Hawaiian Kingdom Research Articles

Ka Moʻolelo o Ka Nuha: the safety zone at the Kamehameha Schools didn’t happen by accident

Written in a style inspired by Hawaiian language newspapers of the 19th century, this moʻolelo (history) seeks to tell the story of Hawaiian patriotism at the Kamehameha Schools, a school for Indigenous children founded and funded by a princess of the Hawaiian Kingdom. With Raphael Lemkin’s phases of genocide in our pocket and Lomawaima and McCarty’s Safety Zone Theory as our guide, readers will journey through the school’s correspondence, teacher meeting minutes, and Hawaiian language newspapers documenting the celebration of the holiday Lā Kūʻokoʻa, the events surrounding the 1895 Kaua Kūloko, and the experiences of the first Indigenous teacher hired by the school.

Majority Minority: a comparative historical analysis of political responses to demographic transformation

ABSTRACT This study asks: What drives divergent reactions to demographic transformation? This question has grown in salience as the politics of the United States and Western Europe react to the prospect of becoming Majority Minority states — where the native constituency of people, defined by race, ethnicity, and/or religion, loses its numerical advantage in the territory of a sovereign state. Relatively little is known about how societies govern such demographic change in the course of global history such that we may anticipate and contextualise policy responses today. To address this question, I undertake a comparative historical analysis of six Majority Minority states — Bahrain (1920–2010), the Hawaiian Kingdom (1840–1900), Mauritius (1830–1880), historic New York State (1830–1880), Singapore (1850–1970), and Trinidad and Tobago (1840–2010). Earlier historical work and contemporary attitudinal analyses have focused on the ways that popular discontent, racism, and xenophobia drive responses. However, I find that that divergent political outcomes are subject to national institutions — specficially, whether the state equally enfranchises the newcomer population and whether the government’s subsequent redefinition of the national identity is inclusive or exclusive.

‘Nonwhiteness’ in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i: sovereignty, white settlers, and Japanese migrants

ABSTRACT This paper examines the way considerations of race factored into the colonisation of Hawai‘i and its subsequent governance of immigration and different racial groups. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i faced unprecedented demographic change due to its rapidly declining native population and inflows of people from abroad. To preserve its sovereignty, the kingdom attempted to forge solidarity with Japan and Samoa governed by nonwhite people under threat of Western colonisation. Although official rule by European and American settlers did not start until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, they steadily expanded their influence over Hawaiian politics and economy by monopolising the sugar industry. Wary of the effects of nineteenth-century geopolitics, the kingdom attempted to resist the establishment of a white-dominated society that pursued its political, economic, and social agenda through the management of sugar plantations and the opening up of immigration. In the process of stabilising and maintaining the kingdom's sovereignty in the late nineteenth century, nonwhiteness became a significant racial foundation to confront the white dominance in the Islands and to establish an ally with nonwhite peoples and nations in the Asia-Pacific basin.

Ne Tentes aut Perfice: Early Hawaiian Diplomacy in the Southwestern Pacific and the Creation of Hawai‘i’s First Royal Order

