With Hawaiʻi’s environment thrown out of balance by the Māhele, as seen through the eyes of observers such as Hoikeike, diseases like maʻi Pākē thrived and spread unchecked across the archipelago. “The work everywhere is for making things pono,” Hoikeike pleaded. But the balance between humans and nature previously maintained by mālama ʻāina (care for the land) was now in flux. The introduction of Chinese migrant labor, in many Hawaiians’ eyes, had the result of even further destabilizing ka pono o ka ʻāina (the pono of the land). “It is perhaps pono there” in Honolulu still, Hoikeike pondered, but in Lāhainā where the disease was spreading, ka pono o ke kino (the pono of the body) was under assault. “The people fond of beauty,” he thought, “will not be pono, [for] the old friend [death/disease] has come.” Their bodies will be disfigured, and they will become walking embodiments of the Kingdom’s fall from grace.45
As Chinese disease spread, so did confusion as to how it spread, and how it could possibly be prevented. Hoikeike called it a maʻi lele, literally a “jumping disease,” suggesting it was highly communicable. It jumps “from one kanaka to another,” he wrote. “It is not however a sudden jump, [but] actually very slow.” One year later, the newspaper Ka Hoku o Ka Pakipika published an article reporting that it had not yet spread to Honolulu, but the disease’s spread was under careful observation. Unfortunately, as they admitted at the start of their article, “we certainly are not able at this time to clearly state [even] one clear thing regarding this disease.” The paper reported that “the Board of Health [of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi] will reflect upon this disease, and they will determine that which is pono.”46
In March 1865, the independent Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa published a letter from J.H. Kaonowai “Concerning the people with the wicked Chinese disease.” Relationships between Chinese and Hawaiian bodies were a central concern for the Hawaiian working class, and Kaonowai’s letter comes closest to placing blame for the disease squarely on the sugar economy’s new migrant workforce. He referred to Chinese disease as a seed, a “greatly wicked seed, now growing in every part of the land,” and wrote that “here the Chinese lumpy disease [leprosy] was seeded.” Like sugarcane, leprosy was “seeded” in Hawaiian soil, suggesting the close relationship that some Hawaiians perceived between the spread of the disease and the agricultural industry’s importation of Chinese workers. Kaonowai suggested how he thought the disease moved from one body to the next, with “the working of every Chinese-diseased person in peddling food, with their blending/mixing in the wicked ehu [ʻehu; spray/foam/mist/dust/pollen] of the disease inside of the food, and carrying [it] into the city here, the place of the public for buying and selling with the good [healthy] people.”47
Kaonowai was outraged that Chinese-diseased people were drifting into Honolulu from the countryside, “blending in” or “mixing in” their “wicked ehu” in the food that was sold on street corners. Here, another boundary—the boundary between city and country; the boundary between diseased people and “good people”—was violated. The boundary between the inside and outside of the diseased person’s body was also crossed, for the ʻehu of the disease was released from the body and absorbed into the food that passed hands in unbounded marketplaces. Ka ʻehu can mean “spray,” “foam,” “mist,” “dust,” and/or “pollen”; it is airborne, and in this case, contagious. In Kaonowai’s perspective, it was the responsibility of the diseased to police their own ʻehu. When the ʻehu appeared in the food of city peddlers, a line was crossed and rural migrants from the countryside were to blame. If maʻi Pākē revealed rifts between Hawaiian and Chinese workers, it also revealed simmering class tensions between urban and rural Hawaiians on the island of Oʻahu.48
“This disease is Chinese,” Kaonowai confidently wrote, “a very wicked disease, a truly greatly festering disease. That [information is] from a wealthy ‘Pake’ in speaking of the ones of [his] land in China having acquired this wicked disease.” In Kaonowai’s account, a wealthy “Pake” (a Chinese man) in Honolulu explained to him that the disease was carried by Chinese persons, presumably working-class Chinese. Here, too, class tensions are revealed not just within the Hawaiian community but in the Chinese community, between the urban Chinese merchants in Honolulu and the coolies in the cane fields. Perhaps this “wealthy Pake” looked down upon the coolie Chinese and sought to blame them for maʻi Pākē. In Honolulu society in 1865, stories of maʻi Pākē undoubtedly circulated by word of mouth in even greater frequency than they did in print. Everyone had their own interpretation of the disease and who was to blame; every interpretation was situated within a context of racial and class tensions engendered by the sugar industry.49
