by Sarah Vowell
Sai pooh-poohed that notion immediately, pointing toward a picture of Kaahumanu hanging on the museum’s wall. “She was an effective premier,” he said.
Regarding Kaahumanu and Keopuolani’s role in ending the kapu system, Sai noted, “There’s no need for feminism. They were in control.” He added, “In Hawaii, it’s not necessarily your gender, it’s your rank.”
That is a fundamental point. I read Liliuokalani’s memoir, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, twice, once when I started my research and again toward the end of it. She recounts a trip to England during the reign of her brother King Kalakaua when she accompanied her sister-in-law, Queen Kapiolani, to attend Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. En route to England, they traveled by train from San Francisco across the United States and made a stop at Mount Vernon. Liliuokalani describes how moved she and Kapiolani were by the sight of George Washington’s tomb, “where lie the mortal remains of that great man who assisted at the birth of the nation which has grown to be so great.” She continued, “It seemed to me that we were one in our veneration of the sacred spot and of the first President of his country.”
This flummoxed me the first time I read it. The birth of the nation the future queen seemed to be admiring happened because George Washington and his army committed treason against their king.
When I read Liliuokalani’s book a second time after a couple of years of hanging around Hawaii, I had a clearer understanding of her admiration for Washington. It might have derived from his status and power, not his valor or his republican point of view. He had held the highest office in the land and as the heir to the Hawaiian throne, she was the second-highest-ranking Hawaiian.
The George Washington passage is even more fascinating, given the fact that Liliuokalani’s book was published in 1898 to drum up support against the American annexation of Hawaii after she had been deposed from her throne by men with American parents or grandparents who compared their revolution favorably to Washington’s.
The last line of Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen is addressed to the American people and their congressmen. “As they deal with me and my people, kindly, generously, and justly, so may the Great Ruler of all nations deal with the grand and glorious nation of the United States of America.” It’s clever to imply that if the U.S. swallows up her little country, God will smite it. As I reread the last sentence of a book written by a Hawaiian queen who was taught to read and write by American missionaries, her final thought seems emblematic of how the hierarchical Hawaiians adapted to Christianity. Jehovah, “the Great Ruler of all nations,” is the highest high chief in the universe.
I told Sai that I thought one unfortunate consequence of 1893 is that Hawaiian commoners never got a chance to overthrow the monarchy themselves, never got to form their own republic. He laughed.
“No! No way,” he said. “Hawaii is a system of hierarchy. Chiefly rank was ingrained in the land.” He meant that literally, by the way. He explained, “The management of land and resources was intrinsically tied to rank.” He brought up the traditional system of land division, the ahupua‘a, a wedge of land that stretched from the mountains to the sea, ingeniously offering each group of occupants a slice of the ecosystem, allowing access to upland streams and valleys as well as coastal fishing. Each one was lorded over by a chief, Sai says, “who was responsible for the coastline, who put kapu on certain fish to replenish them, who managed access.” Thus the most important duty of each land division’s chief is to act as that tract’s Environmental Protection Agency, to wield authority to guard against such sins as overfishing, so as to insure the people’s survival. That chief received tribute, usually foodstuffs, from the commoner farmers and fishermen in his or her domain, and that chief, in turn, paid tribute to the king, who ultimately owned—a better verb might be “controlled”—all the islands. As the Hawaiian Constitution of 1840 defined the situation under Kamehameha I: “To him belonged all the land from one end of the Islands to the other, though it was not his own private property. It belonged to the chiefs and people in common, of whom Kamehameha I was the head, and had the management of the landed property.” Unlike feudal European peasants, Hawaiian commoners were not bound to particular tracts of land, and so it behooved the chiefs and king to treat the commoners well so the land in a chief’s domain remained productive.
“If it went to a republic,” Sai asks, “how would that work? Because then everybody’s equal under the same system because they’re all citizens.”
“I like that,” I said.
“Because you’re an American,” he said. “You should.”
Because I am an American, and an argumentative one, I would like to point out that the Hawaiian chiefs were as vulnerable to the trappings of power as any other ruling class in the history of the world, occasionally privileging material goods over ecological stewardship. The most disturbing example of this is Hawaii’s participation in the sandalwood trade circa 1790-1830.
The Hawaiian Islands—especially Kauai—were blessed with bountiful stands of sandalwood trees. Sandalwood was one of the rare import items coveted by the Chinese, those consummate exporters of silk, spices, and tea. And so the Hawaiian chiefs made small fortunes by coercing commoners to stop farming and fishing and instead to harvest and haul the trees to port to sell to Western ships. Working conditions in the rainy mountains were treacherous and living conditions deteriorated due to the resulting food shortages when a chief’s taro tenders and fishermen were reassigned to logging. “The plain man,” David Malo wrote, “must not complain.” He noted, “If the people were slack in doing the chief’s work they were expelled from their lands, or even put to death.”
In the chiefs’ defense, their innate human lust for possessions was egged on and exploited by Western traders who were only beginning to solve the trade imbalance with China by pushing opium on the Chinese. (If the word “haole” can have negative connotations depending on inflection and/or the adjective preceding it, it’s downright gracious compared to how the Chinese described foreigners—fan kuei, “foreign devils” or “ocean ghosts.”) By the 1820s, opium consumption was on the rise, but mostly the Chinese were addicted to sandalwood incense and acquiring exquisite sandalwood boxes, many of them carved from Hawaiian trees.