Ne Tentes aut Perfice*Early Hawaiian Diplomacy in the Southwestern Pacific and the Creation of Hawai‘i’s First Royal Order Lorenz Gonschor (bio) Introduction In early 1860, King Kamehameha IV granted royal assent to the Order of Arossi, an order “for the reward of those who have materially aided the Social and Political Advancement of any Polynesian Government or People.”1 The monarch thereby created the first Hawaiian royal order, preceding by several years King Kamehameha V’s 1865 creation of the Royal Order of Kamehameha I, which is commonly assumed to be the first such order.2 Unlike the later Hawaiian royal orders created by Kamehameha V and Kalākaua, however, the Order of Arossi—named after a place in the Solomon Islands—was not conceived of in the Hawaiian Islands but thousands of miles away in what was then the British colony of New South Wales, by a group of diplomats representing the Hawaiian Kingdom in Sydney. While none of them were of Hawaiian ancestry, and only one of them would set foot [End Page 55] in Hawai‘i later in his life, the creators of the Order of Arossi played an important role in connecting the Hawaiian Islands not only to the Australian colonies but also to the archipelagos of the Southwestern Pacific. Furthermore, their Sydney office formed the nexus for the spread of the Hawaiian constitution as a model for other island kingdoms to emulate, and their activities, symbolized by the Order of Arossi, also laid the groundwork for Hawai‘i’s pan-Oceanianist foreign policy as it would be espoused especially under the reign of King Kalākaua during the mid-1880s. This article provides a background to the origin of this first Hawaiian Royal Order by highlighting the roles played by Hawai‘i’s diplomatic and consular representatives in the Southwestern Pacific in shaping Hawaiian policy towards Oceania. It will first provide some context of the development of Hawai‘i’s diplomatic and consular network and the individuals involved, with a specific emphasis on the Southwestern Pacific. The article then focuses on the two central figures in this regional diplomatic network, Charles St Julian and Edward Reeve, whose motivations and passions for their work differed from most other consular personnel. Having introduced the main protagonists who conceived of the Order of Arossi, our attention will then turn to the peculiar circumstances of its creation, namely a quite extraordinary story of failed British settler adventurism in the Solomon Islands upon which a Hawaiian connection was later grafted. Continuing the story of the expanding Hawaiian consular network in the Southwestern Pacific during the 1870s and 1880s, it concludes with an assessment of the network’s contributions to the Hawaiian Kingdom’s larger pan-Oceanian policy, including a critical evaluation of the individuals involved. Hawaiian Diplomatic and Consular Representation Abroad In the nineteenth century world order, the Hawaiian Kingdom had a unique status. In 1843 it became the first non-Western nation that received full recognition as an independent state by the Western powers.3 Subsequently, Hawai‘i established equal treaty relations with almost every single Western nation. This made Hawai‘i unique among non-Western nations, as the European powers had not only not colonized [End Page 56] the Islands but recognized them as one of their equals, a status they would deny all other Pacific islands, but also Japan until 1899 and China until as late as the mid-twentieth century.4 Secondly, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Islands had become a hub for the trans-Pacific trade between the Americas and Asia. As early as in 1801, French scholar Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu had predicted that Hawai‘i would become the “caravansary of the Pacific”5 and by the time the kingdom started modernizing its political structure in the 1840s during Kamehameha III’s rule, Honolulu had definitely become “a center, rather than a periphery, of the Pacific World.”6 It was in the context of these expanding trade relations that the Hawaiian Kingdom established a wide range of consulates and consular agencies around the world, starting in 1850. The driving...

MANUSCRIPT XXXIV: ‘The feelings of friendship which We have always entertained’: Fragments of Tongan–Hawaiian Relations, 1880–8

ABSTRACTAfter the Hawaiian Kingdom had played an important part as a model for Tonga's transition to a modern constitutional monarchy from the 1850s to 1870s, Tonga's government attempted to reconnect with Hawai‘i in the 1880s by suggesting a friendship treaty between the two kingdoms but then failed to follow through, despite Hawaiian enthusiasm for the project. Correspondence in the Hawai‘i State Archives, hitherto unacknowledged by historians, documents these late 19th-century fragments of Hawaiian–Tongan relations.

Consistency and change in the vocabulary of fundamental rights in Hawaiian law, 1847–1902

ABSTRACTThe Hawaiian Islands possessed a consistent legal system between 1847 and the early 1900s while going through several political transitions. The continuity of law through three distinct political regimes presents a puzzle. This paper uses three cases studies and a quantitative analysis of published judicial decisions between 1847 and 1902 to investigate change and consistency in the vocabulary of fundamental rights in Hawaiian law in the Hawaiian Kingdom, the self-proclaimed Republic, and the U.S Territory. Judges and lawyers used a common discourse centered on the word liberty to raise issues of fundamental rights during the three political periods, but judges deployed this consistent vocabulary around liberty to make different and at times competing legal arguments about a shifting set of specific rights.

“Ea mai Hawai‘inuiākea”: Marking the Global Diplomatic Presence of the Nineteenth-century Hawaiian Kingdom

