Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World

Island Queens and Mission Wives

GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Coeditors

Thadious M. Davis

Mary Kelley

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Cott

Jane Sherron De Hart

John D’Emilio

Linda K. Kerber

Annelise Orleck

Nell Irvin Painter

Janice Radway

Robert Reid-Pharr

Noliwe Rooks

Barbara Sicherman

Cheryl Wall

Emerita Board Members

Cathy N. Davidson

Sara Evans

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

A complete list of books published in Gender and American Culture is available at www.uncpress.unc.edu.

Island Queens and Mission Wives

HOW GENDER AND EMPIRE REMADE HAWAI‘I’S PACIFIC WORLD

Jennifer Thigpen

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Fund and the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2014 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved.

Set in Quadraat and Bulmer by codeMantra.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thigpen, Jennifer.

Island queens and mission wives : how gender and empire remade Hawai‘i’s

Pacific world / Jennifer Thigpen.

      pages cm. — (Gender and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-1429-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4696-1430-4 (ebook)

1. Hawaii—History—To 1893. 2. Hawaii—Foreign relations—Pacific Area. 3. Hawaii—Politics and government—To 1893. 4. Hawaiian women—Political activity—Hawaii—History—19th century. 5. Missionaries—Political activity—Hawaii—History— 19th century. I. Title.

DU627.T45 2014

996.9’02—dc23

2013035599

18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

For Jamie, with Love and Gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Kamehameha’s Kingdom

Chapter 2 Soldiers and Angels for God

Chapter 3 When Worlds Collide

Chapter 4 Gendered Diplomacy

Chapter 5 Hawaiian Heroines

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Vancouver’s Chart of the Sandwich Islands, ca. 1798 / 15

Authorized portrait of Kamehameha / 28

Portraits of Mercy and Samuel Whitney / 42

Portrait of Ka‘ahumanu by Louis Choris / 48

Kalanimōkū’s baptism aboard the Uranie / 58

O‘ahu in the early 1820s / 60

Mission house and church, ca. 1820s / 102

Kawaiaha‘o Church (also called the Stone Church) in Honolulu / 103

Acknowledgments

This book is, in part, about the obligations of gratitude that bound American missionaries to their Hawaiian hosts in unexpected ways in the nineteenth century. Writing nearly 200 years later, I find that the rules of reciprocity and gratitude still apply. Indeed, I have incurred a variety of obligations—debts I hope someday to be able to repay. In most cases, a simple thank you will not suffice, but it’s a start.

A number of funding sources supported the research and writing stages of this project. I was the beneficiary of a number of grants and fellowships at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), including Humanities Center Research Grants, a Regent’s Dissertation Grant, and a yearlong Chancellor’s Club Dissertation Fellowship. These provided support at a critical time in my research, allowing me to teach less and write more. A University of California Pacific Rim Research Program grant offered the means to conduct research at archives in Hawai‘i in the earliest stages of this project. A Mayers Fellowship from the Huntington Library in San Marino allowed me to spend a summer consulting the library’s vast collections. At Washington State University, a New Faculty Seed Grant allowed me to devote all my professional energies and attentions to writing the manuscript. I offer my deepest thanks to these institutions for their support.

I have also been fortunate enough to have gained the support of mentors and scholars in my field. At UCI, Alice Fahs, Vicki Ruiz, and Dickson (Dave) Bruce provided steady instruction, guidance, and encouragement throughout the process. Alice offered unfailingly thoughtful insights into my work. She is not only a gifted historian but also a truly skilled editor. Under Alice’s tutelage, I grew as a scholar and a thinker, and I am thankful that she continues be such a gracious mentor and friend. Vicki was an inspiration throughout the writing process, gently but persistently reminding me to allow my subjects to tell their own story. Vicki is also an enormously generous person, constantly offering her time, her attention, and her considerable expertise. As any of her current or former students will tell you, Vicki is never too busy to lend a helping hand. Dave persistently—but always cheerfully—kept me focused on my writing.

A number of scholars read my work at various stages and offered meaningful suggestions. Early on, Susan Yohn wisely encouraged me to think beyond a very local story and frame my discussion of the Hawaiian Islands mission in its much broader, global context. Sue Armitage and Susan Johnson read separate pieces, yet both urged me to attend more fully to the meeting of peoples and cultures in Hawai‘i. Taken together, their comments and insights offered the delightful challenge of simultaneously expanding the scope of my research while maintaining a focus on the people who populate the narrative.