A missionary on Kauai complained to the secretary of the ABCFM in 1830 about the high chiefs’ shopping habits, noting, “Some of the foreigners who trade here, are too well acquainted with this trait in their character . . . [and] they urge upon them things which they do not want; and for which, they have no means of paying, but by imposing new burdens upon the people.”
Eventually life in areas with concentrations of sandalwood returned to normal, but only because of deforestation. The chiefs didn’t stop ordering the commoners to cut down all the sandalwood trees until all the sandalwood trees had been cut down.
IN NOVEMBER OF 1819—six months after his father’s death and a month after the missionaries sailed from Boston—King Liholiho hosted a banquet at his court in Kailua. (A little north of the bay where Captain Cook was killed, Kailua is on the Big Island’s western side, called the Kona Coast.) When the guests arrived for dinner, the women took their seats at the women’s table and the men sat at the men’s table, per usual. As Kaahumanu later recalled, “Suddenly and without any previous warning [the king] seated himself in a vacant chair at the women’s table, and began to eat voraciously.” The guests “clapped their hands, and cried out . . . ‘the eating taboo is broken.’ ” Then the king issued orders he wanted carried out on all the islands: the idols were to be burned and the temples were to be abandoned or knocked down.
As a female carnivore, I’m delighted that half the population was freed to eat pork. As a former Smithsonian intern, I am horrified that priceless cultural artifacts went up in smoke. (Many of them were spared, luckily, when believers hid them or buried them in caves, or just generally hung on to carvings for old times’ sake.) As the future king David Kalakaua would describe the effects of Liholiho’
s decree:
In the smoke of burning heiaus, images and other sacred property, beginning on Hawaii and ending at Niihau, suddenly passed away a religious system which for fifteen hundred years or more had shaped the faith, commanded the respect and received the profoundest reverence of the Hawaiian people.
The missionaries interpreted this news as a housewarming gift from God. Lucy Thurston also saw it as fulfilling Henry Obookiah’s ambition to return home and gather up idols and “put ’em in a fire, burn ’em up.”
She wrote, “Obookiah from on high saw that day. He saw the darkness fleeing away from Hawaii, and that that mission family, so hastily fitted out, was going forth to carry the Bible to a nation without a God.”
While relishing the burning of the idols as “the hand of God,” Hiram Bingham saw no reason to get overly optimistic about the heart of man.
He concluded that idols being used for kindling only meant that “atheism took the throne.” He worried that the king had become Voltaire in a loincloth for having “begun an experiment, like what some equally vain philosophers have often desired, and sometimes recommended, to rule a nation without any recognition of religious obligation, or any respect to the religious views of the people to be governed.”
Being a stickler for the Ten Commandments, Bingham couldn’t help but point out why a law against graven images became necessary in the first place, when the Israelites “were ever ready, we remembered, to relapse into idolatry.” Moses couldn’t even take a walk in the woods without his friends and family whipping up a golden calf to worship behind his back, and this was after Jehovah had just parted the Red Sea to save their lives. If an Old Testament tribe that had witnessed the Bible’s most over-the-top miracle was still praying to sculptures, Bingham grumbled, “How much more did we fear these uninstructed heathen would do so, unless they could be speedily impressed with the claims of Christianity.” Otherwise, Hawaii would be “scourged with atheism or anarchy.”
On the long, doltish list of Hiram Bingham’s fears, anarchy seems to me the most unfounded. For starters, Liholiho had just doubled his kingly power by eliminating his rivals, the priests. In the English language, the colloquialism “big kahuna” comes from the word for the Hawaiian priests. Who was bigger than the biggest kahuna? That would be the king who decided there wouldn’t be any kahunas anymore.
Plus, I cannot think of a more reverent people. When Kekuni Blaisdell was walking me through Hawaiian history from the first taro plant to the present, he made a point of talking up the importance to Hawaiians of the belly button and genitalia. He noted that the navel represents “each person’s anatomical attachment to his or her mother,” and so “each child is taught to respect [it], to make sure it’s clean and to reflect on its significance.” He said that genitals are revered as the connection to one’s descendants. For that reason, there’s a specific genre of hula dance honoring royals, the hula ma‘i, “that praises the genitalia of the person being honored.”
I giggled, and he sighed. “Foreigners find this obscene, uncivilized,” he said.
Later, I looked up some of these procreative chants. They’re wonderfully metaphorical, enumerating the qualities of a particular king’s penis, using images such as a “large sewing needle,” or a “bald horse.” Still, celebrating royalty’s needles and horses, while playful on the surface, is deeply serious business, royal procreation being necessary to continue royal lines.
I envy a people who celebrate their leaders’ private parts—that they love those leaders so much they want them making newer, younger versions to tell the next generation what to do. In the democratic republic where I live, any politician whose genitals have made the news probably isn’t going to see his name on a ballot again.
