Joy Schulz. Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific.

Abstract

Two centuries ago, the newly formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) dispatched seven men, “almost all college and seminary graduates,” along with their wives and children, on a half-year journey around South America to the middle of the Pacific Ocean; their purpose was to convert native Hawaiian Islanders to Christianity. Having “[given] away their earthly possessions in order to qualify for Christian missionary service,” there was no turning back, either for them or for another 140 or so missionaries following after them over the next three decades (17). Joy Schulz’s Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific focuses not on this purposeful first generation but rather on their children’s searches for belonging. In doing so, the author insightfully draws on their writings collected together by the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society (HMCS), founded by offspring in Honolulu in 1853 so as “to carve an identity from the larger Hawaiian society” (136).