Pacific Dreams, New York Life

Mapping Hawaiian Labor History, Part II

2012-03-07T10:49:00.026-05:00

Last year, in a post called "Mapping Hawaiian Labor History," I linked to a Google Map that I created showing the hometowns and worksite of 56 Hawaiian men who in 1859 were recorded as living and laboring upon Jarvis Island in the equatorial Central Pacific. At that time I was writing about Hawaiian migrant labor in the U.S. guano industry, and I wanted to see how mapping my data might provide new ways of seeing this history.

Now I am working on a related project: Hawaiian migrant labor in nineteenth-century California. And I've made some new maps. But I did not turn to Google this time. Instead I made the maps myself using the crudest of computer paint programs. And I think they turned out just perfect!

Intro to the Map Data

Readers will know that I am quite interested in censuses. I have posted three times about data on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the 2000 and 2010 censuses. And in a post this past winter, I wrote a bit about what it is like to come across multiple pages in the 19th-century U.S. censuses filled with nameless "Kanakas" instead of individual people with given names.

Anyway, I am now using nineteenth-century federal census schedules, along with English and Hawaiian language newspaper articles, to figure out just how many Hawaiians came to California during and after the Gold Rush, why they came, what they did in California, how they organized themselves in California, what their family lives were like, how their economic situations changed, and how many stayed on, and how many returned home to Hawaiʻi.

It is exceedingly hard to locate evidence to answer many of these questions. For example, without looking at Hawaiian Kingdom censuses as well (which I have yet to do), how can we know how many Hawaiians (and which ones) returned home from California, when they returned, and what they returned to? We have qualitative data in the English and Hawaiian language newspapers about individual travelers, but less aggregate data about all travelers. (Although there are some files in Honolulu that will help shed light on this problem once I get there to do my research.)

Similarly, the available data only provides glimpses into the complex lives of the hundreds of Hawaiians who traveled to, lived in, and worked in California in the nineteenth century. For example, federal censuses in 1850, 1860, and 1870 catch the U.S. population at a glance, during one particular moment in time once every ten years. But how many Hawaiians came and went to and through California between those moments? The censuses cannot tell us that information. A huge problem exists in making sense of San Francisco for example, where, not only were the records for 1850 destroyed by fire, but where tens of thousands of people passed through in the 1850s, during the Gold Rush, but may not have actually been there in either 1850 or 1860 when a census was taken. (Note that the state of California also took its own census in 1852, but I have not used that data.) I have read in a few books that in the decade before the Gold Rush that Yerba Buena (what would become the city of San Francisco) had a rather large Hawaiian population. And it stands to reason that as San Francisco became the preeminent maritime port for passengers and cargo in the 1850s, that hundreds of Hawaiian sailors working on American ships would have spent at least some time there. But no hard data on these numbers exist.

What is necessary is to compare the available census data from each decade (1850, 1860, and 1870) with the qualitative data, to see if the stories reflected in both censuses and newspapers match up. If Hawaiians were saying that there were X number of people living in Y region in the year 1858, do we see any remnant of that in 1860?

This post does not intend to take the analysis of the census data to that level. That awaits the dissertation. For now, I just want to share my maps!

How the Maps were Made

It's actually quite simple. I used websites such as FamilySearch and Ancestry.com to locate all people 1) born in the "Sandwich Islands," or derivative names such as "S Islands," "Sandwich Isles," "Hawaiian Islands," "Hawaii," "Oahu," "Honolulu," etc., and 2) residing in California. This search, within the federal censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870 (I am now working on 1880, but that data is not included here), provided hundreds of search results. But not all were what I was looking for.

For you see, even as early as 1850, but more so as the decades progressed, there were non-Hawaiian people who were born in Hawaiʻi who lived in California. These people are not ethnically Hawaiian, yet they show up in my search results. If I was interested in mapping all people "born in Hawaiʻi" who lived in California, then my job would be much easier. I could accept all the data. But I am actually interested in only mapping those people who are Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli), not just anyone born in Hawaiʻi.

