The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History by Noenoe K. Silva

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History by Noenoe K. Silva Robert Warrior (bio) The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History Noenoe K. Silva Duke UP, 2017, 288 pp. ISBN 978-0822363682, $26.95 paperback. The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen focuses on the lives and works of two Kanaka Maoli writers and editors from overlapping generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing by example an argument for and a methodological intervention in the continuing development of Native Hawaiian studies. Intellectual history is at the heart of Silva's version of Native Hawaiian studies, and this biographically-based study operates as both a much-needed contribution to intellectual historical archival research and interpretation and as an argument in favor of the need for a library of books like it. Joseph Ho'ona'auao Kānepu'u, a Christian schoolteacher from the island of Molokai, wrote and published in Hawaiian from the 1850s into the 1880s. Silva dedicates three chapters to Kānepu'u and his work, first providing an overview of the body of his writings, then a closer look at what she considers to be the most significant and literary of his works, and finally a discussion of his writings that contribute to contemporary discussions of Native Hawaiian geography. As Silva argues of Kānepu'u's literary works, "He intentionally positions himself to act as a bridge spanning the divide between the world of thought and practice of his ancestors and us, his descendants" (52). The second part of the book provides a similar overview and analysis of Joseph Moku'ōhai Poepoe, a prolific and well-known writer and newspaper publisher who wrote from the late 1870s until his death in 1913. In Poepoe's case, Silva provides detailed analyses of mele (songs or chants) from a mo'olelo, or work of Hawaiian history, featuring Hi'iaka, the sister of the volcano (deity) Pele, and a full mo'olelo Poepoe serialized in his newspaper over the course of ten months. The contrast between The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen and Silva's 2004 Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, which members of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2011 voted the most influential book of the first decade of this century, is remarkable. Silva presents the history of Kanaka Maoli resistance she chronicles in Aloha Betrayed on a grand scale, while this new book tightly focuses on two figures. Aloha Betrayed demonstrated how generations of scholars of colonial Hawai'i had not utilized the extensive archive of Hawaiian-language newspapers in writing their histories, effectively ignoring a deeply detailed and complex record of Kanaka responses to settlement and colonization. Silva narrated a history that cut against the grain of Native passivity, showing, for instance, how 95 percent of Native Hawaiians signed an 1897 petition opposing US colonization and many other episodes of defiance against US usurpation of Hawaiian sovereignty. Steel-Tipped Pen also focuses on that era of Kanaka resistance to US [End Page 936] colonialism, but does so through the lives of these two newspaper publisher-editors. Poepoe, as Silva points out in Steel-Tipped Pen, came to be in favor of US annexation and actually wrote derisively of the 1897 petition drive in his newspaper. Poepoe's story is strikingly similar to that of the Cherokee intellectual Elias Boudinot, who in 1827 founded the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, and favored Cherokee Removal even in the face of an anti-removal petition signed by an overwhelming number of Cherokee people. Boudinot, as a member of a tiny minority of Cherokee elites who signed the Removal treaty, was summarily executed under provisions of Cherokee law against signing away Cherokee lands. Poepoe lived to see annexation, celebrating it in his newspaper and eventually serving in Hawai'i's territorial legislature. Kānepu'u died before the unfolding of the major events that led to the US overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, but in Silva's portrayal of his life and work he comes across as a figure whose politics were nothing like Poepoe's, not...