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  Beyond Hawaiʻi

  A

  BOOK

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  The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies, established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

  Beyond Hawaiʻi

  NATIVE LABOR IN THE PACIFIC WORLD

  Gregory Rosenthal

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2018 by Gregory Rosenthal

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rosenthal, Gregory, 1983– author.

  Title: Beyond Hawaiʻi : native labor in the Pacific world / Gregory Rosenthal.

  Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017056075 (print) | LCCN 2018003856 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520967960 (epub) | ISBN 9780520295063 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520295070 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous labor—History. | Hawaiians—Pacific Area—History. | Hawaii—Emigration and immigration—History—18th century. | Hawaii—Emigration and immigration—History—19th century.

  Classification: LCC HD8930.7 (ebook) | LCC HD8930.7 .R67 2018 (print) | DDC 331.6/2969009034—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056075

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 • Boki’s Predicament

  Sandalwood and the China Trade

  2 • Make’s Dance

  Migrant Workers and Migratory Animals

  3 • Kealoha in the Arctic

  Whale Blubber and Human Bodies

  4 • Kailiopio and the Tropicbird

  Life and Labor on a Guano Island

  5 • Nahoa’s Tears

  Gold, Dreams, and Diaspora in California

  6 • Beckwith’s Pilikia

  “Kanakas” and “Coolies” on Haiku Plantation

  Epilogue

  Legacies of Capitalism and Colonialism

  Appendix

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  MAP 1. Map of the Pacific World, showing places mentioned in the text. Map by Bill Nelson.

  MAP 2. Map of the principal Hawaiian Islands, showing places mentioned in the text. Map by Bill Nelson.

  MAP 3. Map of California, showing places mentioned in the text. Map by Bill Nelson.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the assistance of countless friends, colleagues, and mentors. I began the research for this book nearly a decade ago under the mentorship of Christopher Sellers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Chris taught me to see history through intersecting lenses of environment, labor, class, health, and the human body, all in transnational perspective. Jared Farmer, Iona Man-Cheong, and Jenny Newell rounded out my dissertation committee. All three are phenomenal scholars (of the U.S., China, and the Pacific, respectively) who guided my research at crucial moments. The entire history faculty at Stony Brook was supportive and inspirational, providing an intellectual home over six years of tremendous growth and change. They also provided financial support through teaching appointments, assistantships, and funds for conference travel and research. Fellow graduate students—particularly Bill Demarest, Raquel Alicia Otheguy, and Carlos Gómez Florentín—also provided a social environs for this ever-commuting comrade, both on the LIRR train and in New York City. Thank you, as well, to Michael Zweig, who hired me to work at the Center for Study of Working Class Life.

  Since moving to Virginia my colleagues at Roanoke College have been unequivocally supportive and encouraging as I have finished this project. Thank you particularly to current and former chairs Jason Hawke and Whitney Leeson, as well as Dean of the College Richard Smith. The department and the college have provided funds for me to attend conferences and conduct additional research in Hawaiʻi. This book is the product of Roanoke’s supportive research environment.

  I have also benefited from the tremendous mentorship, comradery, and criticism of colleagues from across the United States and the world. These include, in no particular order, Seth Archer, Larry Kessler, Hiʻilei Julia Hobart, Laurel Turbin Mei-Singh, Ted Melillo, Lissa Wadewitz, Ben Madley, Bathsheba Demuth, Thomas Andrews, David Chang, Greg Cushman, Doug Sackman, David Chappell, Ty Tengan, Josh Reid, Anna Zeide, Marika Plater, Kristin Wintersteen, Frank Zelko, Kieko Matteson, Kara Schlichting, Catherine McNeur, Melanie Keichle, Kendra Smith-Howard, and so many others. I am particularly grateful to David Igler and Ryan Tucker Jones, both of whom carefully read and provided extensive feedback on the entire manuscript in its penultimate form.

  In Hawaiʻi, thank you to the East-West Center; the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, particularly librarians Dore Minatodani and Kapena Shim; the Hawaiʻi State Archives; the Bishop Museum; the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society; and the Hawaiian Historical Society. Mahalo nui loa to Manuwai Peters, Pōmai Stone, Puakea Nogelmeier, and Richard Keao NeSmith for their assistance with Hawaiian-language learning, translations, and proofreading. Thank you to Nora, Josh, and Safiya, for friendship.

  In California, thank you to The Huntington Library; The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; and the California Historical Society. Thank you to the Berkeley YMCA, and to Lynn and Marjeela, for friendship.

  In New England, thank you to the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Baker Library at Harvard Business School; and Mystic Seaport. Thank you to Steve Trombulak for hiring me as a visiting instructor at Middlebury College. Thank you to Anne and Davida, for friendship.

  In New York, thank you to the New York Public Library and the New-York Historical Society. Special thanks to the people’s library—the Brooklyn Public Library—where I wrote this final draft. Thank you to Free University-NYC comrades, and to Conor, Michael, Lyra, and Ruby for friendship. Particularly great gratitude goes to Caroline, my brother James, and my parents Robin and Kimmo.