It is actually quite hard to determine who was ethnically Hawaiian, and who was haole (a foreigner). In the 1880 data we have the benefit of seeing the birthplace of each individual's father and mother. If both father and mother were born elsewhere (not in Hawaiʻi), but the individual was born in Hawaiʻi, we can safely assume (with a minor margin of error, of course) that the person was not ethnically Hawaiian. For if he or she was, it would mean that at least one of his or her parents had to have been Hawaiian. And if our person X was born circa 1860, then their parents would have been circa 1840 or earlier, and it was exceedingly rare for an ethnically Hawaiian person to be born in the United States that early. Don't get me wrong — it happened. But it is so rare that we can at least use this crude way of determining Hawaiian vs. haole to get at least close to the data that we seek to find.

In 1870, the census only lists if a person's parents were of foreign birth or not, not where his or her parents were born. So we can perform the same trick with this data, but it is that much harder. I feel like I came across many entries in 1870 where simply because the person was born in the "Sandwich Islands," his or her parents were naturally assumed to also be of foreign birth. This even happened with little haole kids born to American parents in Hawaiʻi. The parents were listed right above the child, and yet still the child was listed as having two "foreign" parents. Were these mistakes? Instances of a hurried and tired census enumerator just checking the "foreign parent" boxes whenever someone was born abroad? Or were these actually ethnically Hawaiian children adopted by white American families? There is no good way to tell, but generally if the child was listed as belonging to two white parents, and it was a somewhat nuclear family household, I assumed the child was haole. There are some cases however, where a family has many, many children, from all over the world. In some cases I have determined based on the evidence that Native Hawaiian children were in fact living in these households, apparently as adoptees, but also sometimes as servant girls and servant boys.

In the 1850 and 1860 censuses, there is no information on parentage. So how can we know if someone born in Hawaiʻi was actually Native Hawaiian? Again we can see who these individuals live with. Young children born in Hawaiʻi to American parents are again assumed to be haole. But there is also a "race" or "color" category on these federal censuses that can be used, but with extreme caution. In the early censuses the "color" options were "white," "black," and "mulatto." Almost all Hawaiians in 1850 and 1860 were either recored as "white" or their race was not recorded at all. In 1860, though, there are a handful of "black" Hawaiians, "mulatto" Hawaiians, and "Indian" Hawaiians, but I have not yet analyzed this data. Keep in mind that census enumerators (most likely Euro-American men) went around and collected this information. They were the ones deciding what "race" or "color" people were. Only in the 1870 and 1880 censuses did the "races" become more defined, with five options: "white," "black," "mulatto," "Chinese," and "Indian." Here we find most Hawaiians still listed as "white," but also some "blacks," "mulattos," and "Indians," plus made-up categories such as "Col" for "Colored," "P" for "Polynesian"(?), and "K" for "Kanaka"(?). If the enumerator labeled the person as anything other than "white," we can assume that he or she was ethnically Hawaiian — at least part-Hawaiian. Only in the "white" cases do we have to look closer, although most are, I believe, just as "Hawaiian" as the "black" and "mulatto" Hawaiians were. (As a side note, I have read in some historians' accounts that Hawaiians were at times racialized as "Chinese" on the U.S. west coast. I find this very interesting, but I have never found evidence of such practices in the censuses. FamilySearch and Ancestry.com will sometimes label these people as "Chinese" in their digitization of the records, but if you examine the actual manuscript schedules it is clear that census enumerators were using the label "C" under race to mean "Colored" for these men and women. There is always some extra note somewhere on the ledger specifying these men as "Natives," "Islanders," or "Kanakas.")

