FIGURE 20. Immigrant Arrivals in Hawaiʻi, 1852–1893. Source: Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1977), 97–98. Compiled by the author.
This demographic shift was evidenced on the local level. From one plantation to the next, workforces shifted in the 1870s from Hawaiian majorities to Chinese pluralities (if not outright Chinese majorities). On the island of Kauaʻi, the Lihue Plantation Company (in Līhu‘e, Kauaʻi) had a largely Hawaiian workforce in the early 1870s. Although they had hired a Chinese cook as early as 1866, it was not until 1870 that they hired twenty or so Chinese workers to work alongside the Hawaiians. By 1874, the company’s payroll book listed over ninety Hawaiians workers. The payroll book also revealed that Līhuʻe had seven or eight Japanese workers as of 1874. The Japanese were also listed on the payroll alongside “Honolulu men,” a group of 21 Hawaiian workers listed separately from the main group of Native workers. The Honolulu men engaged in night work (keeping guard over the plantation during evening hours). In October 1874, the payroll book recorded the “Pay day of Women in Employ of [the] Lihue Plantation Co[mpany].” This list included the names of 13 Hawaiian women. All told, as of 1874, the Līhu‘e plantation had mostly Hawaiian workers in its employ, men and women; Chinese and Japanese workers were also present, but they represented a fraction of the company’s labor force.76
Post-reciprocity, the plantation’s demographics rapidly shifted. Just six months after the treaty took effect, the Līhu‘e plantation’s payroll book listed the “Pay day of Chinese & Bolabola & Guano & Spanish in Employ of [the] Lihue Plantation.” This strange category referred to the total non-Hawaiian workforce. (The “Bolabola” men were presumably Tahitians; “Guano” workers likely I-Kiribati from Micronesia; “Spanish” workers, ironically, Portuguese.) Meanwhile, the company maintained a separate list of Japanese workers, all 14 of them.77 The Lihue Plantation Company still employed over 130 Hawaiian workers. But by mid-1878, the “Chinese &c” population (Chinese and non-Hawaiians) had overcome the Hawaiian population to become the dominant work force on the plantation. Hawaiians were a minority.78 Similar post-reciprocity trends were evident on the Honokaa Sugar Company plantation, located in Honokaʻa on the island of Hawaiʻi. Their 1875–1877 cash book listed 20 Hawaiian workers, and no workers of any other race. In 1877 the Honokaʻa company hired its first Chinese worker. The number of Hawaiians in the employ of the company decreased steadily thereafter, from a high of 36 workers in March to a low of 20 in August. The company purged their Hawaiians and replaced them with Chinese. In September 1877 the company was employing 21 Hawaiians versus 18 Chinese workers. By March 1878 the company had 54 Chinese. By the turn of 1879, the company’s payroll book lists 29 “white men,” 40 Hawaiians, and 55 Chinese. This is how Hawaiians became a minority in their own land. By 1876 they were no longer needed or wanted for employment abroad; they were no longer needed or wanted for employment at home. A combination of Hawaiian resistance and coolie-mania resulted in the dissolution of the Hawaiian working class.79
The story of sugar’s first half-century in Hawaiʻi is not the one we might expect. Euro-American planter-capitalists did not just barge right in, take ownership over the land, import foreign workers, and lure Hawaiʻi into the global capitalist economy. Rather, plantation owners and managers experimented and failed over and over again. Hawaiian and Chinese workers alike threw up roadblocks to capitalist success: they deserted, they fought back, they got sick, and sometimes they even killed themselves; they rejected the food, they refused to give up their kalo fields or lease their cattle. They did not combine and rise up en masse against the capitalist elite. But they engaged in everyday forms of resistance that made sugar plantation management, in George Beckwith’s estimation, very pilikia.
