Northwest Passages: A Collection of Historical Writings from the University of Portland 2017-2018 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2017
This paper explores the historiography of Hawaiian mobility in the 19th century, with reference to mobilities that took place through Kānaka Maoli engagements as servants for the Hudson’s Bay Company of London. In recharting Hawaiian mobilities to the Pacific Northwest, it considers how Kānaka Maoli histories were intertwined with trans-Pacific networks of commerce and a broader Pacific world of aspirational mobility, extractive marine-based industries, and ultimately, a land-based fur trade centered initially at Fort Astoria. It discusses how Hawaiian engagements with the HBC in the Pacific Northwest were formative for their eventual incorporation into the colonial settler world of British Columbia, and examines their displacement from Oregon Territory in the wake of the 1846 boundary settlement. It incorporates themes of intimacy, encounter and hierarchy as key sites for locating Hawaiian social histories along the Northwest Coast. Finally, the Hawaiian presence in British Columbia is traced with attention to community formation and land acquisition. Whether or not they fit within a broader category of pioneer-settlers, the “Kanakas” displaced to the Northwest Coast were for a time first positioned along what historian Adele Perry has termed the “ragged margins” of empire.
He Mau Palapala Mai Kalipōnia Mai, Ka ʻĀina Malihini (Letters from California, the Foreign Land) Kānaka Hawai’i Agency and Identity in the Eastern Pacific (1820-1900) , 2019
The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which working-class Kānaka Hawai’i (Native Hawaiian) immigrants in the nineteenth century repurposed and repackaged precontact Hawai’i strategies of accommodation and resistance in their migration towards North America and particularly within California. The arrival of European naturalists, American missionaries, and foreign merchants in the Hawaiian Islands is frequently attributed for triggering this diaspora. However, little has been written about why Hawaiian immigrants themselves chose to migrate eastward across the Pacific or their reasons for permanent settlement in California. Like the ali’i on the Islands, Hawaiian commoners in the diaspora exercised agency in their accommodation and resistance to Pacific imperialism and colonialism as well. Blending labor history, religious history, and anthropology, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical approach that utilizes Hawaiian-language newspapers, American missionary letters, and oral histories from California’s indigenous peoples. I argue that precontact strategies were critical to preserving and holding onto an ethnic Hawaiian identity in encounters with merchants, missionaries, and indigenous peoples in California throughout the 1800s.
‘Ike Mōakaaka. Seeing a Path Forward: Historiography in Hawaiʻi
Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian vol. 7 (2011)
The creation of a hegemonic, master narrative for Hawaiʻi—sourced almost solely from English-language materials—has long offered a highly exclusive characterization of past events and figures in Hawaiian history. Elements within this dominant narrative not only shape understandings of specific individuals and actions but also work together to construct a general understanding of a people and their nation. This article advances analysis of a political biography, set in a crucial period of Hawaiian history, to highlight a historical process that continues to inform paradigmatic yet problematic histories. It calls for a decided and comprehensive move to a more inclusive historical process that offers a more complex, rich picture of Hawaiʻi's past.
Ke Ala Loa - The Long Road: Native Hawaiian Sovereignty and the State of Hawai'i
Tulsa Law Review, 2012
'i at Manoa. The author wishes to express her deep gratitude for the guidance and support of David H. Getches and Jon M. Van Dyke, two noted scholars and advocates for the Native Hawaiian community. Diacritical marks change the meaning of words in the Hawaiian language. Thus, in this article diacritical marks are used in Hawaiian words except in case names, certain titles, and quotations where Hawaiian words appear as they did in the original texts. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author's.
Nā Kuhia ma Hawaiian Antiquities / The Notes to Hawaiian Antiquities
Palapala, 2018
In Hawaiian Antiquities (Malo [1903] 1951), Nathaniel Emerson not only translated Davida Malo’s Ka Moolelo Hawaii (handwritten ca. 1841–53), he also added numerous endnotes to supplement and often to critique what Malo had written. This article analyzes and evaluates those notes. In order to help him understand Malo’s account, Emerson consulted with many Native Hawaiians, thirteen of whom are identified in the printed version of Hawaiian Antiquities or in an earlier draft. The consultants provided Emerson with valuable material (prayers in particular) that he included in the notes, but they had limited knowledge on many of the topics covered by Malo, especially concerning the makahiki and luakini rituals that had ended before their time.
Development and Decadent Time in Nineteenth-Century Hawaiʻi
Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 2023
The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Stoddard, in his memoir Hawaiian Life: Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (1894), recalls the beautiful ‘boat-boy of Lahaina’ in just such temporally ambiguous terms: although the travel writer had not seen the native youth in years, Stoddard muses that ‘the finger of Time doubles up the moment it points toward him’, so that ‘he must be still lying in wait for me, […] not a day older, not a particle changed’. In the case of Hawaiʻi, this pervasive trope of stasis exists in tension with alternative and often contradictory models of time as cyclical, regressive, and even hyper-accelerated, such that Hawaiian history appears to unfold in fits and starts, jumping forward and looping backward in ways that resist linear understandings of progress. Later in Hawaiian Life, for instance, Stoddard reflects on the fate of Kane-Pihi, a local fisherman who in the span of a few months transforms from a ‘gentle savage’ into a streetwise petty thief and eventual convict. For Stoddard, Kane-Pihi’s rapid evolution – which ends with his ignominious death in prison – recreates in miniature the story of a race doomed to collapse under the weight of modernity and its steady drumbeat of ‘development’.
Making 'Aha: Independent Hawaiian Pasts, Presents & Futures
We use Hawaiian methods of knowledge production to weave together contemporary and historical instances of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) political resistance to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism. Our departure point is the summer of 2014, when hundreds of Kānaka came forward to assert unbroken Hawaiian sovereignty and reject a U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) proposal to create a pathway for federal recognition of a reorganized Native Hawaiian governing entity. This essay situates testimonies from these hearings within a longer genealogy of Kanaka assertions of "ea" (sovereignty, life, breath) against the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Hawaiʻi that began in 1898 and extends to the present.