“Ea mai Hawai‘inuiākea”1: Marking the Global Diplomatic Presence of the Nineteenth-century Hawaiian Kingdom Ronald Williams Jr. (bio) The field of Hawaiian history has witnessed several recent explorations of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s role in international diplomatic affairs of the nineteenth century. A common theme has been the outsized reach, both in breadth and potency, of the relatively diminutive island monarchy. In September 2018, the Honolulu Museum of Art opened a major exhibition entitled, “Ho‘oulu Hawai‘i: The King Kalākaua Era,”2 dedicated to the conception that during the mid-late nineteenth century, “Cosmopolitanism—the idea that local politics share systemic parallels internationally as part of a world citizenry—was a thriving philosophy in the Hawaiian Kingdom.”3 A significant component [End Page 133] of the exhibit was the material culture surrounding Hawaiian Kingdom statecraft, including: an official uniform “decidedly of a distinct national feature;”4 decorative royal orders, both awarded and received; and exquisite jewelry presented to Queen Kapi‘olani and Princess Lili‘uokalani as diplomatic gifts when the two represented the Hawaiian Kingdom at the 1887 Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in London. Several essays within the accompanying catalogue highlight “Hawai‘i’s place in a global society during what was, in Eurocentric terms, the modern era.”5 On 28 November 2018, the Hawai‘i State Archives [HSA] hosted an open house commemorating the 175th anniversary of the 1843 Anglo-French Declaration—an international recognition of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a sovereign and independent nation-state by Great Britain and France. A public lecture on one of Hawai‘i’s first commissioned diplomats, Timoteo Ha‘alilio (1808–1844), was followed by an exhibition displaying primary-source documents and artifacts highlighting Hawaiian Kingdom diplomatic history from 1843–1893. One case offered materials from Hawaiian Kingdom consulates—San Diego, Valparaiso, Antwerp, Pretoria, Hong Kong, and Sydney—located on six of the world’s seven continents. Also in 2018, the Hawaiian Historical Society, as part of its ongoing Public Lecture Series, hosted a research presentation by Tiffany Ing discussing her recent dissertation, “Ka Ho‘omālamalama ‘ana i nā Hō‘ailona o ka Mō‘ī Kalākaua a me kona Noho Ali‘i ‘ana: Illuminating the American, International, and Hawai‘i Representations of David Kalākaua and His Reign, 1874–1891.”6 Ing’s work examines both domestic and foreign representations of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s seventh mō‘ī [monarch] through English and Hawaiianlanguage newspapers; offering a broader evaluation and explanation of the Hawaiian leader’s activities and motivations. As in the aforementioned works, Ing examines the prolific international actions and efforts of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the resultant place afforded the Islands as a co-equal sovereign state in the great family of nations. She explains, “From the outset, then, the mō‘ī [Kalākaua] used well-established diplomatic methods to set up recipocal and symbolic relationships with other world leaders as part of his strategy to assert Hawai‘i’s independence.”7 [End Page 134] As part of a larger book project on the history of Hawaiian Kingdom diplomacy, I have recently sought to compile a complete list of Hawaiian Kingdom consulates and legations abroad from 1843–1893. Several lists have been previously published with varying numbers of cities that number from seventy to around 100—archivist Alice Tran of the Hawai‘i State Archives and I produced a list for the November 2018 open house that contained 117—but all have been decidedly partial. An examination of previously cited sources, along with the voluminous correspondence and diplomatic circular collections at the HSA, produced the list included below—revealing that during the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Kingdom operated consulates and legations in at least 136 cities on six continents across the globe.8 Note: spellings and names of cities and countries listed reflect those used in the original primary sources. Consulates and Legations of the Hawaiian Kingdom Abroad [1843–1893] 1. Aguilas, Spain 2. Amsterdam, Netherlands 3. Antwerp, Belgium 4. Apemama, Kiribati 5. Apia, Samoa 6. Arecife de Lanzarotte, Canary Islands 7. Astoria, Oregon, USA 8. Auckland, New Zealand 9. Assumption, Paraguay 10. Bangkok, Siam 11. Barcelona, Spain 12. Batavia...

