Haley - Captive paradise: a history of Hawaiʻi

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To Jody and Lesli,

and Spencer and Kate

Contents

If a big wave comes in, large fishes will come from the dark Ocean which you never saw before, and when they see the small fishes they will eat them up. The ships of the white men have come, and smart people have arrived from the Great Countries which you have never seen before. They know our people are few in number and living in a small country; they will eat us up.

Davida Malo, adviser to King Kamehameha III

The nation that draws most from the earth and fabricates most, and sells most to foreign nations must be and will be the greatest power on earth. This is to be looked for in the Pacific.

William H. Seward, U.S. Secretary of State

Preface

Throughout recent years, activists agitating for the independence of Hawaii occupy the grounds of the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, the only former royal palace on American soil. They do this periodically. They want to draw attention to what, in their view, was the unconscionable way their country was annexed by the United States in 1898, in the name of cheap sugar and the needs of American imperialism (although, as we shall see, it was much more for the latter reason than the former). The full story of how the United States got its hands on the Kingdom of Hawaii is virtually unknown among the mainland general public, and I began this volume as a history of Hawaiian annexation.

I quickly discovered, however, that such a narrow focus could not begin to embrace the kingdoms tumultuous journey, which ended with its absorption into the United States. Discovered by the British in 1778 as the most isolated and strategically important islands on earth, the country endured the clash of empires as the British, French, Russians, Japanese, and Americans all contended for influence with the native monarchy. From the mayhem of civil war every time a king died, a preeminent conqueror arose: Kamehameha, who waged war and suppressed rebellion for thirty years before he could call himself master of all the islands in 1810. From a precontact culture of idol worship and human sacrifice, refugees from the Kamehameha conquest reached the United States, gained an education, insistently challenged American Christians to send missionaries to end the pagan terror, and in fact led the first missionaries back to their homeland. And then the struggle was on for the next seven monarchs: to balance bringing their people into the Industrial Age while preserving for them some sense of cultural identity; to maintain the sovereignty of their country while dealing with the greediest and most powerful empires in the world; to provide a modern economy and wealth for their people while becoming snared ever tighter in the grip of the American economic colossus. For all this to have taken place in the span of one human lifetime is a pageant of imperial triumph and human tragedy rare, if not unknown, elsewhere in history.

Dating back from annexation in 1898, the United States could never have captured Hawaii politically had it not first come to dominate the islands economy, and that moves the story back to the 1860s. Equally, it could not have dominated the economy without first capturing the people spiritually and culturally, and that moves the story back to 1820. But the American hand was felt even before that, in a bullying sea captain who inadvertently provided Kamehameha the technology needed to conquer the country, and in the mostly American traders who introduced the chiefs to luxury consumer goodsand how to go into debt to acquire them. Annexation, then, can only be understood in this broader context of the Americanization of Hawaii.

Oddly, there has never been a narrative history of Hawaii. There was a great deal of academic appraisal of the subject in the decades leading up to statehood in 1959, much of which has been reprinted for current reading. And James Micheners famous novel Hawaii , which rocketed him to literary stardom, came out in the very year of statehood. Modern academic studies have been rooted in the reigning politically correct paradigm of race, gender, and exploitationwhich as it turns out are highly appropriate lenses through which to view the islands history. But the Hawaii I found is far more complex. Early in the process I had coffee with a distinguished history professor friend of mine, to discuss my possible return to graduate study, looking toward completing a long-abandoned Ph.D. He asked how my Hawaii work was coming, and I said that while I was finding little to change my opinion that the 1893 overthrow was indefensible, I was also increasingly surprised and troubled by the pervasive oppression of the common people by their own chiefs and kings before Americans ever showed up. I cited several examples; the professor nodded and allowed that this was indeed the case, but he warned me that if I wrote the book that way and did not position the Hawaiians as victims of American racism and exploitation, as he said, it wont help you get accepted back into grad school.

I marinated in this irony for a few moments and said, This must be what they mean by academic freedom. Noting my shock, the professor went on to say that race, gender, and exploitation have ruled the scholarly paradigm for thirty years, and are entrenched for probably thirty more. He has made his peace with it, and he has disciplined himself to teach and write in that vocabulary. But it also seemed clear that when the actual facts of the history conflict with the reigning theoretical model, it may fall to nonacademic writers to disseminate a more nuanced narrative. The danger with this, of course, is that many trade writers who frolic in the vineyard of history are not trained historians, and are liable to seize upon the ill-conceived or the sensationala trap that has admittedly also snared a history professor or two.

All this is meant only to express my sense of responsibility in handling a subject as multifaceted as Hawaii. I knew going in that discussion and reexamination of how to interpret the islands history is in active ferment, but what I found was an intellectual community in near riot over control of the narrative. Revisionism, very often appropriate but sometimes excessive, provocative, and overreaching, is a given feature now of American history as presented in the academy. Hawaii, however, has placed the phenomenon in a pressure cooker, by its isolation from other fields of history, by the long suppression of the native culture and the suddenness of a rich profusion of studies that incorporate it. Consequently, it is not unusual to find summaries of the American missionaries in Hawaii that treat their presence as a foreign invasion, but it is incomplete and misleading to exclude mention of Opukahaia, or Hopu, or other refugees from the Kamehameha conquest, with their insistent challenges to the American Christian community to evangelize the islands and end the horrors of endless warfare and kapu the ancient regimen of taboos. One history of the Chiefs Childrens School, apart from acknowledging that the enterprise was undertaken at the request of the alii the noble classtreats it as a purely American ethnocentric gutting of the native culture, and omits any mention of the scholarly John Papa Ii, kahu of the kings niece and nephews, who functioned as a vice principal of the school, who appreciated the good that both cultures had to offer, and who was an important bridge from the old culture to the modern world.