Another complicating factor is how to locate, and how to count, people of mixed heritage. In Hawaiʻi, people of mixed European and Hawaiian descent are sometimes called hapa haole, which roughly translates as "half white." For my purposes, anyone of any Native Hawaiian descent in nineteenth-century California should be classified as Hawaiian. There are two reasons for this. One, because when these people lived and worked in California, if they were even part-Hawaiian, or looked part-Hawaiian, they were considered "colored," just as people of African descent in the United States, even if only marginally African, were considered "colored" (the so-called "one drop rule"). There is a conflict between this assertion and the prevalence of "white" Hawaiians in the censuses, but I can't work that out right now. My evidence here is rather anecdotal, such as in the case of William Heath Davis, a famous hapa haole Hawaiian who pioneered early California. In the censuses he is consistently labeled as "white," and in 1880 he lists both of his parents' birthplaces as in the United States (which I think is true), but in fact he was 1/4 Native Hawaiian (his mother was half-Hawaiian), and Davis could never shake the nickname given to him by whites in California: "Kanaka Bill." From what I have gathered, he tried to "pass" as white his entire life, but some people continued to see him as "Kanaka." Incidentally, he had a fair number of 1/8-Hawaiian kids in California. I have also counted them as "Hawaiian" in my data. It is not up to historians to say who was "really" Hawaiian or not. One's identity is a form of expression governed by one's self, and one's self only. Davis may have struggled with his "Kanaka" identity for his entire life, but for our purposes it is best to include him and his offspring as Hawaiians. My job as the historian is simply to weed out the absolutely not-Hawaiian people from the 1-100% otherwise Hawaiian people who may or may not have identified, or been identified, as "Kanakas" at the time.

My second point here is that by the period 1850-1880, there had only been one or two generations of intermarriage between Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians (actually probably more, especially the bastard children of haole sailors from the late 18th and early 19th centuries), so there is a good sense that most of the people coming from Hawaiʻi to California during this period were either fully Native Hawaiian, half-Hawaiian, or fully haole, but with little wiggle-room in between these categories — or at least less wiggle-room than exists today. (1/4-Hawaiian William Heath Davis was, I believe, the exception to this rule.) For my data, I have assumed that every non-haole Hawaiian arriving in California during this period was 100% Hawaiian, unless I knew more information such as with Davis. This has allowed me to at least try to map out the Hawaiian children born in California as well. I have not found as many California-born Hawaiian people during this period (1850-1880) as I assume actually were born, but I have found at least 60-70 kids overall, and I have been able to guess how many of them were fully Hawaiian, hapa haole, half-Native American, 1/4-Hawaiian, and so on, to the best of my ability.

I could actually go on and on about the caveats with this data, and I encourage readers to comment and let me know how to improve this methodology, or at least we can discuss all that is so problematic about it, especially when it comes down to things like determining who was "really" Hawaiian or not.

So, in summary, I threw out all the suspected haole from my search results and I have mapped the remainder. There are two ways to map this data: 1) to map all the people born in Hawaiʻi living in California at any given time, or 2) to map all the Hawaiian people in California at any given time. The latter option means including the California-born children of Hawaiian parentage. The amount of children is statistically insignificant for 1850 and 1860, so I have only made the latter type of map for the 1870 data.

Now How the Maps were REALLY Made...

I thought of using some fancy GIS software for this, but then decided against it. The most important reason against using GIS is that the county-level data I am working with do not conform to today's modern political geography. California counties have changed shape and size over time, especially during the period 1850 to 1880, so I had to in fact create new base line maps that would take into account the changing shape of these counties. (The other reason I do county-level data here is because the town/city-level data is unreliable for the earlier periods [1850 and 1860]. And although it is quite good for the 1870 and 1880 data, of course counties are easier to see on an entire map of California than small townships are. So I went with county-level data for my maps.)

I downloaded a base "California counties" map from Wikimedia Commons, and started messing around with it. It turned out to be pretty easy to reshape the counties with my computer's paint tools. (Although, note that I did not change the borders of a county unless there was data to plot for that county.) To show my data I needed a color scheme, and I decided that I would use a red color gradient, from light to dark, to show population density for each county. My data ranged from N=1 to N=113, and I had to round things off at both extremes. N=113 became 100% on my color gradient, and N=1 through N=5 were all mapped as 5% on my color gradient because if I made it any lighter it could hardly be seen. Since most counties usually had anywhere between 1 and 5 Hawaiians living there at any given time, these small differences are unfortunately lost in the maps. But how can you show the difference between 1 and 5 when you need to show the difference between 1 and 113, as well?