Kaonowai concluded his letter to Ka Nupepa Kuokoa with a public call for the Kingdom’s Board of Health to respond to this crisis. “It is pono,” he wrote, “to severely quarantine the people who have obtained the Chinese disease.” A law should be promulgated, he suggested, that the “carrying of the food in this city by them is not pono.” That was February 1865. By June, the board had acted. Instead of focusing on the policing of street vendors and rural migrants in the city—a problem that dated back to the 1840s and was never subject to government surveillance—the Board of Health focused instead on quarantining everyone known to have the disease. In June, Ke Au Okoa, the official Hawaiian-language newspaper of the Kingdom, reported that there were people living on every island in the archipelago with Hansen’s disease; the total number infected was over two hundred and fifty persons. In response, the legislature passed an “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy.” It stipulated that a quarantine station should be established in the city of Honolulu, and a remote place on the edge of an island shall be deemed a permanent home for the incurable. That place became Kalaupapa peninsula, on the north shore of Molokaʻi. Over the next one hundred years, thousands of subjects of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (and later the United States) were forcibly removed to Kalaupapa to live the rest of their lives in this leper colony. Although the disease itself was “Chinese,” as many Hawaiians pointed out, the great majority of those afflicted and sent to Molokaʻi were Hawaiian. In fact, during the period 1866 to 1893, when the leper colony was administered by the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, over 90 percent of the exiled were Hawaiian.50
In the battle between Hawaiian bodies and Chinese bodies, the supposed porosity of the coolie body, as manifested by the spread of maʻi Pākē, ultimately engendered the permanent disfigurement and displacement of thousands of Hawaiian bodies. It was a decisive win for Chinese migrant workers. By what only may have been a strange coincidence, that same year (1865) the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi began a concerted effort to import even more Chinese into the Hawaiian Islands. While they forcibly sent thousands of Hawaiians away to what one writer called “the land of the skeletons,” they simultaneously sought to replace the dead and dying with a new race of workers from afar.51
David Kalākaua, the future mōʻī of the Kingdom (r. 1874–1891), spearheaded this effort. Ostensibly, the Hawaiian state’s push to import coolies in 1865 was for the purpose of procuring labor for the growing sugar industry. But, in actuality, this people trade was also about something else. The Hawaiian state’s interest in Chinese migrants, an interest that came into conflict with the state’s other interest in protecting its indigenous people, was rationalized as an effort to save the Hawaiian “race” from extinction. Native and foreign elites presented the coolie trade as a solution to Hawaiʻi’s most existential threat: the inevitable auto-genocide of the Native Hawaiian. The people trade therefore was not just about importing and reselling human beings as commodities in support of capitalism. The state also simultaneously held hopes that Chinese coolies, as biological agents, would do what bodies do best: reproduce. Unlike southern planters in the United States who worked hard to ensure that black slaves reproduced new slaves for coming generations, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi did not necessarily want Chinese workers to reproduce more Chinese. Instead, they wanted the Chinese to intermarry with Hawai
ians and produce a new super race, a Chinese-Hawaiian amalgam. The science of Chinese bodies in the 1860s included this early eugenicist program. Hawaiian leaders such as Kalākaua not only sought to create a super race of workers to provide for capitalist growth in the Islands, but on a much deeper level, they feared that the Kingdom’s sovereignty would be compromised if the indigenous population went extinct. There was strength in numbers. And there was also a rising tide of foreigners settling in the archipelago. Hence, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi began to actively search for a “cognate race” to interbreed with the Hawaiians. The only way to save the Hawaiian was to mix in the blood of another more viable people. This issue concerned the Kingdom from the 1860s until its overthrow in 1893. For much of that time, the campaign for a cognate race focused on the Chinese.52