Throughout the nineteenth century, both Native leaders and haole elites sought to discipline Hawaiian workers’ mobility and freedom. They attempted to keep Hawaiians from going to California and elsewhere abroad, hoping instead that they might proletarianize in place—that the Māhele might make domestic wage workers out of them. Some even thought that this would improve their health and increase the reproduction of the nation. Yet at the same time haole discourses about the kanaka body had seeped so deeply into Hawaiian national discourse that both Native and haole elites alike did not believe that indigenous workers were capable of serving the nation as a permanent working class. Certain of the Native worker’s inevitable extinction, capitalists and the state joined forces to import Chinese workers to take the Hawaiians’ place. They hoped that Chinese “blood” would reinvigorate the nation, and that Chinese labor would bring great profit to the Kingdom and its supporters. But as haole planters and Hawaiian officials lined up behind the importation of Chinese coolies, they turned their back on Hawaiʻi’s indigenous working class. The great age of the Hawaiian worker—and the Hawaiian Pacific World—was over.
Epilogue
LEGACIES OF CAPITALISM AND COLONIALISM
IN THE LATE NINETEENTH and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of Hawaiians voluntarily migrated to the deserts of Utah in the western United States. They sought to join up with other followers of the Mormon Church.1 Over one hundred years later, thousands of Hawaiians are migrating again to the deserts of the United States. In 2010, the U.S. federal census noted that the tiny city of Eloy, Arizona, halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, had the largest percentage increase of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander people of any census district in the entire country. From just eleven Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders in 2000, the population had jumped to nearly one thousand in 2010. By 2013, the Hawaiian population of Eloy had reached nearly two thousand.2 What explains this rapid growth in the Hawaiian diaspora?
Unlike in the nineteenth century, these specific transoceanic migrants are not wage laborers. Rather they are prisoners of the State of Hawaiʻi, forcibly exiled to a private prison three thousand miles away from home. In 2007, the State of Hawaiʻi partnered with the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit correctional company in the United States. Together, they designed and built a jail in the middle of the Sonoran desert specifically for Native Hawaiian “criminals.” It is cheaper, the State of Hawaiʻi argues, to lock up Hawaiians abroad rather than in the Islands. The CCA has promised “cultural sensitivity” for diasporic inmates, yet reports regularly suggest that Native Hawaiian inmates face violence, are denied the right to practice their faith, and are prohibited from reading and writing in the Hawaiian language.3
The State of Hawaiʻi’s biopolitical regime extends far beyond the removal of Native men to a private prison in Arizona. Back in the Islands, only a small percentage of Native Hawaiians control the means of production; in other words, few own property or capital that they can use to feed themselves and their families. Indeed, houselessness is rampant in Hawaiʻi. Thousands of Native people live on the beach, on the streets, or in emergency housing. Some, such as those at Mākua Beach on Oʻahu, have defiantly resisted state power, refusing to cede their rights to the land. These so-called squatters are routinely arrested and evicted from the last vestiges of an indigenous commons.4 Homeless foreigners likewise may soon be put on airplanes with one-way tickets, paid for by the State of Hawaiʻi, to be shipped back to the mainland, if some politicians have their way.5 And despite a nearly one hundred-year-old federal law that guarantees the right of Hawaiians to at least some of their land, only a fraction of the Hawaiian homelands have been redistributed from the government back to the Native people.6
The nineteenth-century enclosure of the commons, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the increasing legal circumscription of workers’ movements, the harsh discipline of workplace violence, the commodification of nature and the body, the marriage of private capital and the state, the biopolitics of eugenics and genocide: these are legacies of nineteenth-century Hawaiian capitalism that continue to reverberate in twenty-first-century colonial Hawaiʻi.
