Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  Finder’s keepers, thought Meek, who seized Oni’s horses. A Honolulu police court ruled that Meek should return Oni’s horses. When Meek appealed to the Hawaii Supreme Court, Oni asserted the grazing customs of old. The all-white court ruled in favor of Meek, claiming that Oni “has no pretense for claiming a right of pasturage by custom.” Their decision made clear that Oni’s old way of doing things had become “so unreasonable, so uncertain, and so repugnant to the spirit of the present laws, that it ought not to be sustained by judicial authority.”

  When I read that, I thought the decision might have been legally justified but that the word “repugnant” stuck out as a tad vindictive, and thus culturally motivated. “Repugnant” has a snobby subtext, which makes sense, considering its French origin. But my attorney friend Bill told me lawyers throw around the word “repugnant” all the time, that it’s everyday legalese. He said, “It is a word we would use, for example, in saying that a certain action is repugnant to the intent of a statute.” Then he called me a “legal realist” for factoring human foibles and cultural biases into the making and interpretation of laws.

  Coincidentally, as I was reading about the Hawaii Supreme Court’s ruling on Oni v. Meek, the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor were on TV. Senators—particularly Senator Jeff Sessions, a white male representing Alabama—were grilling her about a speech she made referring to herself as a “wise Latina woman,” in which she hinted at possessing different, if not superior, insights from those of her white male colleagues. Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent, and some of the senators worried that she was biased in favor of her own gender and ethnicity. She replied that judges aren’t “robots.” Still, she maintained, “We have to recognize feelings and put them aside,” adding, “In every case where I have identified a sympathy, I have articulated it and explained to the litigant that the law requires a different result.”

  Naturally, when I came across that exchange, the first thing I thought of was the Kepaniwai Heritage Gardens. This is a lovely little park in Maui next to Iao Valley State Park, site of Kamehameha the Great’s “Damming of the Waters” battle. Built in 1952, Kepaniwai honors the architecture of Maui’s original inhabitants and immigrants, featuring a traditional Hawaiian grass house, a Portuguese oven, a Filipino hut, a Japanese teahouse, a Chinese pagoda, a Korean gate, and a New England missionary’s house. When my sister saw it, she said, “Come over to my house!” Come Over to My House was one of our favorite books as kids. Written by “Theo. LeSieg,” aka Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, the book featured cheerful drawings of igloos, stilt houses, and gondolas to illustrate the way of life of kids around the world, leading to the conclusion, “They’re all, all alike when a friend asks you in.”

  Amid the Buddhist silhouettes in the Kepaniwai Gardens, the puritanical Massachusetts saltbox looks as exotic—as ethnic—as the pagoda. So when I saw a white guy from Alabama ask a New York Puerto Rican if her heritage warped her judgment, I thought of that saltbox, and couldn’t help but laugh.

  When the Hawaiian government made it legal for foreigners to own land in 1850, the end of the American Revolutionary War was only sixty-seven years in the past. And one of the issues the revolutionaries fought over was the sanctity of private property. The British government forcing colonists to house its soldiers in their homes and businesses was one of the colonists’ major grievances; they brought it up in the Declaration of Independence and later ratified the Third Amendment to guarantee that a homeowner is not required to quarter government troops without consent. To the Don’t-Tread-On-Me generation and their offspring a property line is a line in the sand.

  I’m not trying to excuse the racial imbalance of land ownership in Hawaii—that’s always going to be upsetting. I’m simply pointing out that to the haoles the acquisition of property had a deeper meaning than simple greed. To them, cultivating land was damn near theological. When the Reverend John Cotton preached his farewell sermon to the Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1630, he told his fellow Puritans, “In a vacant soil, he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is.” Cotton backed up this statement, quoting Genesis: “Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” Recall that when Timothy Dwight preached the founding sermon at Andover Theological Seminary, he lauded Cotton’s generation of Puritans because they “converted New-England from a desert into a garden.” And he meant that both spiritually and literally.

