Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  O Makou ka poe i kakau i ko makou mau inoa malalo, ke ae aku nei makou, a ke hoopaa nei makou ia makou iho e hana i ka oihana i kauia mahope o ko makou mau inoa, maluna o ka_____ i kapaia_____ no _____ o _____ ke Kapena i keia manawa, e waiho ana no ma ke awa o _____ e holo ana no i _____ aole nae e oi aku na malama _____ a e hoi mai paha o ua _____ i kea Pae Aina o Hawaii nei; ina paha e hoi e mai mamua o ka pau ana o ua mau malama _____ la. Ke ae aku nei no hoi makou, ma ia holo ana, e hana no i ka makou oihana a pau me ka oiaio, ina paha maluna o ua moku _____ la, ina paha ma na waapa, i ka po paha i ke ao paha, a like ma na luina maikai a hoolohe. Ua aeia mai hoi e ke Kapena o ua moku la i kapaia o _____ a pau ia holo ana, alaila, e hookaaia mai i kela mea keia mea o makou i ka uku a pau e like me ke kakau ana mahope o ko makou mau iona ma ka lalani i kapaia “Ka Uku.” No ka oiaio o keia hoolimalima, ua kakau mua ia ka iona o ke Kapena. Ke hoopaa nei makou ia makou iho e ee maluna o ia moku i ka _____ o ka hora _____ i ka la _____ o _____ 18 _____

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1938–1966); Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā e Pono ai? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992); Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002); Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

  2. Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1983); Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1985); Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaiʻi’s Interracial Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); JoAnna Poblete, Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawaiʻi (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

  3. Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  4. In this book, I use the italicized kanaka (singular)/kānaka (plural) to denote indigenous Hawaiian uses of this word. I use the romanized, lowercased “kanaka” to refer to haole (foreign) uses and manipulations of this word. Stylistic conventions do not allow for the continued application of quotation marks around “kanaka,” a term of shifting, unstable, and historically contingent meanings. Readers are advised that when they see the term in roman type I am referring to an imagined, discursive construction of the Hawaiian male worker. I follow historian Moon-Ho Jung’s insight that the nineteenth-century term “coolie” was more a discursive construction than corporeal reality, “a product of the imaginers rather than the imagined.” The same can be said for “kanaka.” Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 5. Early uses of the term “kanaka” (or “canaca” in Spanish) to refer to Native Hawaiian male workers include entries for January 24 and 29, 1814, Log of the ship Atahualpa, 1811–1816, Microfilm P-104, Reel 4, William Sturgis Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; entries for November 14 and 22, 1818, Sultan (ship) Account Book, 1815–1819, Ms. N-833 Tall, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Charles Bullard to Mess. James P. Sturgis & Co., July 3, 1822, Charles B. Bullard, Letterbook, 1821–1823, Ms. N-1962, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Accounts of the Schooner Julia Ann (1844), Folder 628:4, William A. Leidesdorff Papers, 1838–1848, MSS C-B 628, Box 1, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Accounts with Wm. A. Leidesdorff for supplies, Folder 628:22, ibid. For more on the kanaka as a stock figure in American whaling lore and music, see James Revell Carr, “In the Wake of John Kanaka: Musical Interactions Between Euro-American Sailors and Pacific Islanders, 1600–1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006). Note that when quoting primary sources, I maintain the spelling and orthography of “kanaka,” “canaca,” or otherwise, per original nineteenth-century Hawaiian, English, and/or Spanish-language texts.

  5. Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 53, 74, 350n5; Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 147; Marshall Sahlins (with Dorothy B. Barrère), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii: Volume One, Historical Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27–28.

  6. On the politics of naming in cross-cultural contexts, see Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988), 23; David Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 50; Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 15–16; Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 18–21; Alastair Couper, Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), 125.

  7. On the racialization of Pacific peoples, see Bernard Smith, “Constructing ‘Pacific’ Peoples,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2000), 152–68; Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940 (Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, 2008); James Belich, “Race,” in Pacific Histories, ed. Armitage and Bashford, 263–81.

