Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory

Chapter 17. Seriously Consider What Is Proper and Just: Effects of the Bayonet Constitution

189 17 Seriously Consider What Is Proper and Just Effects of the Bayonet Constitution the evolution of Kakaako into a real hospital by the mid-1880s, resulting from the combined efforts of the king and queen, Mother Marianne, the Sisters, and Walter Murray Gibson, reflected a kinder, gentler, and in many ways more rational approach to dealing with leprosy. In 1884, an act to amend the Penal Code was passed that authorized the Board of Health “to make arrangements for the establishment of hospitals on each island where leprous patients in the incipient stages may be treated in order to attempt a cure.”1 The way was set for people to be treated on each island, as had been repeatedly requested by those sent to Kalawao and their families. Beginning in 1884, there was a clear trend toward keeping people at Kakaako and serious thoughts of abandoning Kalaupapa. While 290 people were sent to Kalaupapa in 1883, this number dropped to 100 in 1884. Only 74 people were sent to Kalawao in 1885, and in 1886 that number had decreased to only 28. At the same time, an unusually large number of people were “admitted” to the settlement from Kalawao and Kalaupapa in 1885 and 1886, a number of whom were designated as “kokua.” Some were kamaaina and others were children who were born at the settlement. It is very likely that, like Jonathan Napela before him, Ambrose Hutchison, who had become superintendent in 1884, was putting mea kokua on the register in order that they could draw rations.2 190   chapter seventeen In his extensive report as president of the Board of Health in 1886, Walter Murray Gibson summarized the history of leprosy in Hawaii and concluded with his thoughts on segregation: This is a measure fraught with the deepest interest to a very large portion of the Hawaiian people. It is a question involving loss of liberty and separation from home and friends, to hundreds, nay, thousands, who have committed no offense against the laws of the country. . . . The practice of herding all the sick in one place of exile is a hardship with doubtful results. If segregation can be carried out in ways, equally beneficial, but, more in harmony with the wishes of the people it should be done. While it is well for the community that a sufferer from any form of contagious disease should leave his home, it is hardly necessary to compel him to leave his native island. There would seem to be no valid reason why an experiment of local segregation should not be made in this regard on Kauai, as has been proposed, where a retreat has been selected and where families having a diseased member might there place their suffering relative and attend to his wants, and be nearer to him than if doomed to Molokai.3 The end of isolation at Kalaupapa was clearly in sight. During the first six months of 1887, only ten people were sent to Kalaupapa and put on the admission register, together with three who were “admitted” from Kalawao. However, on Wednesday afternoon, July 6, 1887, this would all change. On that day, members of the Hawaiian League, a group of Caucasian planters and businessmen, predominantly American, predominantly Protestant, brought a new constitution to King Kalakaua, which he was forced to sign. Whereas the Constitution of 1864 declared that all executive power belonged to the king and that “the Kingdom is His,” the “Bayonet Constitution” of 1887 stated,­ “To the King and the Cabinet belongs the Executive power.” It further stated that “No act of the King shall have any effect unless it be countersigned by a member of the Cabinet.”4 According to historian Jonathan Osorio, “For the king, this constitution meant the abrupt and nearly total termination of any executive power or royal authority. For haole, it meant not only an enhanced representation in the legislature and control of the executive, it also retrieved their ability to define the nation and membership in it.”5 Seriously ConsiderWhat Is Proper and Just    191 Nowhere, perhaps, was this more clearly demonstrated than in the attitudes toward those Hawaiian citizens who had leprosy. Two weeks after the Bayonet Constitution was forced on the king, thirty-one people were sent to Kalawao. Within six months, 210 more people had been sent to Kalawao and there was no longer any indication that mea kokua, kamaaina, or...