This semester I taught a new graduate level course in
Hawaiian historical research in archives. An unprecedented fourteen students signed up
for the course; four of them had completed second year Hawaiian while the other
ten had four years or more of Hawaiian language training. A surprising number
of my students are interested in topics
dealing with Hawaiian governance and law. What makes their work striking is
that their research projects do not conform to the historiographic trajectory
that currently reigns supreme in histories of U.S.-Hawaiʻi relations. Rather
than obsessively focusing on outcomes – how the Hawaiian Kingdom was “lost,”
who was at fault, and how Hawai’i became a U.S. possession – my graduate
students asked questions about the Hawaiian and non Hawaiian legislators who
held office from 1840-1900.
They were interested in how these men and women became
lawyers, judges, and politicians, and how the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi functioned as
a nation. One student chanced across the case of Judge Kauaʻi who had served as
a legislative representative and judge on the island of Kauaʻi. In 1888, after
a long, distinguished career, he was accused of having leprosy by a grudge
bearing deputy sheriff and arrested. In an eleven page letter, written in
Hawaiian to Supreme Court Justice Albert Francis Judd, he argued his innocence,
quoting from recently passed laws and policies that promised that the afflicted
would be treated in local hospitals until their disease was acute, all the
while protesting his “innocence,” and reminding Judd of their longstanding
friendship. Another student focused on the lives and careers of five prominent
legislative representatives including Hawaiian lawyer, newspaper publisher and legislator
Joseph Kahoʻoluhi Nawahi, while yet another tracked a year of kanaka maoli protest through Hawaiian
language newspapers over the proposed cession of Pearl Harbor to the U.S. in
1877. When I read and corrected the transcriptions and translations of primary
sources that my students produced, and I finished grading fourteen 25 page
research papers, three of which were written in Hawaiian, I took heart that the
history of nineteenth century Hawaiʻi, the Pacific World and America’s place within
it has a long way to grow.
Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou! (Happy New Year from Hawaiʻi)
