To do so, this book pays close attention to the writings of chiefs and chiefly advisers, studying the usage of particular words or rhetorical turns of phrase that arose when the ali‘i or their advisers were engaged in political discussions. I do this so that I can get closer to understanding the fabric of Hawaiian political discourse and how power was shaped by the performance of words in these situations. Understanding of early nineteenth-century Hawaiian political thought can be found not only in important concepts, such as kapu and mana, but also by paying attention to the language that historical actors used in their interactions with one another. Speech is the primary mode through which the ali‘i secured rule and governed, as it was also central to the construction and maintenance of mo‘olelo (history and past-history as precedent) and the proclamation of kapu (oral law) and kānāwai (published law). Rather than being elusive, authoritative speech and Hawaiian patterns of discourse can be tracked across numerous written and published sources in Hawaiian, in translation, and even when transferred by fluent Hawaiian speakers into English.25
To accomplish this kind of recovery of Hawaiian political language and thought, this book must alleviate the tensions between orality and text as well as speech and writing. This project illustrates how people in this history moved between orality and writing, choosing in different instances to draw on the authority of written legal instruments, oaths sworn verbally, chiefly pronouncement (kapu), or the word of God, depending on their situation. Casting aside the colonial privileging of written texts over oral genres not only opens the door to a fuller Hawaiian-language source-base; it also reminds us that British and American historical actors in this period brought with them oral genres and rhetorical performances that structured their interactions with people at home as well as with Hawaiians.
The use of a term like “oral tradition” is problematic. I use the phrase sparingly to refer to genres in Hawaiian that were performed and passed on via networks and institutions that rigorously trained people to memorize materials, maintain their form and genre, and pass them on. A prevailing assumption in the use of “oral tradition” is that it predates the introduction of literacy to native communities and that orally expressed information represents “authentic, traditional knowledge’s, legends and tales.” Categorically, such traditions are relegated to “memory”—a body of knowledge reproduced uncritically and without analysis. The turn to the textual, in contrast, demarcates the inauguration of history, where texted materials are considered valid and “true.” At the inception of the written production of Hawaiian history, minister and professor Sheldon Dibble denigrated Hawaiian traditions as unverifiable because they were oral and not written.26 There is no compelling equivalent in our scholarly discourse for the way that print reproduces consensus arguments, research questions, and tropes uncritically as part of Euro-American discursive “written traditions,” and yet it is possible now using sorting search engines to reproduce the way discourse reproduces itself across scholarly works for generations.
How to construct rules for formulating contexts and deciding what evidence is applicable is one of the challenges this book offers; it suggests several avenues to continue the Hawaiian practice of mobilizing “precedent” from oral texts, as well as aids to their proper interpretation. Thus this book juxtaposes diverse worlds of words and the histories they carry to illustrate the vital importance of oral, oral-to-textual, and textual sources, especially in Hawaiian but also in American and British accounts of 1820s Hawai‘i.
This book also draws upon a wide range of source material generated by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The mission was a quintessential record keeping and generating enterprise that produced written and published works to convert native peoples and to promote its good works in order to fund future missionary endeavors in the islands and in other mission fields. The ABCFM corpus includes letters of candidacy, personal correspondence between missionaries in the field and families at home, official mission station reports, and journals, as well as the letters and official pronouncements to the Sandwich Islands missionaries from the Boston headquarters. The Missionary Herald was the monthly official magazine that kept home-based supporters apprised of the various foreign and domestic missions.
Missionaries also generated a lot of published material directed at native Hawaiians, including language materials to teach them how to read and write and translations of the Bible in the Hawaiian language. The mission also published other religious tracts while working to publish the Bible in Hawaiian as a means to further Christian instruction. In considering the relations between Hawaiian women and foreign men, as well as the ali‘i and transient and settled foreigners, I have used a previously untapped corpus of legal documents written in Hawaiian: published laws and depositions and firsthand accounts of the “outrages” that were generated during the investigation of Leoiki’s sale to Captain William Buckle.
Although many of these mission sources were composed in the Hawaiian language, it is important to note for our purposes that textual correspondence and mission reports in English incorporated quotes and glosses of Hawaiian words and phrases designated for an Atlantic audience. In order to identify important Hawaiian phrases in English-language sources, or in an English translation of a Hawaiian-language text, scholars need to be familiar with Hawaiian generic conventions—with Hawaiian modes of memorializing and representing the past.
These Hawaiian genres constitutive of Hawaiian historical thinking go beyond what has been labeled mo‘olelo. What kinds of historical paradigms and historiographic methods must we consider in a world of chant and oral “texts”? Narratives structured by chronological time are most at home in worlds of writing and print.27 Hawaiian historical paradigms before and during this period demand a different approach to writing this history than our usual orientation toward modern, strict chronological ordering of events and source uses. What kinds of historical thought emerge from a fundamental intellectual organizing genre/practice like the helu—the stacking or listing words and texts?
Recognizing the helu’s centrality in Hawaiian conceptual structures pushes us to recognize its role in constructing historical contexts, which make possible interpretations of events or other texts.28 Because words and certain rhetorical phrases gain power from their repetition and reiteration in particular contexts (ka mea i ‘ōlelo mua ‘ia), these phrases and words can be researched in chronologically later writings to offer clues to past, multiple meanings. In addition, when they are used and by whom also provides clues to the weight of those key phrases and terms. Hawaiians who wrote and published also recorded older oral texts in writing. Even as I consult materials that were published later, events and concepts found in these sources may predate their recording.29 To write this kind of history, I draw upon a vast corpus of writings produced by Hawaiians writing after 1825 in Hawaiian-language newspapers, personal manuscripts, letters and correspondence, and legal documents.30
What kind of history is conceived in mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogies) or koihonua, the chanted Hawaiian genealogies that entwined lineages of ali‘i with the birth or appearance of islands? The koihonua’s contents are often structured as name lists of ancestors that sometimes offer descriptions of their importance, such as the kind of kapu each chief bore and the mana exemplified in their words and deeds.31 While sometimes the helu or list serves simply as a mnemonic device for the chanter that opens out to other avenues of story and song, that only one trained to knowing could recapitulate. Some koihonua were also constructed as chants of emergence and navigation between the islands.32 A close-reading of an excerpt of a koihonua give us access to fundamental definitions of places and people and their relationships in time.
The chant “Ea Mai Hawai‘inuiākea” narrates the emergence of islands as seen from the ocean.
Ea mai Hawai‘inuiākea, Eia mai loko mai o ka po
Puka mai ka moku, ka ‘āina
ka