Again, there are a lot of problems with these maps, but I have become tired of explaining away my problems and my inadequate solutions to them! So, without further ado, presenting...

...the Maps!

1850: Total Number of Hawaiians = 230

(including California-born children = 235)

(Remember that the data for San Francisco County was destroyed by fire, and there were probably scores of Hawaiians living and working there in 1850.)

The top county here is Sutter County, with 113 Hawaiians.

1860: Total Number of Hawaiians = 71

(including California-born children = 76)

The top county here is El Dorado County, with 28 Hawaiians.

1870: Total Number of Hawaiians = 140

(including California-born children = 205)

The top county here is San Francisco County, with 23 Hawaiians.

Here is 1870 mapped WITH CHILDREN, adding 65 people to the data.

1870: Total Number of Hawaiians (including California-born children) = 205

The top county here is still San Francisco County, now with 40 Hawaiians.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found these maps interesting. Please leave me a comment if you have any particular questions or comments regarding these maps or the methodology I have used, or if there are other types of mappings of Hawaiian history that you would like to see. If I have the data, I am open to mapping it.

My final thought here is just how incredibly small these numbers are. From newspaper sources, it is clear that many Hawaiians who traveled to California became sick and died, but also some lucky ones were able to return home; both of these instances would mean taking numbers away from the California census data. This might suggest that most of the Hawaiians we see each decade (1850, 1860, 1870, etc.) are new names and faces, and that there was quite a bit of migration in and out of California during these decades that is unaccounted for in the censuses. If so, then we can easily imagine that the total number of Hawaiians who ever lived in California during the period 1850-1880 was in the high hundreds if not over one thousand. Or perhaps many thousands! We just don't know. The total Hawaiian population (as counted in Hawaiʻi) was about 70-80,000 in 1850, and 65,000 in 1860. That number descended to about 40,000 in 1890. So even if we assume that there were 300 Hawaiians in California in 1850, that would be only 0.4% of the total Hawaiian population. Yet if we half the population and take only Hawaiian men (for in 1850 over 95% of Hawaiian migrants to California were male), then California-resident Hawaiians comprised 0.8% of the male population. Taking into account that thousands of other Hawaiians were at the same time serving aboard American whaling ships, etc., and others were in Oregon and elsewhere in the United States, in fact maybe 5% (N=2,000) or more of Hawaiian men were not in Hawaiʻi in 1850, and thus the migration to California was hard felt as part of a larger pattern of outmigration (as evidenced in newspapers and government documents from the period).

Today, more Pacific Islander Americans live in California than in Hawaiʻi, and that may or may not hold true specifically for Native Hawaiians as well. Hundreds of thousands of people of Hawaiian ancestry live in California today, compared to just hundreds back then. And yet in some ways, the couple of hundreds of Hawaiians in California during the Gold Rush era were more remarked upon by the general public than today's hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians. The change in numbers, though, is staggering. To think that there are more Hawaiians in California today than there were in all of Hawaiʻi one hundred and fifty years ago! That's crazy! Or to think that there are more Native Hawaiians in a private correctional facility in Eloy, Arizona today (N=932) than there ever were at any one time in the entire state of California in the entire nineteenth century! That's also crazy.

Emigration and diaspora remain important concerns of the lāhui Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian nation) to this day. I hope that my dissertation research on nineteenth-century Hawaiian migrant labor can help add to this conversation.

An Update on that Ph.D. Thing

2012-02-28T16:08:00.005-05:00

Hello,

It has been over two months since I last posted to this blog, and now I feel it is necessary to give a little update on that Ph.D. thing.

