Several years ago, I talked with a group of “Road Scholars” visiting the Wallowas. Road Scholar was the heir to “Elderhostlel,” and remains a program that targets retirees who want to travel and learn. At that time, I did my brief presentation on Nez Perce removal and tried to be encouraging about Native peoples’ return here and in many places across the country.
One of the visitors was from Hawaii, and he and I have been exchanging emails over the affairs of Native Americans on the Mainland and in Hawaii ever since. His name is Noel Kent…
He frequently responds with news of Indigenous activities in Hawaii to my blogposts about Nez Perce and other Native history and revival on the Mainland. I learned early that he is a retired academic, and more recently, on googling him—because he never revealed it directly—that he had written a book about the waves of non-Hawaiians who have controlled the islands over the past 200 years. Hawaii: Islands Under the Influence describes how the growth of sugar, pineapple, and tourism economies has overwhelmed Native lands and culture. It was published over forty years ago. In a second edition, Noel holds out hope for Native revival.
Hawaiian “Euro-History” was a bit slower than ours on the North American continent. James Cook was apparently the first European to land on the islands, in 1778, almost 300 years after Columbus “discovered”—stumbled upon—the Americas. The Haole—non-Hawaiian— missionaries arrived in 1820, the first sugar plantation was planted in 1845, and, as Kent documents, it has pretty much been a land-grab—with Asians joining the fray along the way—from farming to tourism ever since.
There are Nez Perce and Northwest linkages along the way as well. The Astor party took on Hawaiian sailors on their journey to the mouth of the Columbia in 1810-11. In fact, as Peter Stark tells it in his book, Astoria, Hawaiians saved the seaward journey from disaster because they knew how to swim—the American and English sailors did not!
Missionaries were actually later to the Northwest than to Hawaii, then known as the “Sandwich Islands.” The Spaldings arrived at Lapwai in 1836, and in 1839, at Henry Spalding’s request, the Sandwich Islands missionaries sent him a press and a pressman. In the 1840s, a Nez Perce Hymnal and the Book of Matthew were printed in a phonetic version of Nez Perce. It was the first printing press in the Northwest.
In that same period—between 1810 and the 1840s—several Hawaiian Natives joined the fur trade in the Northwest. You will find some Hawaiian names and bloodlines among NW Tribal people, and the mysteriously spelled Owyhee River and other odd linkages to the Islands.
Back to the Islands themselves, and the takeover of indigenous lands. I told a new Hawaiian friend who works for the Oregon Community Foundation about Noel Kent and his book, and she replied by sending me a book written by her uncle, Kahana: How the Land Was Lost, by Robert Stauffer. The book is newer than Noel’s book, and focuses on telling the land loss story through events on the island of Oahu.
Stauffer explains that, much like Tribal landholders on the Mainland, the Hawaiians had no concept of private property. They operated in terms of usage rights. And in the fifty years before 1893, 90 percent of all Island lands passed into the ownership of non-Hawaiians. Unlike the Mainland Indigenous, there were no treaties and reservations. From earliest days of the United States Republic, Native lands could not pass into private ownership without Congressional approval, i.e., treaty, allotment disbursement. But with no such prohibitions on the Islands, and the fast work of American bankers and land moguls, indigenous landholdings in Hawaii were gone.
One wonders why all this could happen in Territorial days—weren’t the Islands subject to US law before statehood? Ah—the bankers probably had an answer for that!
I was going into my senior year of high school when Hawaii became the 50th state in August of 1959. The idea that the lands had been wrested away from Native ownership did not occur to us as we followed the talk about how 50 stars—and briefly 49, with Alaska gaining statehood earlier that year–were going to replace 48 on the flag! Surfers from my California senior class got tickets to Hawaii for graduation presents, and the big boom in middle and richer classes of Americans going to the Islands would follow the surfers.
Noel Kent writes about language classes and Native claims today on the Islands, and we hear stories from around the world about language training, landback movements, and Indigenous visibility and prowess from business to entertainment to professional sports. How sad for all the lives lost and people washed over in the exuberances of colonization, resource extraction, and statehood over decades and centuries.
And how wonderful that we can see the reemergence of Native cultures and Native peoples in our country, in Hawaii, and across the world.
A thank you to Noel Kent, to my mentor Alvin Josephy, and to all the Haoles who saw to it that stories of colonialism, of displacement and loss were not lost, and that the dignity and humanity of all Indigenous people should be celebrated by us all.
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