Listening to Leoiki: Engaging Sources in Hawaiian History

This paper challenges the perception of "silence" of Hawaiian women in the sex trade in 1820s Hawai'i by focusing on the sale of a Hawaiian woman, Leoiki—whose name means "little voice"—by a chiefess to a British whale ship captain in 1825. Working with family genealogies, depositions, American missionary correspondence, and other sources written in Hawaiian, this paper explores how the important principles of kuleana and kapu function within Leoiki's story as well as essential focal points for a Hawaiian historian's gathering and interpretation of sources. In writing this kind of history, this paper also sets out a new methodology that is interpretively consistent with traditional Hawaiian modes of remembering and perpetuating history.