In November 2011 I posted about my joys and frustrations (but mostly joys) pursuing language study in three different languages nearly simultaneously! I have elsewhere written about my Hawaiian language study, which unfortunately formally ended last summer as my teacher moved back to Hawai‘i. My study of Chinese has been ongoing (usually not going, with only little bits of "going" now and then) for over eight years. That project, which over its lifespan has had many different goals, resulted in the achievement of at least one of those goals in December 2011 when I passed my department's foreign language translation exam in Chinese. I translated a 19th-century Qing dynasty "memorial" from Chinese to English. If that sounds a bit interesting, you can read more about it in my "language study" post from last fall. In that post I had hinted that I would soon begin my third language of the Pacific World: Spanish. I have since begun lessons and can now read really, really simply Spanish texts. I have not yet made use of this skill in my research, but perhaps someday I will. In the meantime, we are planning to travel to Peru this summer and I will then get the first chance to use my spoken Spanish skills (of which I have very few).

Back to that Ph.D. thing, you might recall that since last summer I have been reading for my department's oral examination. I wrote about this both last June and July, although both posts tended to drift off into more interesting subject matter. And then, for many reasons that I need not explain, I never posted about orals again. I'll just say that the experience of prepping for orals became something I wanted to make believe wasn't really happening. I behaved that way until about 48 hours before the exam, earlier this month (February 2012), when I then began to feel the weight of my anxiety for the first time as if eight months of it had been building up and was only just then coming out. I slept quite poorly the night before and spent the entire morning of orals-day re-reading my notes again and again, and when that got old just looking at a piece of paper with the book titles on it, as if to burn the image of those books and everything I had ever thought about them into my eyes. But unfortunately, orals are like they sound: oral, not visual. So there is still the challenge of taking burnt eye-images, or burnt brain-ideas, or however you process the information, and transforming that into something oral and aural, that is, out loud in conversation with three faculty members sitting less than ten feet away from you. When the exam finally took place, it just happened, as everything spilled out of me, and I simply did my best to contain and control the spillage, to make the spills seem intentional and articulate and well-thought-out, rather than the wild tsunami it felt like.

I passed with distinction. And a day or two later, as I was beginning to imagine life without orals prep for the first time in nearly a year, I could begin to look back and see what a great experience it was. I learned a lot — "as much as I'll ever know," one supportive professor told me, although the words can also be read pessimistically, as if "it's all downhill from here" — and I developed stronger relationships with colleagues and faculty. I put my own projects on hold for a long time, including this blog, which I progressively got angry and sad about as the months of orals prep wore on, but now that I am back doing my own projects, I wonder what new distraction I can pursue to take me away from myself again. :)

With my foreign language exam done, and orals done, only one hurdle remains: the dissertation prospectus. Now comes my opportunity — "finally," I say — to do my thing. A big thing. The real Ph.D. thing; what it's all about. The dissertation.

I'm not ready yet to present my prospectus to the world. I can assure you that it will have something to do with Hawaiʻi, labor, environment, and the 19th century. It will be fun. It will tie together everything I have worked on for the past three years. It will, I hope, be a springboard for research trips to Hawaiʻi to conduct research. For it is shameful that I spend so much time in my "New York Life" dreaming these "Pacific Dreams," while in those dreams I live vicariously through 19th-century Native Hawaiian men who lived "Pacific Lives" and sometimes even dreamed "New York Dreams," although more often "Boston" or "California" dreams! They say the past is the foreign country, but the Hawaiian past is doubly foreign: it exists not only deep in an unknowable time, but also spatially apart: beyond the reaches of American imperial, teleological history-making (or at least, that's how I wish it was). (Of course, many historians, including myself, will disagree with everything I just said in the last sentence.) As a 21st-century haole from NYC, how can I get back to that past? And if I can get there, in this grand "Pacific Dream" called my dissertation, what will I say when I get there? How will I behave? Will the Hawaiian laborers I study recognize me as I recognize them? Will they appreciate that I want to know their stories, and tell their stories, to some unknowable future audience? Or will they think me a fool, or worse, even a bad person, because I dream these dreams about their lives?

