The Many (De)colonial Lives of Kāpena George Gilley

Abstract

This article provides the first full biographical account of history’s only known Native Hawaiian whaling captain, George Gilley, whose life story ranges across the entire North Pacific, throughout the Bering Sea, and into the Arctic Circle. It adds to a growing body of work on Indigenous participation in colonial institutions, including Pacific commercial whaling, and makes a case for using relevant Indigenous epistemologies and methods to locate Native agency within the largely non-Native sources born of those institutions. Gilley’s mo‘olelo (story/history) specifically fits into the burgeoning field of Native Hawaiian biography, which, it is argued, should expand to consider historic Hawaiians who left few written records. The article demonstrates a model for achieving this expansion, by treating Gilley’s hybridized, (de)colonial mobility and embodied, inherited knowledge as legible evidence of his sovereignty within the Euro-American economic, racial, and nationalistic structures that nineteenth-century whaling purveyed throughout the Pacific.