  In Virginia, big shout out to my queer family, especially Rachel.

  I have received generous financial support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, The Bancroft Library, The Huntington Library, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Roanoke College.

  At the University of California Press, thank you to my editor Niels Hooper, assistant edi
tor Bradley Depew, project editor Kate Hoffman, and marketing manager Jolene Torr. Thank you also to copyeditor Kathleen MacDougall, cartographer Bill Nelson, and indexer François Trahan. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with you all.

  This book is about migrant workers and global capitalism. It is dedicated to my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. My ancestors came across the Atlantic Ocean on boats. They were diasporic seeds, brave sojourners, working class heroes. This is for them.

  Introduction

  WHAT DOES GLOBALIZATION LOOK LIKE? How does capitalism feel? To the sandalwood cutter, it was 133 pounds of wood strapped on his back, stumbling down a steep mountain path on his way to the sea. To the whale worker, it was bruises on his body; it was the songs he sang about whales, warships, and about coming up short. Kealoha felt it trembling under his skin; it was cold and unforgettable. Kailiopio heard it in the millions of birds screaming and cawing above his head. To the gold miner, it was hunger and embarrassment. Nahoa felt it in the warm tears streaming down his face. The plantation worker felt it in his stomach, in the strange foods that he ate. Hawaiian workers experienced globalization and capitalism in their bodies.

  In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men left Hawaiʻi to work on ships at sea and in nā ʻāina ʻē (foreign lands). Through labor, these men bridged islands and continents; they wove together a world of economic, demographic, and ecological exchanges; and they wrote about their experiences abroad in Hawaiian-language newspapers that traveled home and back out again across a transoceanic diaspora. Hawaiian men extracted sea otter furs, sandalwood, bird guano, whale oil, cattle hides, gold, and other commodities. The things they made and the stories they told traveled to every corner of the Pacific Ocean, from China in the west to the equatorial Line Islands in the south to Mexico in the east to the Arctic Ocean in the north. This is the story of the rise and fall of the Hawaiian worker in the nineteenth century. It is a story of transoceanic capitalist integration, and the story of how the world’s greatest ocean became a “Hawaiian Pacific World”—the world that Hawaiian labor made.

  Historians of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific have tended to ignore this narrative: how Hawaiʻi’s integration into a global capitalist economy in the nineteenth century was propelled by the labor of thousands of Native men who left Hawaiʻi in pursuit of wages and opportunity abroad. Historians have long focused on the complex relations among aliʻi (chiefs) and haole (foreigner) elites, consequently sidestepping investigations of the makaʻāinana (commoners), the indigenous workers and their experiences of capitalism.1 Labor historians have written at great length about Hawaiʻi’s immigrant work force, including Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Filipina/o workers, but less is known about Hawaiʻi’s indigenous workers, including those Native men and women who left Hawaiʻi to pursue work on ships at sea and in foreign lands.2 Pacific World historians have traced the movement of ships, goods, plants, animals, and diseases across the vast ocean, but Native workers are rarely accounted for as agents peopling those diasporas and traveling those circulations.3 This book is a study of the formation of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous working class in an era of early capitalist expansion and globalization. Here, Hawaiian migrant workers take center stage. Through both work and words, Hawaiian labor linked disparate peoples, places, and processes together, making the Pacific into a “world.”

  THE “KANAKA” BODY

  Hawaiian workers were known as “kanakas.” The term kanaka (singular)/ kānaka (plural) is Hawaiian for “person” or “people.” In the nineteenth century, Europeans and Euro-Americans circumscribed this term’s meaning to more specifically refer to a Native Hawaiian male worker. By the end of the century it was used throughout the Pacific World to refer to all manner of Pacific Islander workers. The “kanaka” represented a racialized, classed, and gendered body, the creation of a Western capitalist imagination that saw the world’s peoples as pools of labor fit for the global economy.4 Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hawaiian leaders seem to have occasionally used kanaka as a term designating a male servant to an aliʻi, which perhaps informed how and why outsiders began to use this term.5 Some Hawaiians also seemingly embraced the term kanaka and their application of the term may have informed Euro-American understandings.6 More frequently “kanaka” was used by outsiders as a derogatory label. The idea of the kanaka in the nineteenth century was born of the marriage of a Western capitalist political economy with indigenous Hawaiian paradigms of class, labor, and personhood.7

  Beginning in the 1810s and 1820s, capitalist and Christian values combined to engender a new body discourse in Hawaiʻi. The large size of many aliʻi bodies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was, for many Hawaiians, an indigenous expression of mana (divine power); one’s corporeality marked his or her legitimacy to rule over the people and the land.8 A rival discourse developed under capitalism in which strong, lean, and muscular male bodies were valued as commodities in the global labor marketplace. Foreign employers and missionaries alike saw the body not so much as an expression of spiritual power (mana) but of labor power. An indigenous system of corporeal class politics based on fatness was replaced by a new regime of fitness.9

