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61 4. Writing the Life of Henry Obookiah: The Sponsorship of Literacy and Identity Morris Young The nineteenth-century text Memoirs of Henry Obookiah tells a tale somewhat familiar to another nineteenth-century text, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. While the significant difference is that Henry Obookiah was not subject to the harsh life of slavery or to the denial of the many liberties that we often associate with personhood, his story bears many of the similarities that have led to Doug­ lass’s narrative being characterized as a literacy narrative, that is, a story about the acquisition, development, and use of literacy that often results in some transformative state for an individual.1 In the nineteenth century, a native Hawaiian youth, Henry Obookiah, found himself transported to New Haven, Connecticut. Although he was a “heathen” in the eyes of the residents, it was Obookiah’s desire to learn to read and write that persuaded his hosts that he was worthy of being educated and introduced to Christianity . With literacy in hand, Obookiah proceeded to create a dictionary and grammar for the Hawaiian language and translated Genesis into Hawaiian. After nearly a decade of education in New England and soon after joining the Foreign Mission School, Obookiah was stricken with typhoid fever. While his religious conversion inspired the first Christian mission to Hawai ‘i, his conversion from illiterate to literate—or, to use Sylvia Scribner’s (1988) term, his literacy as a state of grace—also set in motion a cascade of events that changed Hawai‘i and its people forever. Like Douglass’s Narrative, Obookiah’s Memoirs did much of the work to institutionalize him. Subsequent celebrations both in Hawai‘i and Connecticut to recognize him as the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity and the recognition of Obookiah’s contribution to institutionalizing Hawaiian language all mark his historical and cultural significance. As a counterpoint to these significant events, however, we also need to understand the consequences of Obookiah’s presence in New England and his conversion, both of which contributed to the first organized mission being sent to Hawai‘i Morris Young 62 to establish Christianity. On one hand, this brought Hawai‘i closer to the modern world, bringing Western education and a steady flow of Western culture and capital. Obookiah’s development of a Hawaiian grammar and translations of religious texts led to the development of Hawaiian print culture. On the other hand, more substantial Western contact brought the many problems of development and colonial imposition: disease, rapid transformation of indigenous culture, and erosion of self-determination, among other consequences. While Obookiah should not be held responsible for Hawai‘i’s present-day complex situation regarding indigenous self-determination and nationhood, his life, as both lived experience and symbol, did have a profound effect on him and his homeland. As Native Hawaiian sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask has said about Obookiah’s conversion to Christianity: “I think he was trying to understand the very terrible things that were happening to his people. Opukaha‘ia was trying desperately to figure out an earlier era. He’s actually a very sad figure” (quoted in Tanahara, 1993). Obookiah’s conversion—both religious and educational—did not happen without assistance from many others. In the Memoirs and in Obookiah ’s life, we see many sponsors of his literacy and for his conversion to Christianity, providing a powerful and complex example of the function and consequences of literacy described by Deborah Brandt (2001) in Literacy in American Lives. Building on Brandt’s work, this chapter is organized along two lines of discussion. First, I offer a reading of the Memoirs as a literacy narrative, focusing on Obookiah’s transformation, both his acquisition of and education in English, and his conversion to Christianity. How does this sponsorship of literacy function in the transformation of Obookiah? And, second, I examine the circulation of the text Memoirs of Henry Obookiah and how the text and Obookiah served as a sponsor for the first Christian mission to Hawai‘i. Drawing on Brandt’s work to inform my framing of the Memoirs of Henry Obookiah as a literacy studies project helps us understand how material objects may function to sponsor literacy. Sponsoring Literacy and Transformation In her influential study Literacy in American Lives, Deborah Brandt offers a conceptual approach that “begins to connect literacy as an individual development to literacy as an economic development.” A key concept in Brandt’s...

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