Kalākaua was secretary of Ka Papa Hoʻopae Lima Hana, literally the “Board to Land Laborers,” often glossed in English as the “Board of Immigration.” The Hawaiian title is actually closer to the board’s mission: to import and “land” foreign labor onto Hawaiian soil. The Hawaiian Kingdom established this board in 1864. Interestingly, this was the same year that the United States established its own federal Bureau of Immigration. This was not a coincidence. In the United States the age of black slavery had finally come to an end, and the United States sought to recruit European wage workers from across the Atlantic Ocean to take the slaves’ place. In the Pacific, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi sought to recruit Chinese workers from across the ocean to take the indigenous workers’ place. Whether in Washington, D.C., or in Honolulu, the 1860s witnessed a global shift in labor regimes. Kalākaua’s Board to Land Laborers was one manifestation of this moment in world history.53
In July 1865, Kalākaua wrote to Ke Au Okoa to state that “the Hon. W. Hillebrand” (William Hillebrand) has written “from China” with news of the “success of his work.” Hillebrand was “hopeful in the possibility of sending 500 Worker Chinese, perhaps twenty or thirty women within the one hundred.” Local Christians in Hawaiʻi were opposed to the people trade, likening the commodification of Chinese immigrants to slavery. But the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was not engaged in a slave trade, Kalākaua argued. “Although [there is] a wicked name and a hatred of the people connected to the sale of Worker Chinese if an independent party handles the transaction,” the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s efforts on the other hand were different. These coolies would be treated humanely, “in the management within its [the Kingdom’s] hand[s] and underneath its mana [power].”54
If Kalākaua sought to deflect attention from the fact that Chinese men and women were bought and sold as commodities in Hawaiʻi, he let his guard down in the next paragraph. “The Board to Land Laborers is calling out, to the people who want Chinese Laborers, for the sugar plantation, workers, and perhaps kauwa [kauā], to be set aside for them, at request to the Board, and with the payment of 10 dollars in advance, for all Chinese Kauwa[,] men or perhaps [even] women.” Kalākaua was asking potential employers to apply to the board to receive coolies. The board was advertising “workers, and perhaps kauwa.” Kauā is the Hawaiian term for “servant” but can also mean “slave.” Perhaps kauā here referred to domestic servants: coolies who would serve in elite haole family homes rather than dirty their hands in the cane fields. Whatever the case, the use of the term kauā, the same term used to describe African-American slaves in the United States, is surprising. As Kalākaua stated, employers simply had to pay a deposit of ten dollars and then “that Chinese kauwa or this kauwa” would be theirs. There was no denying that the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was now involved in the business of selling human labor.55
This new push for coolies was grounded in an ongoing conversation about race, biology, and Hawaiian and Chinese bodies in Hawaiʻi. In 1854, Prince Alexander Liholiho, nephew of Kauikeaouli [Kamehameha III], addressing the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, claimed that “man, the highest of all animals, being nevertheless subject to certain laws, in common with pigs, monkies and what not, the result of the intermixture of two races, or of long separate families of the same race, cannot but increase the ratio of fecundity.” In this case, the prince was promoting the intermixture of two “races” of people, Hawaiian and Chinese. This may have been the first public call by a Hawaiian official for the admixture of Chinese and Hawaiian “races,” but it was not the last.56
Haole advisors to the Kingdom embraced Prince Alexander Liholiho’s ideas of race admixture. At the following year’s meeting of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, Doctor Hillebrand addressed the society and reinforced the prince’s eugenicist ideas. By that time the Hawaiian prince had succeeded to the throne as Kamehameha IV; as mōʻī, he was in a position of great power to shape Hawaiian policy toward the coolie trade. Hillebrand, in his remarks, argued that the importation of Chinese labor was a good thing. “As house servants they are particularly valuable. But it is a question, whether their constant increase in this country is not fraught with evil. Their moral degredation, thievish propensities and turbulence render them an undesirable admixture to the social stock of our islands.” This was a different position than Kamehameha IV’s. Hillebrand essentialized Chinese workers as characterized by a peculiar “nature” that included “thievish propensities.” He argued that these characteristics would likely transfer to the Hawaiians if racial admixture were pursued. Furthermore, asserted Hillebrand, “the Chinese never amalgamates with other races; but, like the Jew, retains his national habits and characteristics. He imparts more than he accepts.”