My colleagues at Washington State University have been a tremendous source of support. My department chair, Ray Sun, helped ease my departmental obligations at the writing-intensive stage of this project and also offered steady support along the way. Peter Boag read an early draft of the manuscript and offered important suggestions. I appreciate his mentoring and his friendship in equal measure. Sue Peabody provided thoughtful insights and encouragement at critical moments in the writing of this book. I am truly thankful for her help. My colleague and friend Jeff Sanders kindly read chapters as the manuscript was nearing completion. His suggestions allowed—and sometimes challenged—me to consider new perspectives on my subject. I thank Matt Sutton especially for his help. Matt has gone above and beyond in his support of me and of this book. In fact, it is very likely that he has read as many drafts of this book as I have. His incisive criticism of my work made this a better, stronger book and I am deeply indebted to him.

Finally, I thank my family. My husband, Jamie, has always believed that this book was a worthy endeavor and that I had something important to say. While I researched and wrote, he kept the home fires burning—sometimes, in the dead of winter, quite literally. He not only made our home a warm and welcoming place to return to at the end of the day, but he also reminds me that home and family are truly the most important things of all. Our children, Emma and Henry, also helped in the writing of this book, mostly by insisting that I not become subsumed by it. Together, they introduced just the right amount of silliness into my life as I approached the serious business of writing. I am truly grateful to all three of them.

Island Queens and Mission Wives

Introduction

In March 1820 the first company of American missionaries arrived in the Hawaiian Islands. At the insistence of the islands’ ali‘i (ruling elite), the band was dispersed; while some remained on the island of Hawai‘i, others sailed on to Honolulu. In July a small group traveled to Kaua‘i, where they also hoped to establish a mission. They brought with them a young man, Humehume, who the missionaries knew as George Tamoree. He had traveled with the missionaries from Boston. On Kaua‘i, Humehume was reunited with his father, Kaumuali‘i, the ruling chief there.¹ Kaumuali‘i promptly presented the missionaries with a gift of food. Nancy Ruggles, a young missionary wife, reflected on the gift in her diary, observing: Never before were our obligations of gratitude so great as they now are.² Ruggles rightly perceived the reciprocity—and obligation—implied in accepting such a gift. While Kaumuali‘i had reasons of his own to feel thankful that summer, Ruggles anticipated that the chief would expect a reciprocal gift sometime in the future. She might not have foreseen, however, that the gifts that missionaries and Hawaiian royalty exchanged in the first weeks and months of their relationship would pull both parties into an enduring cycle of exchange. This proved especially true on neighboring islands, where missionaries received a variety of gifts from the islands’ ali‘i and were pressed to produce reciprocal gifts, particularly articles of clothing. Such exchanges, I argue, established the foundation for important diplomatic and political relationships that extended well into the future and would ultimately reshape the Pacific world.

American missionaries arrived in the Pacific with a set of strategies for Christianizing the Hawaiian people shaped by reigning American racial and gender ideologies. Early official narratives of the Hawaiian mission validated those strategies, telling a story of masculine intervention in a heathen land. My research demonstrates, however, that missionaries drastically underestimated the significance of the work that mission wives would undertake in the islands, and that they similarly misunderstood the power that Hawaiian women wielded in social, political, cultural, and religious matters. Such an oversight reflected missionaries’ myopic ideology and proved an early—though not insurmountable—obstacle to missionaries’ conversion plans.

Two of Hawai‘i’s highest-ranking women, Ka‘ahumanu and Kalākua, offered early corrections to missionaries’ misperceptions. Ka‘ahumanu, who virtually ruled the islands at the time the missionaries arrived, interpreted her relationship to the Americans in her midst as one akin to that between ali‘i and maka‘āinana (common people). Indeed, missionaries learned that they would need Ka‘ahumanu’s permission to establish a mission on even a probationary basis. Similarly, in a show of her rank, Kalākua began making demands on the missionaries almost from the moment of their arrival. Hawai‘i’s royal women, in fact, used their power and status to compel mission wives to engage in what became an ongoing cycle of giving that endured throughout the missionaries’ tenure in the islands.