But what was once the gr
eat strength of ka lāhui (the nation) in the nineteenth century—its migrant, diasporic workers—remains just as true today, albeit largely unrecognized. The 2010 U.S. census recorded more Hawaiians living in the continental United States than in Hawaiʻi itself. This is a nation in perpetual diaspora. Today’s migrant workers cross the ocean more frequently than their ancestors did, on airplanes rather than on ships. Young Hawaiians pursue higher education on the mainland. Some migrate for jobs. Tens of thousands are born in the diaspora. Some have never even seen Hawaiʻi.7
In the nineteenth century, thousands of Hawaiians left Hawaiʻi to work on ships and in nā ‘āina ‘ē (foreign lands). Through movement, they connected disparate peoples, places, and processes into an interwoven Hawaiian Pacific World. In the sandalwood trade, they began to transition from makaʻāinana into a working class, from forced and coerced labor into “free” labor. Workers began demanding money in exchange for work. They learned to see the profit in trees, salt, and furs. In the whaling industry, thousands of Hawaiians traveled as far as the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, and Japan in pursuit of whales and wages. They learned about contracts, advances, slop, and debt. They sang songs about the world’s many oceans and continents. In the Arctic, thousands proved their manliness and the strength of their “race” in the face of a debilitating haole discourse and a dangerous work environment. They connected Hawaiʻi to Alaska and facilitated the transmigration of words, liquor, and music. They engaged in violence against other Native peoples. In the guano industry, one thousand Hawaiians struggled to make a home for themselves in a deserted corner of their diaspora, learning how to survive until the next boat came. In California, Hawaiian men pioneered towns and cities, worked for contracts and as day laborers, and joined the great exodus for the mines in the mountains. After the Gold Rush, many tasted the bitter pill of deindustrialization, their surplus bodies languishing on beaches and on the street. They were arrested and evicted; their own government even sought to have them deported back to Hawaiʻi. Washed up onshore, they became homeless, unemployed, or incarcerated. Their late nineteenth-century condition is reflected in today’s haunting mirror, as “surplus” and “precarity” define the working class’s descent into a permanent underclass. Encampments on a beach and prison cells in a foreign desert represent integral nodes in an ever-expanding Hawaiian diaspora—a diaspora no longer built upon labor alone, but realized through displacement, marginalization, and incarceration. The past becomes the present.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was on a path toward major revolutions in political economy, fundamentally altering the bonds between Native Hawaiians and global capitalism. The Māhele land reforms, coupled with concurrent legal reforms that encouraged contract labor and criminalized idleness, set the stage for the decline of the Native worker in the global economy, as industrial winds shifted from extractive industries to a plantation-based economy. Native workers thrived in the trans-Pacific extractive economy. Sandalwooding, whaling, salt mining, guano mining, sea otter hunting, and gold mining relied on site-specific modes of production in which capital and labor were brought in from the outside to exploit an endemic natural resource. Kanaka bodies, racialized as amphibious labor suitable for maritime work, were in high demand in all of these industries. They could work their way to and from sites of extraction by serving as sailors on foreign ships, and in riparian and nearshore industries they were believed to be highly suited for moving things into and out of the water, from diving for gold to carrying cattle hides high above their heads. The plantation economy, unlike extractive industries, was not so site-specific. Instead of bringing capital and labor to bear upon a unique natural resource, sugar planters simply sought the land itself. They could transform the land into a commodity and grow monocultural crops upon it. The Māhele and concurrent labor reforms alienated both land and labor in Hawaiʻi, allowing the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society to imagine Hawaiʻi as an empty place, devoid of both products and producers. From the beginning, Native leaders and foreign elites both knew that their plantation dreams rested on the reality of mass importation of foreign labor. Thus, within the span of one generation, Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry transitioned from an almost exclusively indigenous workforce to a laboring population dominated by Chinese migrants. Meanwhile, as petroleum replaced whale oil, menhaden replaced guano, and industrial farming replaced gold, few Hawaiians in the 1870s and 1880s could still imagine, as their forefathers did, that the world was at their fingertips. Ships came for sugar, not for workers. Land, not labor—plantations, not people—was the new name of the game in the rapidly evolving Pacific World.