Want to know? Well, you are cordially invited to jump inside my head whenever you'd like. Indeed, I would be happy to switch places for a while. Otherwise, the best I can promise is to continue to keep you informed through this blog as I explore the Hawaiian past. I can't guarantee that I will get there, but at least we can think about whether there is a there there, and if so, how historians might get there, or if they should even want to. And when not dreaming, I'll be doing the real work of finishing this Ph.D. thing. Looking at documents. Translating them. Analyzing them. Putting the pieces together. Crafting narratives. Testing hypothesis. And all that good stuff.

Representations: Kanakas in America

2011-12-22T01:10:00.005-05:00

June 22, 1898. Cameramen James H. White and W. Bleckyrden of the Edison Manufacturing Company were in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi capturing moving images on film. The very first movies were made in the 1890s, and as far as I know, this is the earliest film footage ever taken in Hawaiʻi.

To be a bit more accurate, White and Bleckyrden were in the capital city of the Republic of Hawaii, an independent country founded five years earlier, in 1893, by Euro-American businessmen who disposed Queen Liliʻuokalani and overthrew her state.

What strange timing. White and Bleckyrden were traveling across the Pacific Ocean by steamship in the midst of America's first Pacific war: the Spanish-American War. The U.S. was fighting on multiple fronts: the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico. And don't forget Guam, although there was little fighting there.

The Spanish-American War was a short war: it began and ended in the spring and summer of 1898. And Thomas Edison's movie-makers were in the midst of it. They were filming in Hawaiʻi at the exact same time as the U.S. Congress in Washington was considering annexing the Hawaiian archipelago. This is because the war in the Philippines (which would drag on for years and years as we fought Filipino independence fighters even after vanquishing Spain) was a war fought with steamships. And steamships need coaling stations. This is why America was eyeing the independent Republic of Hawaii in 1898. This is also why, incidentally, we came to an agreement with Britain and Germany in 1899 to split up the Samoan archipelago. This is the origin of American Samoa: just as Pearl Harbor was a U.S. naval coaling station in Hawaiʻi, Pago Pago Harbor was a U.S. coaling station in Samoa.

Anyway, so Edison's men are filming away in Honolulu while in Washington, D.C. the U.S. Congress is debating annexation. Within two to three weeks the deed would be done, and the Hawaiian archipelago would become part of the United States (July, 1898).

Kanakas Diving for Money

Watch this short film produced by the Edison company, and you see how the Hawaiian world was in flux. First of all, who were the "kanakas" in this film? It is hard to tell, but they look like young boys, perhaps 8-14 years old. All are dark skinned. It is not clear if they are wearing Western-style full body bathing suits, or if they are naked above the waist. I keep seeing different things when I look at the footage.

Yes, they are diving for money, but also jumping and trying to catch the coins in mid-air. It is clear that someone on the shore is throwing coins at them. Sometimes the boys catch them in the air; more often they miss and dive down to retrieve the coins from the water.

It's strange, but a person paddling an outrigger canoe calmly glides by during the footage, and you have to wonder if this was staged. The angle of his trajectory across the film frame is perfect, and he seems to care little about either the filming process (that we can't see) or the boys jumping and diving for money.

Then, talk about an eerie stage set; what we see behind the boys and the canoeing man is seemingly some part of Honolulu harbor. There is a small steamship up front, and a HUGE steamship on the side of what must be a dock/pier. I have read descriptions of this short film suggesting that men are loading/unloading cargo in the background, but I don't actually see that. In the far back, to the left, appear to be more ships. At least we see the forest of tall masts, suggesting that these are ships. Notice how the ships up front have huge smokestacks, too, reminding the viewer that these are coal-fired steamships.

Is any of this scene representative of wartime activity? Not sure. I would guess that the U.S. navy was operating solely out of Pearl Harbor - which they already had access to, even before annexation -, and that Honolulu harbor was still primarily used for import/export of commodities, as usual. The number one commodity of the time was sugar. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these ships were transporting Hawaiian sugar to the United States.

