wanted: tea. In return, there were a few things that they would accept from foreign traders but many that they would not; sea otter furs were a rare desired item. Two other major players, Great Britain and the United States, were compulsively addicted to tea (and to sugar, too, altogether creating a veritable maelstrom of Atlantic and Pacific economic conjunctures: tea, sea otter furs, African slavery, Hawaiian labor—all part of a grand narrative of globalization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). To get Chinese tea, British and American merchants extracted ginseng from northeastern American forests, sea otter furs from northwestern American bays and coves, sandalwood from Pacific Islands, and so on.8 The Russian empire was also a player in this grand dance: they sold mammalian furs to the Qing as early as the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, the Russian empire expanded across the Pacific Ocean into uppermost North America. They extracted sea otter furs from the North Pacific, just as the British and Americans did in the Columbia River region. Russians, Brits, and Americans even variously (and tenuously) worked together at times to get sea otter furs to market.9

  All of these world powers—China, Russia, Britain, the United States—were simultaneously dependent on Hawaiʻi. There were no sea otters in Hawaiian waters, but Hawaiʻi had provisions. To get sea otter furs across the great ocean, foreign traders needed a midway rest stop: they needed a place where they could acquire fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh water, and labor. The late eighteenth-century trans-Pacific fur-and-tea trade was intimately dependent on Hawaiian labor and Hawaiian resources. Some Hawaiian migrant workers traveled to the northwest coast of North America to assist with the sea otter hunt, while others simply sought ways to accumulate wealth via the provisioning of biological and mineral resources to passing ships. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, almost every European or Euro-American vessel crossing the ocean between the Americas and China alighted in Hawaiʻi. By one scholar’s reckoning, as many as
forty-five ships visited Hawaiʻi in the years between 1786 and 1800.10

  Hawaiian workers traveled abroad on some of these ships. For example, while stopped in the Islands in January 1808, John Suter of the ship Pearl reported recruiting six Native men to go with him to the northwest coast of North America to hunt sea otters: “I Ship’d one man, at the Islands, Six of the Natives. I arrived on the Coast the 18th of Feby.” John C. Jones, U.S. consul to the Hawaiian Kingdom, wrote from Honolulu in 1821 that “all vessels on the [northwest] coast now have got double crews,” referring to the equal recruitment of Hawaiians alongside Yankee seamen aboard sea otter hunting ships. “The Brig Frederick, Capt Stetson sailed from here yesterday, who came to these Islands from the Coast, for the purpose only of getting more men for himself & Capt Clark, he has taken away about twenty” Hawaiian men. These Hawaiian workers in the early decades of the nineteenth century were the first significant wave of labor to expand the reaches of the Hawaiian Pacific World.11

  In Hawaiʻi, the indigenous political economy was also transformed as Hawaiians began to produce the Islands’ first export commodity. The significance of salt was directly related to the sea otter fur trade. Salt was absent—at least in easily extractable crystalized form—from the coasts inhabited by sea otters. Geography thus inconvenienced those who would seek to preserve sea otter skins and turn them into dollars and cents, but this haphazard geography was a boon for Hawaiians. Traders alighting in Hawaiʻi found tons of salt for the taking. In the coming decades, Hawaiian aliʻi ordered salt extracted and piled up at Kawaihae on Hawaiʻi Island and at Āliapaʻakai near Honolulu on Oʻahu.12