Kalaupapa Place Names: Waikolu to Nihoa by John R. K. Clark

Reviewed by: Kalaupapa Place Names: Waikolu to Nihoa by John R. K. Clark Christine Thomas Kalaupapa Place Names: Waikolu to Nihoa. By John R. K. Clark. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xix +377 pp. Bibliographic references. Index. $28.00 paper; $75.00 cloth In his newest book, meticulous researcher John Clark explores the place names of Kalaupapa and the lives of leprosy patients exiled there from across the Hawaiian kingdom in the late 1800s. Unlike histories delivered through the lens of St. Damien or St. Marianne, Clark’s book instead elevates the residents through inclusion of more than 300 original letters printed in Hawaiian language newspapers of the time, many never before translated. “They spoke and wrote in their native language, and they brought their regional customs, skills and traditions with them, including their love of place names,” Clark writes. Clark sets a personal tone from the start, dedicating the book to his great-great-grandmother, who was sent to Kalaupapa in 1884. The comprehensive place names section reveals that many were shaped by those who lived and died in the settlement. The translated newspaper letters—by government officials, Hawaiian royalty, visitors and patients—further lend an intimate texture. [End Page 167] As the letters reveal patient reports on settlement food rations, visits from monarchy and even political views after the overthrow, readers gain an insider view into life in this enigmatic place. “The articles show an active community with its members trying to live their lives as normally as possible in the face of a debilitating disease,” Clark says. They wrote to amplify their voices throughout the Islands, and as seen in the included section of kanikau (emotional poetic dirges expressing deep feeling for someone who has died) also used print to memorialize loved ones. For Clark, these are now a treasury of information and place names. While there is a lot to digest here, the book’s deliberate structure helps readers navigate by highlighting overall themes and details and making it simple to find information of particular interest. This is a title to keep on the shelves and return for leisurely exploration or specific reference. It’s a book that exemplifies everything one expects from Clark—careful research, readable prose with thorough organization, and empathy for his subject and readers. Christine Thomas Reprinted from the Punahou Bulletin Winter 2018 Copyright © 2019 Hawaiian Historical Society

Hawaiian style graffiti and the questions of sovereignty, law, property, and ecology

Based on the ethnographic insight gained from the fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2012 on the island of O‘ahu, this article attempts to capture the aesthetic and symbolic expressions of decolonization in aerosol writing pieces by a crew primarily composed of Kanaka Maoli (“true human being,” indigenous people of Hawai‘i) writers. By focusing on the indigenous aesthetic practice of kaona (“hidden meaning”), the article analyzes the ways in which Hawaiian style graffiti unveils the contested issues of jurisdiction, sovereignty, property claims, and ecological integrity under the prolonged colonial and military occupation. It simultaneously illuminates the decolonial vision brought forth by Kānaka Maoli writers that seeks to transcend and transform the realities imposed by the colonial and occupational power. Through socio-historical contextualization, the article draws parallels between the time of Hawaiian Kingdom and the present, to unravel the integration of ancestral knowledge and contemporary expressions in Hawaiian style graffiti.

“Now we know”: resurgences of Hawaiian independence

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I provide a brief overview of the Hawaiian independence movement and discuss resurgences of independence discourse among activists, artists and other grassroots Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian people). My focus is on articulations of Hawaiian national identity in official testimonies and in contemporary Hawaiian-produced music. Testimonies at a series of hearings on federal recognition, held by the U.S. Department of Interior in Hawaiʻi in 2014, are read alongside Kanaka hip hop music expressing identification with and support for the Hawaiian sovereignty. I am interested in the ways contemporary Hawaiian independentists hold a resurgence of the common people together with the assertion of ongoing Hawaiian Kingdom sovereignty, perhaps creating space for imagining more horizontal ways to practice independent Hawaiian governance. The article opens with a brief summary of Hawaiian political history from 1810 onward, to provide context for the ways that the contemporary political actors discussed are explicitly connecting to a recent history of internationally recognized Hawaiian national independence, and an even deeper legacy of ‘Ōiwi cultural practice, as means to asserting independent futures.

Science and Politics in the Hawaiian Kingdom: The Progress of the Honolulu Social Science Association, 1882–87

ABSTRACTThe growth in studies of Indigenous responses to the gradual foreign control and American annexation of the Hawaiian Islands has provided an important corrective to dominant trends in earlier Hawaiian historiography, but there has been comparatively little recent work on the attitudes and values of those identified as colonizers. In particular, how Western ideas were understood and appropriated within the context of Hawaiian politics is not well known. This article extends scholarship demonstrating how in colonizing contexts, ideas about science could be mobilized as a moral resource and scientific societies could become distinct social formations. Specifically, the article shows how, during the pre-annexation period, the predominantly White and Hawaiian-born members of the Honolulu Social Science Association gathered in the performance of scientific modernity, with an implicit yet overarching political aim.