Before moving on to other representations of "Kanakas" in America, it is necessary to return to the jumping and diving boys and think through what's really going on here. When I watch this clip, I always think how humiliating and racist it is: that these two white men from America with movie cameras are throwing change at young Hawaiian boys and watching them fight over it for entertainment. In this interpretation, the Edison film portrays the quintessential colonial encounter, and speaks to the disparate political and economic power relations between Euro-Americans and Native Hawaiians at the time. In my dissertation I will be demonstrating how Native Hawaiians once dominated as wage laborers in a variety of industries across the Pacific World in the nineteenth century. But by the 1890s, when this film was made, all the extractive industries they had engaged in had disappeared, replaced by a new plantation economy reliant on imported Asian immigrant labor. Indeed, even in the sugar industry, Native Hawaiians were the dominant labor force until the early 1880s, when Chinese overtook them and became the majority. By 1898, Japanese were the majority. These swift Pacific-wide economic, ecological, and demographic transformations meant the closing of myriad doors for Hawaiian men. Thus we are left with these boys fishing for coins in Honolulu harbor. In my dissertation young Hawaiian boys travel the world searching for work and adventure. In Edison's dystopian representation of fin-de-siecle Hawaiʻi, this world has collapsed on itself.

Or am I reading too much here? There is something else worth saying though. The Hawaiian laborers in my dissertation often fascinated the minds of Euro-American employers. These Euro-American men wondered in letters, diaries, and even in the public newspapers about the particular types of work and environments that Native Hawaiian male bodies were most "fit" for. One chapter of my dissertation will look at this issue of Euro-American conceptions of Hawaiian workers' bodies. Initially, one thing I can say is that I have already found tons of sources suggesting that many Euro-American employers saw Hawaiian workers as particularly fit for working in water. Many even called the Hawaiian workers "amphibious," or likened them to marine animals like "sea dogs." Indeed, I have found numerous accounts of employers taking great delight in watching Hawaiian workers both play and work in the water - delighting in watching them surf, dive, swim, and play in the waves. Their sentiments are a weird mixture of genuine admiration and racist dehumanization, and I am still making sense of it all. Anyway, of all the footage these Edison cinematographers must have taken in Hawaiʻi, think about why we are left with these 30 seconds. What are we supposed to know about Hawaiʻi and "Kanakas" from these 30 seconds? Does it have anything to do with the relationship between "Kanaka" bodies and amphibiousness?

Now for "Kanakas in America" Item #2:

John Kanaka-naka

Unfortunately, in 1898 when the Edison crew were filming Hawaiʻi, there was no technology for capturing sound and lining it up with the motion pictures. Not that we would have heard much more than splashing waves in "Kanakas Diving for Money," but surely the ability to sync sound would have altered the Edison crew's choices about what to film. They may have filmed Hawaiian musicians. That would have been fitting with the whole colonial ethnographic approach. They most certainly would not have filmed a bunch of American seamen singing old sea shanty songs from the whaling days.

Well, thanks to Youtube we can watch the film they never made! And, of course, thanks also to those who carry on the Pacific maritime traditions like singing sea shanties. Like these guys. I don't know where they are from, but of all the renditions of "John Kanaka" I found on Youtube, I like theirs the best because they all actually look like seamen! They look like they could tell many a "yarn" about life in the fo'castle. You want to imagine they've actually lived the life they are singing about: traveling around Cape Horn (an incredibly dangerous voyage throughout the nineteenth-century for American ships heading to the Pacific), and visiting San Francisco (or "Frisco Bay" as they sing).

The lyrics actually help us situate the song quite a bit (although the lyrics of course have changed over time, and today there are multiple versions). When the guys sing "We're bound away for 'Frisco Bay," and "We're bound away 'round Cape Horn," we can most certainly pinpoint the seamen's port of origin as somewhere in the Atlantic. I would venture to say New England, but in some version I have heard the line that they are "Liverpool born and bred." So they're English sailors, eh? Or they might be New England seamen. Rounding Cape Horn into the Pacific, heading to San Francisco. From the reference to "Frisco," we can guess this is probably the post-Gold Rush period, for I see little other reason why English or American sailors would be stopping in San Francisco Bay before 1848. I mean, they did stop there, but not nearly as often as after 1848.