If missionaries were unprepared for the kind of compulsory, reciprocal gift giving and exchange that would structure their relationship with ali‘i, they certainly would not have anticipated that women—Hawaiian or American—would become largely responsible for shaping the future of the mission and the nature of Hawaiian-American interaction. Yet my research shows that relationships of exchange, originated and successfully maintained by women, determined the contours of the American mission in Hawai‘i.

Island Queens and Mission Wives focuses on the creation and evolution of a multiethnic, global community in the Pacific. In particular, I narrate the dramatic story of cultural transformation that resulted as competing cultures came into close and sustained contact with one another within the context of an emergent Pacific world. While the cultural—and later, political—colonization of the Hawaiian Islands is well known, the exchange relationships forged among American missionary wives and Hawaiian women have been largely overlooked. I argue that women’s relationships, organized around the exchange of gift items, became critical sites for the building and maintenance of important diplomatic and political alliances. Exploring the connections between women’s work and colonization, this book addresses important questions about colonial processes not only in Hawai‘i but also in many other locations across the globe.

This book supplements the existing literature on the American mission to Hawai‘i in several ways. First, it seeks to recenter Hawaiians (particularly ali‘i) within the missionary drama and to situate Hawaiian interactions with American missionaries within the much larger context of the emergent Pacific world. In a second and related way, this book challenges the periodization that historians have often employed to understand the Hawaiian past. Such periodization did not develop solely as an outgrowth of Eurocentrism but was due in part to historians’ traditional reliance on missionary documents. That is, while American missionaries viewed the period between 1820 and 1853 as Hawai‘i’s mission period, the islands’ inhabitants almost certainly did not. In fact, the missionaries were but one group among many foreign visitors who routinely visited the Hawaiian Islands beginning in the late eighteenth century. The idea that the missionaries’ tenure in the islands constituted a particular, discrete, or important era in the islands’ history developed only later, after the ramifications of the American missionary labors had become more clear. The traditional periodization, then, is informed more by our understanding of later historical outcomes than by our grasp of processes at work in the historical past.

While American missionaries ultimately gained a strategic foothold in the islands (and one that had long-lasting implications for Hawai‘i’s political, economic, and social future), this was not the inevitable conclusion, nor was it one that Hawaiians necessarily foresaw. Thus, rather than beginning with the so-called mission period, I begin my narrative earlier, in the 1780s, to coincide both with King Kamehameha’s political assent and with an era of increasingly aggressive Pacific exploration that lasted well into the nineteenth century. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ali‘i were called upon to mobilize their skills as shrewd diplomats and political negotiators while dealing with a diverse, culturally foreign population with competing plans for Hawai‘i and its people.

The argument I put forth rests in part on the premise that Hawaiians were neither passive nor helpless victims of Western colonialism. My research makes extensive use of the cache of English-language sources to identify instances of Hawaiian opposition to European and American aggression in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In many cases, historians have overlooked such resistance. The sources I consulted, including not just American missionary documents but also accounts by European explorers such as George Vancouver and Otto Von Kotzebue, frequently—if inadvertently—pointed to the kinds of resistance foreigners encountered in their interactions with Hawaiians. My work is theoretically indebted to a historiography of colonialism that endeavors to grapple with the way in which power was constantly negotiated and contested in such contexts. For example, though missionaries later recounted their experience in the Hawaiian Islands as an unmitigated success, their own records offer a more complicated and ambiguous picture, particularly the documents from the earliest years of the mission.

I am aware, of course, of the work of scholars who have argued for the centrality of Hawaiian-language sources to understanding and interpreting Hawaiian history. It is critical to note, however, that there are precious few of these sources for the period I examine because Hawaiians did not make much use of a written language in this period. The very few records that do exist are both fragmentary and scattered. With a few very small exceptions, the extant Hawaiian-language sources were written well after the period I examine and often by people who had been educated and Christianized by American missionaries, such as Samuel Kamakau, David Malo, and John Papa ‘Ī‘ī. These sources were later translated.

Throughout this book, I have made use of the work of the mo‘olelo (histories) recorded by Hawaiian historians like Kamakau, ‘Ī‘ī, and Malo. I have handled these sources carefully in order to account for the passage of time as well as changes in interpretation or ideology that may have occurred in the intervening years. Indeed, I recognize the value of these translated sources, particularly for what they tell us about Hawaiian culture in the nineteenth century.³ I have used them extensively in this way. I have also used them to corroborate—rather than to directly reflect upon—the events described by Western visitors. I have been similarly cautious in my handling of published missionary documents and memoirs, using those documents in the same way that I use Hawaiian histories.