The Posse Cut as Autobiographical Utterance of Place in the Night Marchers' Three Dots

Two hundred and forty years after contact and one hundred twenty years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, the process and project of conquest continues. Hawai'i's Indigenous people and settler populations remain caught in a tense, back-and-forth process of place-making and identity formation. The poles of Native and settler exist in the same time and place, reflected in the land and lyrical life writing as if two turntables were playing very different songs synced to the same BPM, their peaks and valleys complementing each other, the horizon of their soundscape always competing. Understanding Hawai'i thus requires the crossfade—the constant movement between two decks. In 2012, the Night Marchers, a local and Hawaiian hip-hop posse, released their debut album Three Dots, across which, Indigenous, Asian settler, and Black diasporic rap artists crossfaded across their tense geography through overlapping verses and dialogic life writing. The complexities of their work together, understood as synced but choppy, reveals the dense layers of Hawai'i's rich, symbolic, and politically overdetermined landscape.

Hawaiian

Hawaiian belongs to the Eastern Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family and is indigenous to the islands of Hawaiʻi (see Pawley 1966, Marck 2000, Wilson 2012). Hawaiian is also an endangered language. Not only was the native population decimated after contact with foreigners and foreign diseases but the language itself came under attack after the occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 (for more on Hawaiian history, see Coffman 2009, Sai 2011). Children were thereafter banned from speaking Hawaiian at school and indeed ‘physical punishment for using it could be harsh’ (Native Hawaiian Study Commission 1983: 196). In the decades that followed, Hawaiian was gradually replaced by an English-based creole (HCE or Hawaiʻi Creole English) for practically all Hawaiʻi-born children (Bikerton & Wilson 1987, also Sakoda & Siegel 2003). By the end of the 1970s, most surviving Hawaiian speakers were over 70 years old and fewer than 50 speakers were under the age of 18 (Kawaiʻaeʻa, Housman & Alencastre 2007).

Revisiting the Hawaiian Influence on the Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen

ABSTRACTIn the 19th century, the Hawaiian Kingdom was not merely the leading state of Oceania, but had important influences on East Asia as well. The article argues that Hawai‘i has a special place in the modern history of China because Sun Yat-sen, the future revolutionary and founding father of the Chinese Republic, was educated in the Hawaiian Kingdom, attending two denominational secondary schools in Honolulu in the late 1870s and early 1880s during Kalākaua’s reign. Sun began developing his vision for a modernised China during this time, and as he himself stated, the Hawaiian Kingdom became the first conceptual philosophical model for this vision. A critical examination and analysis of Sun Yat-sen’s early biography and the development of his political thought further demonstrates that Sun’s vision of a technologically modern, yet politically independent and actively anti-imperialist China was close to the reality of the Hawaiian Kingdom he experienced.

Walls of Empowerment: Reading Public Murals in a Kanaka Maoli Context

Since the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and the subsequent fraudulent annexation of the Islands by the United States in 1898, Native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) have vigilantly contested US colonialism in Hawai‘i and have resolutely sought to defend and affirm their existence as the still-sovereign people of their homeland through political, legal, cultural, and artistic means. While the first three kinds of indigenous resistance have been well documented in numerous books, journal articles, and theses, there remains a largely unexplored field of academic enquiry concerning the role of contemporary Kanaka Maoli art within this milieu. This article seeks to redress this shortfall by critically analyzing how Hawaiian artists use the discrete discursive space of public walls as semiotic slates to both affirm Native sovereignty and contest US colonialism. I explore sovereign artistic intervention as it is manifested in two wall projects: Ola Ka Wai, Ola Ka Honua by graffiti writers John “Prime” Hina and Estria Miyashiro and the Aloha ‘Āina mural by students, faculty, and community members at the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa. As I show, these projects illuminate the power of public art to galvanize not only indigenous communities but also the broader public around contemporary and ongoing indigenous political concerns in Hawai‘i.

Talking the language to death

In the late 19th century, when the United States began its illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the teaching of languages was dominated by an approach— grammar translation—that has been associated with élitism and cultural dominance. Since then, there have been major developments in language teaching. Among these has been the development of “communicative language teaching” (CLT), an approach intended to encourage learners to use the target language for genuine communication in culturally appropriate contexts. However, analysis of a sample of Hawaiian language lessons taught in the second decade of the 20th century revealed little evidence of any of these. Instead, an approach reminiscent of aspects of grammar translation was very much in evidence, with teacher talk, often in English, occupying over half of the lesson in each case, and with considerable evidence of confusion, frustration and minimal participation on the part of many of the students. What this suggests is the need for a comprehensive review of all those factors that have an impact on the teaching and learning of Hawaiian, including, in particular, curriculum design and teacher ISSN 1837-0144 © International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 2 training. It is no longer possible to accept that while language teachers talk, often in the language/s of colonisers, language death continues to stalk those indigenous languages that have so far failed to succumb.