  In Hawaii, the racial resentment over haoles’ post-1850 land ownership is, like Kilauea, an active volcano. One man I met on Oahu, who asked me not to use his name, told me about attending a series of public discussions in 2002 called the “Sovereignty Sessions.” This fellow is white and was born and raised in Honolulu. He said that these meetings, devoted to discussing the issue of Hawaiian independence, “featured about ten ‘Hawaiians’—people of Hawaiian ancestry, but very few, if any, with more than one-quarter blood quantum—speaking with ten or so non-Hawaiians about the issue of sovereignty and its implications for Hawaii. Before each of the three three-hour sessions, we would serve ourselves from a provided buffet dinner and we would give our thanks in prayer to Jesus, or the Christian God, which I immediately found curious. After eating, we would discuss the issues surrounding sovereignty as the two moderators, one ‘Hawaiian’ and one non-Hawaiian, asked questions and attempted to separate emotion from fact. I remember the first meeting being very polite, and as a result not very productive or informative. In the second meeting, after the prayer and the eating, the gloves came off. In my opinion, the ‘Hawaiians’ were very aggressive, throwing around words like ‘genocide’ with respect to the decline of the Hawaiian culture, and ‘theft’ in regards to the issue of land, and how the creation of a native Hawaiian government comprised only by people who had Hawaiian blood was the only way to possibly redress the wrongs perpetrated onto them. My most distinct memory is of a non-Hawaiian gentleman asking, more or less, ‘You act like the missionaries were purely evil and provided nothing of value to the Hawaiian people, but didn’t they give you a written language that has enabled the Hawaiian language to persist to this very day? Didn’t they give you your God? Several of you have referenced God in decrying what the missionaries supposedly did—but would you rather have your land or God? I’m sure you would all say you want both, but that’s simply not possible and not the case, so which is it?’ There was silence as people digested that stark choice. I think the conversation shifted to whether the missionaries did actually ‘steal’ the land, which of course depends on your interpretation.”

  Hawaiian words remind me of how a friend once described looking at the vast list of departing flights at Hong Kong International Airport. He said he liked the feeling of standing before the enumeration of destination cities, knowing he could go in so many different directions. A Hawaiian word can have so many meanings and associations that each noun becomes a portal into stories and beliefs, like how the word for wealth, waiwai, is just the word for water spoken twice. I started asking Hawaiians what words meant even when I knew the answer because I became addicted to seeing them crinkle their brows into Talmudic squints as they tried to call forth a word’s nuances.

  The hypothetical dilemma reportedly presented by that man during the sovereignty discussions—land or God—is folded into the word palapala. In the definitive Hawaiian Dictionary, compiled by Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, palapala is defined as “Document of any kind, bill, deed, warrant, certificate, policy, letter, tract, writ, diploma, manuscript; writing of any kind, literature; printing on tapa or paper; formerly the Scriptures or learning in general; to write, send a written message.” Just as the word haole describes both a missionary and the sailors shooting a cannon at the missionary’s house, palapala encapsulates what Westerners brought with them to Hawaii, from literature and diplomas to bills and deeds.

  In 1840, the artist Alfred Agate drew a missionary who came to offer one kind of palapala—learning and G
od—but would stay to enjoy the other kind—a deed to Hawaiian land. In the picture, William P. Alexander, who sailed to Hawaii from New Bedford with the ABCFM’s fifth company of missionaries, preaches to natives seated on the ground in a grove of kukui trees near a beach on Kauai.

  Agate’s engraving appears in the published account of the naval expedition the U.S. Congress authorized to circumnavigate the globe in 1838, the year Queen Liliuokalani was born. The United States South Seas Exploring Expedition, known as the “Ex.Ex.,” was America’s attempt at a scholarly/commercial/ military voyage for the whaling age in the manner of Cook and La Pérouse. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes and the six ships under his command were to map, survey, document, and collect scientific specimens. (The specimens they brought home ended up being the basis of the Smithsonian’s collections.) As Nathaniel Philbrick writes in Sea of Glory, “the Expedition logged 87,000 miles, surveyed 280 Pacific islands, and created 180 charts—some of which were still being used as late as World War II.”

