Epilogue

This book’s epilogue considers how the story of the rise and fall of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous workers—and the diasporic, migratory nature of their experiences—revolutionizes what we think we know about the place of Hawaiʻi in the Pacific, and the place of the Pacific in the world. I also raise questions about what this story can contribute to twenty-first-century struggles over capitalism and colonialism in Hawaiʻi as well as across our globalizing world. The epilogue looks specifically at the twenty-first-century legacies of nineteenth-century practices and experiences of Hawaiian migrant labor, state labor discipline, indigenous land dispossession, policing and incarceration, and life in “perpetual diaspora.”

Nahoa’s Tears

Meanwhile, the California Gold Rush opened up yet another front in the Hawaiian migrant experience. Eighteen-year-old Henry Nahoa wrote a letter home from California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1850s to express his “aloha me ka waimaka [aloha with tears]” to family members in Hawaiʻi. Nahoa’s tears were not alone. At least one thousand Hawaiians migrated to California in the period before, during, and after the Gold Rush. Chapter five explores workers’ experiences in Alta California from the 1830s to the 1870s. During this time, men like Nahoa lived and labored under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule. They worked in sea otter hunting, cattle hide skinning, gold mining, and urban and agricultural work, from the coasts, to the sierras, to cities and farms. Nineteenth-century California was an integral part of the “Hawaiian Pacific World.”

Boki’s Predicament

Chapter 1 begins with the opening of a trans-Pacific triangular trade in the 1780s among the United States, China, and Hawaiʻi. Boki was an aliʻi (ruling chief) and kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu who in the 1820s became obsessed with the sandalwood trade and the riches flowing into Hawaiʻi from the Qing Empire of China. The story of Boki’s predicament—how to ensure enough indigenous sandalwood supply to keep pace with Hawaiian leaders’ increasing consumption of foreign goods and their debts owed American merchants—is our entryway into understanding the emergence of the Pacific World as an integrated segment of the global capitalist economy, and one in which Hawaiian workers took center stage. In the 1840s, Western concepts of “free labor” and “free trade” revolutionized the trans-Pacific economy with the imposition of “free trade” on the Qing Empire following the Opium War (1839-1842) and the imposition of a “free labor” ideology in Hawaiian land and legal reforms. By 1850, the Māhele—a process of land privatization and redistribution—had dispossessed the majority of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous people, leading many to seek work abroad or on foreign ships.

Make’s Dance

Chapter two begins with the story of Make, a Native Hawaiian whale worker on an American ship in 1850. Make was just one of thousands of Hawaiian men who served on foreign whaling vessels in the nineteenth century. As a global whaling industry emerged in the period 1820 to 1860, transoceanic economic and ecological factors conditioned Hawaiian workers’ experiences of both whales and the ocean. Movement and mobility are key to understanding the “whale worlds” inhabited by both Hawaiian workers and migratory whales. Hawaiian migrant workers were modern-day “whale riders.” Their experiences of ocean space and ocean time were influenced not just by global economic and ecological forces, including the geographical distance of the commodity chain from production to consumption, but by the nature of the ocean itself. Our story continues by following the movement of workers from Hawaiʻi to New England and beyond; the movement of whales from feeding grounds to breeding grounds; and the movement of whale parts from sites of production to sites of consumption in the United States.

Introduction

This Introduction applies broad brushstrokes to place the story of Hawaiʻi’s nineteenth-century indigenous migrant workers in the context of Hawaiian and Pacific historiography, as well as theories of labor history, environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the history of the body. The introduction explores the discursive construction of the “kanaka” as a racialized and gendered laboring body type; the concept of a “Hawaiian Pacific World”; and the unique characteristics of nineteenth-century Hawaiian capitalism. The introduction also explores the methodological and ethical issues involved in conducting research in Native Hawaiian history, and includes concise chapter summaries.

Beckwith’s Pilikia

For Native workers returning to Hawaiʻi in the second half of the nineteenth century, they found an almost unrecognizable economy and environment. Following the Māhele, Euro-American settlers had made Hawaiʻi their home and were intent on reorganizing labor and land to serve global capitalism. Chapter six examines the rise of the sugar plantation system in Hawaiʻi, and how Hawaiʻi’s sugar history—so often linked with histories of U.S. empire—was actually part of the same trans-Pacific story of oceanic industrialization through sandalwooding, whaling, guano mining, and gold mining. But the new migrant workers at this time were not Hawaiian “kanakas,” they were Chinese “coolies.” George Beckwith’s plantation at Haʻikū, Maui, is used as a case study for exploring the intersections and entanglements of Hawaiian and Chinese labor in this period. By 1880, Chinese and other non-Natives outnumbered Hawaiian workers in the sugar industry, and across the Pacific World the collapse of extractive industries such as whaling, guano mining, and gold mining left Hawaiʻi’s diasporic working class disjointed and disempowered. The end result was the dismemberment of the Hawaiian working class.

Kailiopio and the Tropicbird

Another front of extractive industry in the 1850s and 1860s was guano mining. Kailiopio was one of approximately one thousand Native Hawaiian men who worked on remote equatorial Pacific Islands mining bird guano. Chapter four bridges themes in animal studies and the history of the body to explore the guano “workscape.” The guano island work environment was a hybrid world made and maintained interdependently by both human and avian actors. Millions of nesting seabirds, and their engagements in transoceanic “work”—connecting distant feeding grounds with local breeding grounds—constituted the “nature” of Hawaiian migrant workers’ experiences of this remote world.

Kealoha in the Arctic

From 1848 to 1876, most Hawaiian whale workers engaged in the icy climes of the Arctic Ocean. Chapter three begins with the story of Kealoha, a Hawaiian whale worker who in the 1870s lived among the Inupiat of Alaska’s North Slope for over one year. Bodies—both cetacean and human—are a central category of analysis for understanding Hawaiian experiences of Arctic whaling. In the Arctic Ocean, Hawaiian men interacted not only with ice, wind, cold, and snow, but also became intimate with whale anatomy as well as their own bodies through work. European and Euro-American discourses on the “kanaka” body held that Hawaiian men were not fit for work in non-tropical climates, but Kealoha and thousands of other Native men challenged these racialized ideas, proving their fitness and their manliness in the “cold seas” of the North.