This dominant version of Hawai‘i’s history has not gone unchallenged, and revisionist narratives have attempted to address this problem from the contact period through annexation. These interventions have sought to rebalance the unequal measure of Hawaiian history by illuminating possible Hawaiian worldviews, made visible through abundant Hawaiian oral and written texts, and by focusing on the agency of native Hawaiian historical actors. Indeed, Hawai‘i may arguably have the largest native-language historical and literature archive in the Pacific, and perhaps all of native North America, exceeding one million pages of printed text, a staggering 125,000 of which were Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948.6 It is because of Hawai‘i’s relatively late Western “discovery” toward the end of the eighteenth century that the textual legacies of cross-cultural relationships in the islands are markedly different from those of other indigenous peoples in North and South America, Africa, and the Pacific. Due to the missionary introduction of printing presses to early nineteenth-century Hawai‘i and chiefly commands to their people that they become educated and literate, Hawaiians began to write and publish Hawaiian histories, genealogies, and “traditions” during the 1820s. As a result, continuity in the transmission of Hawaiian oral, historical, and cultural “traditions” into writing and print may be unparalleled in the historiography of native peoples.
In the first real attempt to correct the historiography through Hawaiian-language sources, Hawaiian historian Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa illustrated the power of metaphors framed out of deep literacy in Hawaiian language. Using these metaphors to expand our understanding of Hawaiian governance through the concept of pono (correctness), her work provided an important corrective to the argument that avaricious ali‘i facilitated the spread of western institutions to the detriment of their native subjects.7 At the same time, Hawaiian-language expert Puakea Nogelmeier forcefully argued that generations of scholarly work on Hawai‘i were profoundly limited by the sole use of English translations of four major nineteenth-century Hawaiian intellectuals and writers.8 Nogelmeier challenged this four-text canon, calling its enshrinement a “discourse of sufficiency.”9 Thus Nogelmeier put the onus on scholars to go beyond an impoverished canon of sources and draw upon the numerous extant sources in Hawaiian.
Political scientist Noenoe Silva has continued Kame‘eleihiwa’s work with Hawaiian-language sources, arguing that kānaka maoli were not passive victims of colonialism; instead, her work restored the leo o ka lāhui (the voice of the people) to Hawaiian histories of the Overthrow and Annexation periods.10 To do so, Silva presents, translates, and interprets numerous late nineteenth-century written protests against American seizure of Hawai‘i. Petitions, newspaper editorials, and chanted and sung protestations against the overthrow and annexation counterbalance the unequal settler colonial histories of this critical moment.11 The most recent works by geographer Kamanamaikalani Beamer and literary scholar Marie Alohalani Brown illustrate that new scholarship on nineteenth-century Hawaiian history is no longer apologetic about engaging Hawaiian-language source material. Beamer’s work rejects the “fatal impact” thesis that imagined a passive native capitulation to foreign influence. In his historical narrative of Hawaiian governance, the ali‘i are portrayed through ‘ōiwi (native) optics as having “agency” in selectively appropriating western ideas and technologies to augment traditional Hawaiian governance.12
In these attempts to rebalance the unequal measure of colonial histories of Hawai‘i with a native history of Hawai‘i grounded in the Hawaiian-language archive, these scholars have made essential interventions, especially in their attempts to illuminate Hawaiian historiographic concepts, paradigms, and tropes through culturally literate interpretation of Hawaiian-language sources. But this revisionist work’s emphasis on restoring “agency” to Hawaiian historical actors carries another risk: the unreflective use of Western historiographical paradigms, tropes, and plots in telling histories of culturally Othered peoples. As the historical anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues, any history of first contact in Hawai‘i, let alone a history of contemporary Hawai‘i, can easily be trapped in its own Western cultural paradigms unless we rigorously recognize how “our” paradigms and tropes replicate them, working instead to respect and seek the cultural differences that make all the difference.13
Revisionist projects’ use of “agency,” then, is an effect of the historiographic distortion introduced into Hawaiian histories as part of a colonial historical narrative, fundamentally based in Enlightenment definitions of places and peoples, of modern political subjects defined by their self-agency, and of primitive naturals with passive natures. In other words, natives with agency have been created out of necessity to combat historiographic narratives that have made natives historical objects rather than subjects.14 But this revisionist work has left uncritiqued the fundamental binarism embedded in settler colonial historiography.
This book takes seriously Sahlins’ warning, critiquing the premises to which colonial historiography of Hawai‘i has bound us by deepening the revisionist dive into Hawaiian-language sources to reveal and employ Hawaiian-language-based “ideas, actions, and ontologies” in historical interpretation. Different languages let us see different historiographies. This is the heart of correcting histories of unequal measure: we must seek an understanding of a multilingual and epistemologically diverse Pacific World, full of many kinds of exchanges. We need to attempt an integration of the methodological and intellectual practices of both Hawaiian and American histories. And the foundation of this necessary correction to imbalanced power and priorities in our distinct and converging historiographies is an unwavering insistence upon including disparate worlds of words that met in early nineteenth-century Hawai‘i.
From this perspective, the political and legal transformations of the 1820s—transformations of vital importance to Hawai‘i’s modern history—were Hawaiian responses to “colonial” disorder, rather than well-organized colonial impositions upon Hawaiian disorder.15 This work maps the political, economic, and religious intercourse between Hawaiians and foreigners from 1810 to 1828. In doing so, I argue that Hawaiian governance and law enter into a moment of global modernity, marked by the expansion of chiefly governance to now include kānāwai, or printed laws. This legal change in the 1820s marks a clearer distinction between Hawaiian political subjects under chiefly kapu, American and British political subjects, and foreigners who sought political existence under the chiefs. This mixed world of words came together in a Hawai‘i still ruled by the ali‘i and governed by long-standing council and legal practices. From this view, we can see a new Hawaiian history.
In this new history, Hawaiians were not waiting to be civilized, rather they were experiencing a series of dramatic social and political upheavals marked most significantly by Kamehameha’s unification of the islands. This long-term military campaign flattened the political structure of rule by eradicating rival ali‘i, collapsing lines of genealogical succession, and subsuming religious leadership under his rule. Unification was aided by the incorporation of haole expertise and munitions, and hastened by new diseases that struck warring factions indiscriminately. It was this complex religio-political contest that American merchants and missionaries encountered. Thus Hawai‘i in the 1820s was shaped by a heterogeneity of value systems, in which each group of people brought their own ways of making decisions to their engagements with each other. The entry of Hawai‘i into the global sandalwood trade occurred through an alliance between certain chiefs and American merchants. In this alliance, different ideas of obligation and debt held by chiefs and merchants made for a necessary evolution of economic thinking in Hawai‘i and laid the foundation for a modern Hawaiian national debt in the mid-nineteenth century. As increasing numbers of whalers arrived in the islands, sexual encounters between Hawaiian women and foreign men brought the ali‘i, foreign sailors, ship captains, merchants, and American missionaries into serious conflict beginning in 1825, resulting in the pronouncement of legal restrictions (kapu)