  Philbrick continues, “The Expedition also mapped 800 miles of coastline in the Pacific Northwest.” If the kukui tree that dwarfs William Alexander in Agate’s portrait of the missionary is impressive, it’s nothing compared to an old-growth pine in an Oregon forest that Agate depicts in a scene with a couple of sailors who are trying to measure it, a tree of such monstrous height and girth that a Congress already salivating for Oregon would no doubt drool when they saw it.

  Nevertheless, those kukui trees Agate drew on the expedition’s stopover in Kauai, wrote Lieutenant Wilkes, “are large and form a delightful shade.” The kukui is what is known as a “canoe plant.” The ancient Polynesian voyagers who settled Hawaii brought the kukui with them in their canoes, canoes that were waterproofed with the oil of the kukui nut. Hawaiians made dye to decorate tapa cloth out of kukui bark, strung together kukui nuts to make leis for the chiefs, and used oil from the nuts to seal their surfboards and light their lamps and torches. It’s no wonder the kukui is now the Hawaii state tree.

  Wilkes wrote of Alexander’s sermon in the kukui grove, “There are few places in the open air so well calculated to hold divine service in, and it is well fitted to create feelings of religion.”

  Later, Alexander will run the Lahainaluna School. Then he will go on to own a sugar plantation. His son Samuel will be one of the founders of Alexander & Baldwin, one of the “Big Five” corporations, Noenoe Silva writes, “that controlled Hawaii’s economy for many decades.” (In fact, today, the mill on Maui operated by an Alexander & Baldwin subsidiary is the last operating sugar mill in the Hawaiian Islands.)

  Silva describes the increasingly blurry line between the missionaries’ mandate to convert the natives and their participation in the land’s conversion from subsistence crops to commercial agriculture. She cites William P. Alexander’s 1860 report to the ABCFM: “We have hundreds of acres of fertile soil that might be easily irrigated by our perennial streams that burst forth from our mountain glens, yet we produce almost nothing but [taro]: whereas we ought to produce and export a thousand tons of sugar annually.” Silva points out that nowadays, taro, the Hawaiians’ staple food for centuries is “scarce and expensive as a result of the change to a cash economy based on sugar, pineapple, and tourism.”

  Alexander’s capitalist comment that the land was wasted on taro when they could have been raking it in with cane, while decidedly un-Hawaiian, should probably be considered in light of the letter the Sandwich Islands Mission received from ABCFM headquarters in 1849 advising the missionaries to begin the process of weaning themselves, their schools, and their churches from the board’s financial support. The board encouraged the ministers who wanted to stay in Hawaii to seek employment and become subjects of the kingdom. The board offered grants to ease the transition but counseled the missionaries to negotiate with the government to take over support of schools and to step up the training of native preachers to take over the soon-to-be self-supporting churches. So it makes sense that Alexander and his colleagues would seek agricultural, commercial, and political opportunities.

  In the case of another future Big Five company, Castle & Cooke, the business had its very origins in the mission’s depository of supplies: Amos Starr Cooke left the Chiefs’ Children’s School in 1849, joining his former shipmate William Castle to assume the duties of the late Levi Chamberlain. Two years later the two opened the Honolulu store that would grow into a conglomerate by purveying the same sort of sundries Chamberlain used to forward to the various mission stations.

  The ABCFM closed the Sandwich Islands Mission in 1863 and the missionaries and their children who stuck around had to earn a living. Given that the American Civil War was ratcheting up the demand for Hawaiian sugar, it’s not surprising that some of the godly families shifted their attention away from heaven and toward the red dirt.

  IN THE DECADES between the Great Mahele of 1848 and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, the two most crucial issues in Hawaii were sugar and death.

  “With the coming of strangers,” wrote the Lahainaluna graduate Samuel Kamakau, “there came contagious diseases which destroyed the native sons of the land.”