Using Vector Space Models to Understand the Circulation of Habeas Corpus in Hawai'i, 1852–92

Habeas corpus arrived in the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 1840s and 1850s when it appeared in the kingdom's legislative proceedings, in the 1852 Constitution, and in a published legal decision. However, a description of the transmission and transplantation of a common-law concept to a particular place in the Pacific Ocean does little to explain how people in the kingdom used habeas corpus. Habeas corpus circulated widely in the kingdom between 1852 and 1892. Did the application of the writ in Hawai'i change the conceptual architecture of habeas corpus? Legal historians have several different methods to find out how habeas corpus functioned and how judges, lawyers, and litigants molded the writ's legal identity. Reading the published judicial opinions preserved in print volumes or subsequently digitized in databases provides a window into the way judges construed habeas corpus. The archival records of the legal cases illuminate how local lawyers and ordinary litigants wielded habeas corpus to achieve their goals. In addition to these traditional methods of legal and historical research, computer code identifies conceptual patterns in a digitized corpus of the kingdom's legal decisions. Each of these methods—close reading, archival research, and computational analysis—represent different angles on the operation and legal content of the writ.

Contestation and Counter-conduct in the Imperial Pacific

Contestation and Counter-conduct in the Imperial Pacific Jessie Kindig (bio) Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire. By Adria L. Imada. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 392 pp. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War. By Cindy I-Fen Cheng. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 285 pp. $65.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World. By Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 400 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. By Takashi Fujitani. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 520 pp. $85.00 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. By Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. 352 pp. $89.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). The hula practitioner Kini Kapahukulaokamāmalu left Hawai‘i in 1892, part of the first state-sponsored hula troupe to tour North America and Europe. The customs agent processing visas in San Francisco marked Kini and her five hula sisters as “immigrants,” to which Kini angrily replied, “I tell him Hawaiians never been immigrants. We have immigrants in Hawai‘i … and they have white skin like you” (Imada 55). During their tour, the American-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom made Kini’s troupe an object of interest in America’s new “possessions,” and the troupe’s performances at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition became immensely popular. As Kini came to realize, their performances were also popular because of the expectation of erotic pleasure that fairgoers connected to Hawaiian women [End Page 177] and hula performers. While Kini played on this expectation to attract fairgoers to the performances—promising “naughty doings at the Midway Plaisance” as the barker for the Hawaiian Village exhibit—she also policed the boundaries of imperial desire. Kini and her hula sisters found it impossible to evade all the hands of the white spectators: when one man pinched her, she tried to hit him and warned him sharply, in English, “Don’t touch me” (71).1 In recent years, numerous scholars have proposed thinking of the Pacific as a space of both movement and exclusion. The shifting borders of nations and needs of capital prompted transpacific streams of labor alongside the development of diasporic family ties and cosmopolitan identities, while imperial nations like the United States and Japan policed the racial limits of citizenship and imposed Cold War boundaries on decolonizing nations like Korea and Vietnam. In describing the imperial history of the Pacific, scholarship emphasizing transnational, diplomatic history has focused on systems of securing power—that is, on exclusion: the structures of feeling, the governmental regimes, the labor streams, the character of racial formation.2 Other scholars, drawing from ethnic studies and cultural history, have highlighted the social dimensions of the imperial Pacific, proposing that imperial power has never been fully secure, even while they describe the limited space for movement within its reach.3 Several recent books continue both these lines of inquiry and provoke a discussion of how scholars might further bring studies of imperial power structures together with accounts of empire’s embattled hegemony.4 These works delineate the contours of the imperial Pacific by emphasizing the actions, journeys, struggles, and thoughts of activists, artists, athletes, and ordinary people as they traversed this world of twinned movement and exclusion: Adria L. Imada’s Aloha America, Takashi Fujitani’s Race for Empire, Masuda Hajimu’s Cold War Crucible,5 Cindy I-Fen Cheng’s Citizens of Asian America, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s Radicals on the Road. As Imada argues in Aloha America, Kini’s refusal to have the racial, gendered, and imperial metaphors of “immigrant,” “hula girl,” and “possession” attached to her person was based on her insistence on the right to broker Hawaiian cultural identity and maintain a sense of personal autonomy as a working artist as she moved between Hawai‘i, Europe, and America. Like Kini, the historical actors in each of these texts sought to navigate their own relationship to competing...

