"I Improve This Opportunity to Write to You:” Hawaiian Writers to American Readers in the Nineteenth Century

The captive Friday, mute but grateful to his white savior to avoid a fate worse than death at the hands of cannibalistic fellow islanders, leaving his fleeting footsteps in the sands of time. Fayaway, all smiles, mystery and silence, trapped by the cultural restrictions of her own paradise. Queequeg, speaking in undecipherable pidgin while hawking embalmed heads on the streets of Boston on a Sabbath. These are a few of many examples of fictional portrayals of Pacific Islander who are either unable, or in some cases unwilling, to speak for themselves: fictional portrayals influenced by a discourse that perceived indigenous people as mystified by western technology, helpless before the onslaught of disease, unable to progress into a modern age, silent victims of preconditioned fate.

Yet as the nineteenth century progressed and western literacy spread throughout the Pacific, such fictional portraits of Pacific Islanders did not reflect the complex, increasingly hybrid culture that became the reality of a globalized—and in many cases, forcefully colonized—Oceania, whose inhabitants survived despite all the forces poised for their annihilation. Specifically, Native Hawaiians were one community among many in Oceania to adapt western alphabetic literacy and print technology in the service of preserving autonomous nationalism during a period when the United States increasingly turned its imperial gaze to the Hawaiian Islands. As this study will demonstrate, pro-imperialist discourse encouraged the erasure of native voices, including records of their dissent. In each instance in which Native Hawaiians addressed an American audience through the medium of print, they provided a corrective to false representations of Pacific Islanders as uncivilized and passive—deconstructing expansionist rhetoric through the content as well as the context of their self-representations. This study examines an archive of Hawaiian writings in English directed to American readers throughout the nineteenth century, with the conclusion that trans-Hawaiian/U.S. print networks represent a site of creative adaptation in which Hawaiians strategically engaged with the medium of print as one tool for asserting their sovereign identity on a global stage.