  8. Sahlins, Islands of History, 17–19; Sahlins, Anahulu, 57; Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 228–29; Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 76.

  9. On Hawaiian body politics, and the continuity of the kanaka body into the twentieth century, see Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 122–30. For nineteenth-century reflections on aliʻi “fleshiness,” see Charles B. Bullard to Mess. Bryant & Sturgis, March 20, 1821, in Charles B. Bullard, Letterbook, 1821–1823, Ms. N-1962, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; C.S. Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, during the years, 1823, 1824, and 1825 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1970), 133; Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, the Sandwich Islands & Around the World in the Years, 1826–1829, trans. and ed. August Frugé and Neal Harlow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 208; Jacobus Boelen, A Merchant’s Perspective: Captain Jacobus Boelen’s Narrative of his Visit to Hawaiʻi in 1828, ed. and trans. Frank K.A. Broeze (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988), 78–79; Sahlins, Anahulu, 78–79, 109.

  10. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches . . . , Vol. IV (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), 269; Paul D’Arcy, The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006), 30–33.

  11. On perceptions of Hawaiian “amphibiousness,” see Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea [1840] (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 65, 93; E. Gould Buffum, Six months in the gold mines; from a journal of three years’ residence in Upper and Lower California, 1847–8–9 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), 32; Charles Warren Haskins, The Argonauts of California (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890), 77–78; James D. Hague, “Our Equatorial Islands; with an Account of Some Personal Experiences,” Century 64, no. 5 (1902): 660; C.H. Judd to Joseph O. Carter, December 7, 1859, reprinted in A.F. Judd II, ed., The Guano Islands (Honolulu: Family Records, House of Judd, 1935); William Henry Ellison, ed., The Life and Adventures of George Nidever, 1802–1883 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1937), 36; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, April 27, 1867, reprinted in R. Gerard Ward, ed., American Activities in the Central Pacific, 1790–1870, 8 vols. (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966–67), 2:552–57. On Native bathing and surfing cultures, see Edward Brinley, Jr., to Francis W. Brinley, September 1–17, 1848, HM 74025, Edward Brinley, Jr. Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Charles Bernhard Richard, Travel Sketches, being a Narrative of his Travels from 1846 to 1849, 149, New-York Historical Society; Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 27–28.

  12. Stewart, Journal of a Residence, 93, 151; George H. Dole, “Hawaiians at Church,” Dec. 13, 1859, HM 57931, George H. Dole Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; George H. Dole, “Industry” [c. 1855–1862], HM 57932, ibid. On climate, race, bodies, and tropicality, see Gary Y. Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1–14.

  13. R.C. Wyllie, Answers to Questions: proposed by His Excellency, R.C. Wyllie, His Hawaiian Majesty’s Minister of Foreign Relations, and addressed to all the Missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands, May, 1846 (Honolulu: Department of Foreign Affairs, 1848), 5–7; Robert J. Hollingsworth to the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, August 14, 1851, published in Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 2 (1851): 99–103; Stephen Reynolds, “Report on the Committee on Labor,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 3 (1852): 69–71; William Hillebrand, “Report on Labor and Population,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2, no. 2 (1855): 69–77.

  14. Stewart, Journal of a Residence, 154–56; William Little Lee to Simon Greenleaf, August 16, 1849, William Little Lee letters, 1847–1850, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Also see O.A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993); David Igler, “Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770–1850,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 693–719; Igler, Great Ocean, ch. 2; Seth Archer, “Epidemics and Culture in Hawaiʻi, 1778–1840” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 2015).