A Legendary Story of Ko‘olau, As Serialized in the Newspaper <em>Ka Leo o ka Lahui</em>, July 11–20, 1893

The tale of Ko‘olau is connected to a famous incident that is still recalled in Hawai‘i today: in 1893, six months after the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, a family (Kaluaiko‘olau, Pi‘ilani, and their son Kaleimanu) fled into the rugged valley of Kalalau to escape being separated at the hands of the Provisional Government when Ko‘olau and his son, Kaleimanu, were diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. The government sent the police and military equipped with a Howitzer to hunt them down, but the family resisted through Ko‘olau’s marksmanship and their knowledge of the land and forced the government troops to return empty-handed. The story translated here is a legendized allegorical retelling of the story of Ko‘olau’s ancestor, also named Ko‘olau, and his amazing adventures across the Hawaiian islands.

Reflecting on Ea

Reflecting on Ea Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (bio) I was parked at the Kapi‘olani Community College farmer’s market, of all places, and my mind kept flashing back to the words I had heard two weeks before, from a speech given in 1871. I sat in my minivan, looking up toward the mountains. A warm June wind blew through my window. Manuokū danced around the tops of the trees. To my right, the dark blue of the ocean moved imperceptibly below the lighter blue of the sky. I knew that I was seeing ea all around me. For Hawaiians, ea means a number of different things: rising, life, breath, sovereignty. In the speech, reprinted in the August 12, 1871, issue of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, a man named David Kahalemaile talks about the importance of ea, describing it as something vital that we cannot live without. Ke ea o ka i‘a, he wai. The ea of fish is water. Ke ea o ke kanaka, he makani. The ea of the person is wind. Ke ea o ka honua, he kanaka. The ea of the earth is the person. Ke ea o ka moku, he hoeuli. The ea of the ship is the steering paddle. ‘O ke ea o ko Hawai‘i Pae ‘Ā ina, And the ea of the Hawaiian Islands is our ‘o ia nō ka noho aupuni ‘ana. independent governance. With those words in mind, relayed by my friend Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua to a group of us who had come together to learn about the Hawaiian Kingdom holiday Lā Ho‘iho‘i Ea, I was moved to write this poem. I had never written a poem before, but I had been assisting another friend, Lyz Soto, and the team of four women (three high schoolers and one college freshman) she was coaching for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, and being around these smart, generous, courageous, and hilarious women had kindled a strong desire in me to write. But like most creative impulses I have had, I mostly put it out of my mind. The more I was around inspiring people in the community, however, the more I realized I was drawing ea from them, getting breath to speak. It had taken years for me to realize this, but this loud voice of mine had been given to me as a tool of reciprocity. It wasn’t just for [End Page 577] me to speak my own desires. My voice was for me to pass on what I had been taught and give back to people who had inspired me. A few days before I was sitting in that parking lot, I had attended the first Department of Interior hearing about proposed rulemaking for federal recognition. It was perhaps one of the first times in recent memory that the federal government thought to get the Hawaiian community’s feedback on moving toward a so-called government-to-government relationship between the federal government and Hawaiians along the lines of recognized Native American tribes, a relationship that, needless to say, has had a long history fraught with controversy. I was moved by how many Hawaiians had shown up at that meeting and the subsequent meetings to call for justice for what had been done by the United States to our people, and these calls very often included independence for Hawaiians. Almost as much as Kahalemaile’s words stuck with me, so too did the impassioned, articulate, and often elegant two-minute testimonies of our community. Yet in the media coverage and even the response from some of the Hawaiian civic clubs, all we heard about was the “embarrassment” caused by these ignorant, loud and angry Hawaiians. Normally I would just let my own anger at the way we view our own people fester inside me, helped sometimes by the healing balm of talking with friends, but this time, the expressions of ea that were around me, coming from the people around me, coming from the land around me, coming even from the sea around me, were giving me breath to say something. That anger, and at times despair, that we have so often as Hawaiians is...