  In their article on the epidemics of 1848-49 for the Hawaiian Journal of History, Robert C. Schmitt and Eleanor C. Nordyke estimate that ten thousand people (one tenth of the population) died in the islands in those two years alone. They attribute the alarming uptick in deaths from measles, whooping cough, dysentery, influenza, and diarrhea to the amplified ship traffic between Hawaii and the West Coast brought on by the California gold rush. They point out:

  Before the late 1840s, most ships visiting Hawai’i sailed from East Coast ports, and reached the Islands by a long, laborious voyage around South America. Any sick seamen were either dead or recovered by the time they sighted Diamond Head. Now they sailed directly from San Francisco in perhaps two weeks or less, fully capable of spreading the baleful diseases they had so recently picked up.

  Describing a subsequent epidemic that may have killed as many as five thousand inhabitants of Oahu in 1853, Kamakau recalled, “The smallpox came, and dead bodies lay stacked like kindling wood, red as singed hogs.” In Honolulu, “the disease broke out like a volcanic eruption.” And then:

  The dead fell like dried kukui twigs tossed down by the wind. Day by day from morning till night horse-drawn carts went about from street to street of the town, and the dead were stacked up like a load of wood, some in coffins, but most of them just piled in, wrapped in cloth with heads and legs sticking out.

  Among the high chiefs, the nineteenth-century death rate was as high as the birth rate was low. In her memoir, Queen Liliuokalani describes that during the measles epidemic of 1848, three of her childhood peers, including Kamehameha I’s grandson Moses, “were buried on the same day, the coffin of the last-named resting on that of the others.”

  Kamehameha the Great, the founder of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was the first and last monarch to father heirs who survived childhood to rule. When the thirty-year reign of Kamehameha III ended with his possibly alcohol-related death in 1854, his only son was the product of an extramarital affair and thus not eligible for the throne. So his nephew was sworn in as Kamehameha IV; he then died of asthma at twenty-nine.

  Kamehameha V signed “An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy” into law in 1865. That year, with nearly three thousand reported cases of what is now called Hansen’s disease, a hospital was built on Oahu. The following year, the first exiles were sent to a permanent, segregated settlement on Molokai’s Kalaupapa Peninsula, an isolated sliver of land cut off from the rest of the island by the steepest sea cliffs on earth. “A prison fortified by nature,” Robert Louis Stevenson called it after spending a week there in 1889. Exile was permanent and patients were at times removed from their homes by force. Legally mandated segregation remained Hawaiian law until 1969, which was twenty-three years after the arrival of a cure. Over the course of the century it existed, the Molokai colony confined an estimated eight thousand patient
s. At the time of the 1893 overthrow, Kalaupapa had more than a thousand residents. (One of Sanford Dole’s early tasks as president was to declare martial law on Kauai to facilitate a manhunt for a Hawaiian known as Koolau who was afflicted with Hansen’s disease. Koolau had shot and killed the deputy sheriff who tried to apprehend him for the purpose of shipping him to Molokai. Koolau escaped with his wife, Piilani, and their son to hide in Kauai’s remote cliffs and valleys for three years. While on the lam in the backwoods, the son took ill. Then Koolau and his wife buried the little boy. Then Koolau died and his wife buried him. Then she emerged from the wilderness alone. As she hiked down, she later recalled, “The mountains and forests were lonely. Only the brush of the breeze on my cheeks and the rustle of the leaves on the trees were my travelling companions, besides my recollections.”)

  Kamehameha V, the last of Kamehameha the Great’s direct descendants to rule, died in 1872; suffering from an abscess, a kidney disorder, and a cold, the king remarked, “It is hard to die on my birthday.” His cousin and successor, William Charles Lunalilo, ended his short reign spitting up blood; when he died of tuberculosis, his reign had lasted thirteen months.

  When David Kalakaua became king in 1874, his motto was “Ho‘oulu A Ho‘ola Lahui”—Increase the Race. In fact, the native Hawaiian population decreased by 15,000 during his reign. By 1890, there were only about 40,000 natives of pure or part Hawaiian blood—compared to a minimum of 300,000 on Captain Cook’s arrival.

  Kalakaua, like his short-lived predecessor Lunalilo, was elected king. “Can you imagine?” a Honolulu cab driver asked me as we were chatting about Hawaiian history on the way to the airport. A transplant from Illinois, he said, “Who ever heard of electing a king?”