By the early twentieth century, work, for many Hawaiians, meant cultural labor. A tourist industry blossomed around the commodification of indigenous practices and Native bodies. Foreign people paid money to see Hawaiian men surf, to watch Hawaiian women dance, to eat Hawaiian foods, to experience indigenous aloha. Following the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893 by haole usurpers, in what the U.S. government called “an act of war,” Hawaiian independence activist Joseph Nāwahī warned that “we have been ousted by trespassers who entered our house and who are telling us to go and live in a lei stand that they think to build and force us all into. I am telling you, my fellow citizens, we should not agree in the least.” But the convergence of settler colonialism and capitalism was so strong that many Hawaiians did, in fact, turn to cultural work, such as selling lei, in order to make a living. Foreigners at the dawn of the twentieth century defined the Hawaiian people as a race “losing its identity,” beset by “indolence” and “decadence.” “Hawaiian unskilled laborers,” one writer stated, “are, to a great extent, an unattached and irresponsible part of the community, with few family ties or common bonds of interest with the rest of their people except that of race.” The idea of the Hawaiian worker was an oxymoron.8
Today there are more Hawaiian people in the world than ever. Some Hawaiians own land, run businesses, or otherwise control capital. Far too many are homeless, unemployed, imprisoned, or exiled. The vast majority are somewhere in the middle: they are workers. Most of them work outside of Hawaiʻi. The integration of the Hawaiian people into the global capitalist economy, a process that began in the early nineteenth century, is now at its highest stage. In the wake of the first U.S. gunboat to shore up sandalwood payments in 1826, today the U.S. military conducts an ongoing archipelago-wide occupation of the islands, controlling huge swaths of land and engendering social and ecological disorder.9 In the footsteps of planters who sought to curtail Native food production and make workers dependent on foreign commodities, now the Hawaiian Islands import roughly 90 percent of its food from abroad.10 A huge number of Hawaiians live in greater Honolulu, one of the most expensive metropolitan regions in the U.S. empire, where gentrification engenders yet further waves of indigenous dispossession.11 Capitalism and colonialism pervade everyday life in Hawaiʻi. No wonder so many hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians currently pursue life and labor abroad.
I conclude with some hard and perhaps unanswerable questions. What would it look like for anticolonial struggle in Hawaiʻi to include the voices of, and harness the power of, the archipelago’s indigenous workers, as well as those who are out of work and those under the discipline of the state? What would it look like for anticolonial struggle to include the voices of, and harness the power of, the hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians living in diaspora? This book has profiled the lives of thousands of Native men who experienced capitalism and globalization on the front lines, through their bodies, in an era of rapid, revolutionary changes in political economy. I have sought to show how class is a crucial analytic for understanding the history of nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi, its people, and their position in the world. Today, hundreds of millions of people are migrant laborers across the world. Crossing and blurring all boundaries, they show us that we live in an age of one world economy with one global working class. Thinking about capitalism and class, understanding
how labor and migration have shaped and continue to shape Hawaiian lives, may offer new tools for critiquing and dismantling the colonial state.
Appendix
SAMPLE GUANO LABORER’S CONTRACT
The following text reproduces a sample shipping article for the U.S. Guano Company (1864) from Box 1, Folder “Shipping Articles 1864,” Harbormaster’s Shipping Articles, 1862–1900, Record Group 89, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.
Strikethroughs (example: example) denote markings in pencil made by the company agent to strike out words or phrases from the contract. Words and phrases in parenthesis are amendments made in pencil that the company agent has added to the contract. Sometimes these words or phrases fill in appropriate blank spaces in the contract; sometimes they are scribbled into spaces between other words. Underscores (example: _____) denote blank spaces in the contract that were supposed to be filled with information, but were often left blank. For discussion of how Hawaiian laborers read and used these contracts, see pages 117–119.
We, whose names are hereunto affixed, do hereby agree and bind ourselves to serve in the capacities set opposite our respective names, on board the (Company) called the (United States Guano Co) of (at Baker’s Island) whereof (S.G. Waterman) is at present Master (Agent), now lying in the Port of (Honolulu) and bound (to proceed to said Baker’s Island there to labor) for a term not to exceed (twelve) months, or until the said (U.S. Guano Co) shall return (us) to these Hawaiian Islands, provided that takes place before the expiration of said term of (twelve) months. And we further agree, that during said voyage (term of service) we will perform our duty faithfully, where on board said (shore) or in her boats, whether by night or day, as good and obedient seamen (servants). It is also agreed by the Master (Agent) of said (U.S. Guano Co) that at the end of the voyage (term of service), we shall each of us be paid the amount of compensation per month set opposite our respective names in the column marked “Wages.” In witness of which agreement, the Master (Agent) hath hereto first set his name. And we bind ourselves to be on board said (the ‘Sadoga’) vessel at or before the hour of (Noon) on the (26th) day of (May) A.D. 18 (64)
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 27