Ultimately, however, the Hawaiian “race” needed Chinese blood. “So long as no females of their own race migrate hither, the evil may be considered remediable,” Hillebrand argued, because that way the Chinese will not produce more Chinese (with attendant bad habits and morals). “Perhaps it may be asserted, in their favor,” he concluded, “that their intermixture with Hawaiians will impart to these some of their industrious habits.” There was a lot at stake in the consideration of mixing Hawaiians and Chinese, Hillebrand noted, but as long as Chinese men were forced to intermarry with Hawaiian women, planters and government could expect that the offspring would be endowed with the Chinese’s unique “industrious habits.”57
It was, of course, a ridiculous claim: that Hawaiian-Chinese biracial children would be more industrious than their Hawaiian parents simply because of their embodiment of Chinese blood. But it is what Hillebrand and so many other officials and elites believed. This discourse not only circulated among the elite of Hawaiʻi, but even among commoners. Hawaiian-language newspapers frequently printed commentary on the eugenicist question. As a baseline, in the early 1860s it seems that Hawaiian readers (and authors and editors) struggled with the simple task of even defining what kind of Chinese these coolies were. An 1860 editorial in the government newspaper Ka Hae Hawaii, on “The Abuse of the Chinese,” painted coolies as an exploited people: they were victims of violence, and yet somehow also naturally prone to violence themselves. “They are a slave people, and they have been sold like goods like the negroes of the southern lands of the United States,” the article asserted. “If one gazed upon the sinners living in the Prison in Honolulu here, this matter [is] made clear to them, because, the Chinese that are imprisoned are numerous. These people have been called ‘chink Chinese.’” They were an unwanted people, the author stated. The implication was that they are not the kind of people that Hawaiians should want living and reproducing in their midst. “The merchant Chinese, they are a completely different people,” however; “they keep quiet and greatly care for the Laws of the land, and these people are called, ‘Vancouver Chinese.’” This class difference between “chink Chinese” and “Vancouver Chinese” was racialized in the writer’s eyes. These were two different “types” of Chinese—two different “races” almost—and Hawaiians should be careful when deciding which ones they want to amalgamate with their families.58
In 1868, the English-language missionary newspaper The Friend weighed in. The Friend reported that the Kingdom, now und
er the rule of Kamehameha IV’s brother, Lot (Kamehameha V), had taken positive steps to ensure that imported Chinese laborers were treated fairly. It was also apparent that Lot had the same interest as his brother in mixing Chinese and Hawaiians. “His Majesty,” The Friend reported, “alludes to the appropriation of funds by the Legislative Assembly for ‘introducing immigrants of a kindred race.’” The Friend’s position was that “we should deprecate any system of compulsion, or any system which did not embrace whole families. We do not believe the introduction of a large number of male laborers alone from any country into the Hawaiian Islands will prove advantageous to our islands and aboriginal community.” “We want laborers,” the paper concluded, “but at the same time we desire to see growing up a healthy, moral and religious community.” Apparently, the introduction of Chinese contract labor into the islands, and the coupling of Chinese men with Hawaiian women, promised to disrupt the “health,” “morality,” and “religiosity” of Hawaiian society. This editorial suggested that “families” rather than individuals should be enticed to come voluntarily, that they will be taught Christianity and uplifted from the darkness they inhabit at home. But, The Friend was firmly against an unregulated, wild admixture of Chinese and Hawaiian bodies.59
One year later, in late 1869, The Friend published another take on “The Labor Question.” “It is certainly desirable that persons who are brought or attracted here to raise sugar, or engage in other labor, should be such as will readily affiliate with the Hawaiian people. The only apparent means of rescuing the native population from speedy extinction is by the infusion into them of other blood.” Just years earlier the missionary newspaper had advocated the abolition of the coolie trade and the voluntary recruitment of Chinese families. By the end of the decade, The Friend was convinced that the Hawaiian “race” was in need of an “infusion.” New blood would “build up from them and immigrants,” Hawaiians and Chinese together, “a new nation in which they will be one of the prominent constituent elements.”60
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 25