  At least three racial stereotypes defined the kanaka body in the Western mind. To many employers and other foreigners, Hawaiians were an “amphibious” race, “nearly as much at home in the water as on dry land.”10 This meant that Hawaiian workers were seen as particularly fit—that is, suitable or adaptable—for labor in marine and maritime work environments. This racial imaginary—certainly influenced by foreigners’ surprise at Native bathing, surfing, and fishing cultures—influenced Hawaiian work experiences all across the Pacific, where workers were frequently charged with labors that involved swimming, diving, and boating.11 Second, Hawaiians were considered innately indolent. Many foreigners blamed this on the climate, thereby racializing tropicality as the combination of listless bodies with an enervating environment.12 This discourse of tropical indolence legitimated Christian missionaries’ efforts to destroy indigenous systems of labor and domestic production; only capitalism could turn so-called lazy kanakas into industrious citizens. Employers likewise reasoned that indolence had to be driven out of the kanaka; left to his own devices, he simply would not work.13 Third, the kanaka body was seen as a diseased body. By mid-century, both aliʻi and influential foreigners were consumed by a discourse predicting apocalyptic population decline. True, Hawaiians were dying at an alarming rate from foreign epidemics, but the racialization and commodification of the kanaka also framed disease as a market liability.14 One of the reasons why the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi eventually turned to importing foreign labor was the government’s belief that the Native kanaka would not survive long enough to sustain the economy and preserve the lāhui (nation).15 All told, the presumed brute strength and “amphibious” dexterity of Hawaiian male workers made the kanaka an attractive worker, while his simultaneous penchant for indolence and susceptibility to disease made him a less than ideal partner in global commerce.

  Yet for the kanaka himself, being a worker in the capitalist economy was not so much about the raced, classed, and gendered limitations of his body, or the inherent strengths or weaknesses of his corporeal nature. To him, work was about survival, and also about working-class power and possibility in a world suddenly turned upside down. Against narratives of indigenous rootedness in ka ʻāina (the land)—narratives that privilege stories of demographic and environmental collapse, victimization, and dispossession—we might follow an approach first charted by Epeli Hauʻofa and since developed by Kealani Cook, David A. Chang, and others, to tell stories of indigenous routedness on the ocean. Rather than facing colonization and in situ victimization, thousands of Hawaiian workers challenged their Native leaders and the state as well as haole employers and imperial usurpers alike by moving their bodies along pathways opened up by globalizatio
n. Movement, migration, and mobility were not signs of defeat for the Hawaiian people but rather historical examples of working-class agency in Hawaiʻi and beyond.16

  These stories have the power to “re-member” Hawaiian working-class men to nineteenth-century history. Against the debilitating, emasculating discourse of the deformed kanaka body—which Ty P. Kāwika Tengan has shown can be re-membered through indigenous articulations of Native masculinities—and the “dismembered” Hawaiian body politic (ka lāhui)—building on Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio’s terms—this book’s narrative of Hawaiian migrant labor is the story of physically capable and cosmopolitan workers who created a transoceanic diaspora spreading out across the world’s greatest ocean, bringing Hawaiʻi into the global economy and forever reshaping Hawaiian history, politics, and culture.17 Yet these men are routinely left out of narratives of the Hawaiian nation and Hawaiian history, and this omission has grave consequences. If that which made the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi a wealthy, cosmopolitan state on the nineteenth-century world stage was not its leaders, but rather its workers, how might this story influence current-day anticolonial strategies against U.S. empire? If labor, not land—people, not plantations—are central to Hawaiian history, how might working people, including diasporic off-Island Hawaiians, take center stage again in the Hawaiian lāhui?18

  And what about women? Thousands of Hawaiian male migrant workers were supported at home by mothers, wives, sisters, cousins, and daughters. Furthermore, hundreds of women worked on ships and abroad as migrant laborers. Some were prostitutes, some were domestic servants, others worked side-by-side with men doing the same labor yet not always receiving the same wages.19 Moreover, many historians have noted the incredible stories of female leaders in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi who ruled as queens and princesses, prime ministers and regents. Titles shifted over time, but women always took a leadership role in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. European and Euro-American observers often wrote about Hawaiʻi as a nation of women.20 Yet sometimes this discourse was problematic. When foreigners wrote of Hawaiʻi as a seductive land luring colonists in to “have” her, they feminized the nation and the people; colonialism thus became an exercise of exerting one’s white heteronormative masculinity and patriarchy over a nation seen as submissive, feminine, and in need of protection. Attendant with this discourse, as Adria Imada has shown, was the imperial parading of Hawaiian women as representatives of the docile and welcoming (with aloha, of course) colonial subject body. Native scholars Ty P. Kāwika Tengan and Isaiah Helekunihi Walker have also shown how this discourse worked to erase Hawaiian men from narratives about Hawaiʻi. They were seen as superfluous, even dangerous, to the colonial project of making Hawaiʻi into a paradise (as defined by the colonizers). To this day, many Hawaiian working-class men feel sidelined from the dominant colonialist narratives of their nation and their history.21 In this book, Hawaiian men take center stage alongside a rigorous gender analysis that explores how Western discourse emasculated men as “kanakas,” and how Hawaiian men fought back against this talk through their courageous stories of work, migration, and sacrifice upon the ocean and across the world.