Beyond the Plantation: Teaching about Hawai'i before 1900

Introduction

In teaching introductory Asian American Studies courses, I worried at times that my use of popular texts like Ronald Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore and Kayo Hatta's film Picture Bride painted too simple a portrait of Hawai'i by focusing inordinately on Hawai'i's plantation experience.² Would my students, for example, come away from these course materials with lilttle understanding of the Native Hawaiian and non-Asian workers who lived and continue to live in the islands? I suspected that they might, given that Native Hawaiian workers are barely mentioned in Strangers and that in Hatta's work a Native Hawaiian fisherman appears only briefly near the end of the film where he tells the protagonist, Riyo Nakamura, an early twentieth-century Japanese immigrant, that he once worked the plantation, but no more.³ References to Native Hawaiians were either too few or too subtle in these works addressing plantation life in Hawai'i.⁴

What should we know beyond the history of plantation Hawai'i? Even if we might make a pedagogical choice to focus the majority of a course on looking at the plantation period, how might we better contextualize this history to show the wide range of groups who arrived and their effect on the political economy of the islands?

The primary foci of race and ethnicity in the field of Asian American Studies have often limited research and teaching in the field to the experiences of peoples who trace their ancestry to Asia. Older paradigms of immigration history in the field also obscure how the history of Native Hawaiians and other non-Asian groups have been intertwined within the larger history of Hawai'i's place in Pacific and world history. Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and other non-Asian groups are nearly non-existent in the major works that have been used in teaching survey courses in Asian American Studies.

This article is by no means comprehensive. It can only suggest a handful of topics that instructors might explore in looking at the history of Hawai'i until the end of the nineteenth century, when the influence of the United States became most dominant. It briefly discusses the initial settlement of Hawai'i by Native Hawaiians, their depopulation and outmigration after Western contact, and how these population changes brought about political changes in the islands by the end of the nineteenth century. A partial listing of recent scholarship and teaching materials that can be used in the development of individual courses and other program curricula appears at the end of this article.

Voyaging and Settlement of Hawai'i and the Pacific

Indigenous Pacific peoples were "wayfinders," voyaging across the large Pacific Ocean well before the crossing of the ocean by European and Asian vessels. Between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans from insular Southeast Asia had already settled in Australia and New Guinea. By about 5000 BP (before the present), ancestors of the people Western cartographers and anthropologists would later call Polynesians and Micronesians started voyaging out of island Southeast Asia.⁵ Some of these adventurers had reached beyond what is now called Melanesia and had ventured into what is now Vanuatu (New Hebrides) and Kanaky (New Caledonia) by about 3200 BP. Other voyagers pushed through toward eastern Micronesia, and by 3000 BP humans had populated the Fiji/Samoa/Tonga area. By 2,200 years ago, they had settled the central Polynesia areas of the Marquesas and Society Islands; from there, voyagers ventured out to the three corners of the Polynesian triangle. They had reached Hawai'i in the north by about AD 400, Rapanui/Easter Island in the Southeast by about AD 300, and lastly Aotearoa/New Zealand in the Southwest by about AD 1300.⁶ When British Captain James Cook travelled to the area in the late eighteenth century, he noticed the linguistic and cultural similarity of the people in the region, remarking that this was perhaps the largest nation on the earth.⁷ Pacific Islanders thus found their way across the ocean, deliberately and knowledgeably. Contrary...