Readers might notice that although I cite Hawaiian-studies scholars and discuss their scholarship, their approaches do not seem to have shaped this book. It is important to note that I also rely on and cite a variety of scholarly texts by a range of scholars representing many disciplinary perspectives throughout the manuscript without allowing their scholarship to shape or direct my analysis. My intent is to build on and make meaningful contributions to the existing literature rather than to replicate it. At the same time, it is important to note just how much Hawaiian-studies scholars have done to push all scholars to take seriously the concerns, interests, and motivations of Hawaiians in their interactions with foreigners. This is no small contribution; in fact, their work has done much to transform the way scholars of all disciplines approach and understand this topic.

I have approached all of my sources cautiously, vigilantly guarding against accepting—and repeating—Westerners’ descriptions of Hawai‘i and its people. My analysis is informed in important ways by Marshall Sahlins’s assertion that one cannot do good history . . . without regard for ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. I have thus endeavored to understand the historical subjects that appear in this study on their own terms and within their own cultural and historical context. Toward this end, I have relied not just on historical scholarship on Hawai‘i but also on the foundational literature of anthropologists like Sahlins, Jocelyn Linnekin, and Greg Dening. I have also profited from Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa’s insightful, nuanced work. Finally, I have benefited from the work of historians of the American West (most notably Richard White and Daniel K. Richter) who have pioneered innovative methodologies for studying interactions between culturally distinct peoples.⁴

Third, this book expands on current scholarship by considering how Hawai‘i’s ali‘i—beginning with King Kamehameha and ending with Ka‘ahumanu—perceived and shaped their relationships with foreign explorers, travelers, traders, and missionaries. In order to accurately interpret these interactions, I draw on the theory and methods of scholars in the fields of cultural studies, gender studies, and anthropology. I examine the cultural ideologies that undergirded even the most basic daily interactions between Hawaiian royalty and their foreign guests. Lacking a common cultural language by which to communicate, ali‘i and their guests often had to guess at meaning and intention. While such exchanges were rife with the possibility of miscommunication, a vast anthropological literature and a growing body of historical scholarship allows insight into these exchanges.⁵ Where Hawaiian women of rank did not leave a written record of their feelings about their exchanges with missionary wives, for example, it is possible to interpret the manner in which they attempted to communicate their political authority.

Finally, the existing literature on Hawai‘i in this period most often considers gender and colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands as separate, rather than intersecting, categories.⁶ Where Hawaiian histories consider the political power of Hawai‘i’s high-ranking women in this period and mission histories explore the labor of mission wives, only rarely do texts connect women’s work with the political labor of colonization. Island Queens and Missionary Wives examines the complicated colonial relations as they evolved in this period. Specifically, my research offers a careful exploration of missionary-Hawaiian contact to demonstrate that the intimate exchanges among and between women became central to the overarching story of colonization and conquest. Looking to the intimate domains of exchange generated around reciprocal gift giving, my research demonstrates that women were at the very center of the colonial drama in the nineteenth-century Hawaiian Islands.⁷ Further, while my research focuses specifically on Hawai‘i, these insights promise to help us rethink colonial interactions around the globe. Ultimately, this book seeks to help readers to not just better understand the role of women in colonization but also rethink the nineteenth-century transformation of the Hawaiian Islands, the nature of American expansion, and the development of an increasingly multicultural Pacific world.

Chapters 1 and 2 are intended to introduce readers to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hawai‘i and New England, respectively, to establish the collision of cultures that ensued in the 1820s. Chapter 1 sets up the political, economic, and social context of the Hawaiian Islands in the years leading up to and immediately following Kamehameha’s death. This chapter draws out the increasingly global and cosmopolitan character of the islands in this period and points toward the important political and cultural shifts that occurred on the eve of the missionaries’ arrival. Though Kamehameha’s rule coincided with a period of aggressive exploration in the Pacific, he laid the foundations for a politically and economically powerful Pacific nation. He did so first by unifying the Hawaiian Islands and, second, by cultivating political and economic relationships with travelers and traders. I argue that Kamehameha actively engaged with foreigners not only as a means by which to consolidate his political authority in Hawai‘i but also to