Anarchy as a movement or a disposition is difficult to cultivate in a society in which each person knows his place, in which there is nothing more important than hierarchy and lineage, where children clean their belly buttons to honor their ancestors, where rulers’ sexuality is not only openly discussed, it is celebrated with choreography because procreation is the root of continuity and tradition.
It’s tempting to reduce the initial encounters between Hawaiians and missionaries to some sort of clunky prequel to Footloose. After all, when Daniel Chamberlain witnessed his first hula, he wrote, “I scarcely ever saw anything look more Satanic.” Yet a procreative hula honoring a high chief strikes me as emblematically Hawaiian because it is conservative. The cultural collision of the New Englanders and their new neighbors isn’t a quarrel between barefoot, freewheeling libertines and starchy, buttonedup paragons of virtue (though that is how the missionaries see it). To me, it is the story of traditionalists squaring off.
THE THADDEUS WAS anchored off the shore of the Big Island village of Kawaihae, and the missionaries were still waiting for permission to go ashore. They had heard the news of the old religion’s demise and were antsy to leap into the spiritual void that awaited them on dry land. In the meantime, a few canoes of native rubberneckers rowed out to the ship “to look at the strangers,” as Bingham put it. Staring back, he did not like what he saw: “The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt swarthy skins, were bare, was appalling.”
The items of clothing that rendered the Hawaiians “almost naked” were the malo (loincloth) on the men and the pa‘u (skirt) on the women. Capes were also an option. These garments were fashioned from tapa (also called kapa), a soft cloth with the consistency of paper pounded from the bark of mulberry and other trees. Exceedingly beautiful, this cloth was often decorated with intricate, geometric designs. The Bishop Museum in Honolulu, for example, owns a pa‘u skirt made out of tapa that belonged to King Liholiho’s wife, Queen Kamamalu. Its surface is covered in alternating stripes and checks that would have been a big hit in a Bauhaus design studio.
Captain Cook was smitten with this textile when he first saw it in Kauai in 1778. He wrote in his journal, “One would suppose that they had borrowed their patterns from some mercer’s shop in which the most elegant productions of China and Europe are collected. . . . The regularity of the figures and stripes is truly surprising.”
One of the missionaries who arrived a few years after the Bingham company took the time to observe the time-consuming process by which Hawaiian women pounded the bark and then decorated it. He concluded that its production takes so much “invention and industry” it proves the Hawaiians were not “incapable of receiving the improvements of civilized society.” For a missionary, where there’s drudgery, there’s hope. That epiphany came later, however. The Bingham gang probably dared not look closely enough to appreciate the merits of this native art form; they were likely averting their eyes from bare breasts and thighs.
Lucy Thurston recoiled at the native dress, or lack thereof, remarking, “To a civilized eye their covering seemed to be revoltingly scanty.” Still, unlike Bingham, she rallied when some of the visitors handed her a recently allowed banana through her cabin window. She passed back some biscuits in return and they called her “wahine makai”—good woman. She was touched by their hospitality, later recalling, “That interview through the cabin window of the brig Thaddeus gave me a strengthening touch in crossing the threshold of the nation.”
On April 1, some Hawaiian chiefs boarded the Thaddeus, among them the prime minister, Kalanimoku. Bingham lauded him as “distinguished from almost the whole nation, by being decently clad.” Lucy Thurston was also impressed, marveling that he had “the dignity of a man of culture.” By which she meant he was wearing pants—yellow ones, along with a silk vest and a fur hat. He bowed to the ladies and shook their hands. Years later, Lucy remembered, “The effects of that first warm appreciating clasp, I feel even now.”
Two of the female chiefs, widows of Kamehameha, sat politely on chairs for a while, and then sprawled on floor mats, one of them disrobing. “While we were opening wide our eyes,” Lucy wrote, “sh
e looked as self-possessed and easy as though sitting in the shades of Eden.”
Bingham approached Kalanimoku about establishing the mission, but the minister waved him off and “referred us to the king.”
Kalanimoku did escort Bingham and Thurston on shore, taking them sightseeing to the recently abandoned temple of Pu‘ukohola at Kawaihae Bay. Devoted to the war god Ku, the site is now administered by the National Park Service. This was the last major temple complex built before the end of the kapu system. This sort of pyramidal lava-rock structure measures 224 by 100 feet, and rises twenty feet high. Perched on a hill overlooking the water, this might be the most awe-inspiring manmade monument in all the islands aside from Ku’s new digs, the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Before Kamehameha’s uncle, the high chief, died, he named his nephew the keeper of Ku. Kamehameha had the temple built because of a prophecy promising that if he did, he would conquer all the islands. Thousands of people formed a human chain to pass lava rocks from twenty-five miles away, stacking the stones without any mortar. This is where Kamehameha invited his cousin and rival for a peace conference and then had him killed on arrival and sacrificed to Ku.
In 2008, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran an article titled “Betrayed Bloodline Looks Past Transgression,” about how one of the assassinated cousin’s descendants bucked two centuries of family grudge tradition to chair the Kamehameha Day festivities in the city of Hilo. The man admitted that his relatives “still harbor bad feelings toward Kamehameha to this day.”