  15. On nineteenth-century narratives of indigenous extinction, see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

  16. On “roots” and “routes,” see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). That islanders were/are mobile, and not just in situ actors in history, has been an important theme in Pacific historiography since the 1990s; see Epeli Hauʻofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hauʻofa (Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific, in association with Beake House, 1993); Ben Finney, “The Other One-Third of the Globe,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 273–97; Chappell, Double Ghosts; Jean Barman and Bruce Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006); Gary Y. Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawaiʻi and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Couper, Sailors and Traders; Thomas, Islanders; Terry L. Jones, Alice A. Storey, Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith, and Jose Miguel Ramirez-Aliaga, eds., Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2011); Kealani R. Cook, “Kahiki: Native Hawaiian Relationships with Other Pacific Islanders, 1850–1915” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2011); David A. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

  17. On dismemberment, see Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui; on “re-memberment,” see Ty P. Kāwiki Tengan, “Re-membering Panalāʻau: Masculinities, Nation, and Empire in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific 20 (2008): 27–53; Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawaiʻi (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); also see Epeli Hauʻofa, “Pasts to Remember,” in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts, ed. Borofsky, 453–71.

  18. On the importance of narrating labor and class into indigenous histories, see Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack, eds., Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); William J. Bauer, Jr., We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Anna Keala Kelly, “Portait. Marie Beltran and Annie Pau: Resistance to Empire, Erasure, and Selling Out,” in A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, ed. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 36–47.

  19. On Hawaiian migrant women in the entertainment industry, see Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

  20. Jocelyn Linnekin, Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Jennifer Thigpen, Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawaiʻi’s Pacific World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

  21. On the feminization of Hawaiʻi, see Desmond, Staging Tourism; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi; Imada, Aloha America. On the discursive dispossession of Native men, see Tengan, Native Men Remade; Walker, Waves of Resistance, ch. 4.

  22. Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure,” Journal of World History 3, no. 1 (1992): 55–79; Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1; Katrina Gulliver, “Finding the Pacific World,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (2011): 83–100, esp. 93.

  23. Lon Kurashige, Madeline Y. Hsu, and Yujin Yaguchi, “Introduction: Conversations on Transpacific History,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 2 (2014): 183–88; Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds., Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014).

  24. J.R. McNeill, “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 299–349; Okihiro, Island World, ch. 1; Cushman, Guano; Ryan Tucker Jones, “The Environment,” in Pacific Histories, ed. Armitage and Bashford, 121–42.

  25. Marshall Sahlins, “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World-System,’” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, eds. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 412–55; Armitage and Bashford, “Introduction: The Pacific and its Histories,” in Pacific Histories, ed. Armitage and Bashford, 1–28, esp. 16–17.

  26. Igler, Great Ocean; Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Edward Dallam Melillo, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); and John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawaiʻi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  27. B. Pualani Lincoln Maielua, “Moanaākea,” in The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific, ed. A. Marata Tamaira (Honolulu: Center for Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2009), 141–50; Damon Salesa, “The Pacific in Indigenous Time,” in Pacific Histories, ed. Armitage and Bashford, 31–52.

  28. Igl
er, Great Ocean, 11; Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 5. For a nuanced approach at the intersection of local, national, and transnational scales, see David A. Chang, “Borderlands in a World at Sea: Concow Indians, Native Hawaiians, and South Chinese in Indigenous, Global, and National Spaces,” The Journal of American History 98 (2011): 384–403.

  29. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It.

  30. Helen G. Chapin, Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1996); Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 45–86; M. Puakea Nogelmeier, Mai Paʻa i Ka Leo: Historical Voice in Hawaiian Primary Materials, Looking Forward and Listening Back (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press/Awaiaulu, 2010). On print cultures, nation, and diaspora, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed.; London: Verso, 1991); Pier M. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  31. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It, 103–55. On the transoceanic power of words, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). On indigenous articulations of diaspora, see Clifford, Routes; Katerina Martina Teaiwa, “Our Sea of Phosphate: The Diaspora of Ocean Island,” in Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations, ed. Graham Harvey and Charles D. Thomson, Jr. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 169–91; Katerina Martina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).