Anyway, the next question must be: why are these seamen going to San Francisco Bay? All we are really left with are the many references to "John Kanaka-naka" and some phony Polynesian-sounding phrase "tu rai ay" (or, too lai ay, or whatever orthography you like). On various Youtube posts I have read numerous comments going back and forth about whether this is a Samoan phrase, or perhaps a Hawaiian phrase, or perhaps just a made-up Polynesian-sounding phrase. Who knows. But I wouldn't put it past European and Euro-American seamen to come up with something "Polynesian" sounding, for they also adopted Polynesian tattooing in the nineteenth century. Indeed, those who spent years in the Pacific on whaling ships and other vessels sometimes fell in love with all things Polynesian, including, at times, Polynesian women. This is why I consider that anyone studying nineteenth-century American maritime history must also understand Polynesian peoples, languages, culture, and history, because American mariners built their world around the world that Polynesians had created. Thus it comes as little surprise that they would be singing about a Polynesian, too: John Kanaka.

Who was John Kanaka? He was the John Doe of Polynesians. And he must have been on the ship to 'Frisco, or else he was there waiting for them. If you read the writing of Euro-Americans in the Pacific you see the term "Kanaka" used all the time, often to refer to Native Hawaiians, but sometimes referring to any Pacific Islander, especially a laboring person. The connection between the transmigration of the term "Kanaka" from Hawaiian to English and the importance of Pacific Islander labor in the Pacific World has not really been analyzed that much. I will certainly try and tackle this in my dissertation. I argue that the term "Kanaka" really did come to signify a particular type of labor/laborer in the nineteenth-century Pacific World. It wasn't just the term for Native Hawaiian people. For that purpose, Euro-Americans used the term "Sandwich Islander" well into the late nineteenth century. The one term you won't see much of in the nineteenth-century is "Hawaiian." If you were a Hawaiian then, to a haole you were a "Sandwich Islander." But if you were digging, hauling, cutting, scraping, lifting, or in any way hanahana (working) for a haole, you were a "Kanaka." Thus, if you worked on a European or Euro-American ship, you were a "Kanaka" sailor. If your name was too hard to pronounce, your haole shipmates might just call you John Kanaka.

Now, this song begs the question: why sing about John Kanaka? Because he was interesting? Because he was foolish and awkward? Because he was brave and strong? Because he was the best lookout or harpooner on the whaling ship? Because he could dive and swim better than any haole could? Because he looked different? Because the captain treated him like an animal? Because he taught you something about the Pacific World? Because he was never anything to you except your pre-conceived notion of him?

Who really knows. I've discovered that a scholar at UC-Santa Barbara wrote a dissertation on this very topic in 2006: "In the Wake of John Kanaka: Musical Interactions between Euro-American Sailors and Pacific Islanders, 1600-1900." I can't wait to check it out. If you get to it before I do, I'd love to hear about it.

Item #3:

"Kanakas" in the U.S. Census

My latest project is researching the history of Native Hawaiian labor in nineteenth-century California, before, during, and after the Gold Rush. So I thought I'd turn to the U.S. Census to see if I can find any Hawaiians living in California in 1850 (the earliest census to include California), or in later decades. Now keep in mind that "Hawaiian" was not a racial category on the census until the year 2000. So there were no hard numbers recorded for how many Hawaiians were in any given place. You have to look at the manuscript schedules page by page and figure it out yourself. I've been playing with familysearch.org, a good (and free) source for looking at U.S. census manuscript schedules, and here was one particularly page I found that really stopped me in my tracks:

U.S. Census, 1850. Excerpt from the manuscript schedule for Sutter County, California.

Just in case you can't read that, here is a close-up of the top of the page:

Detail from 1850 U.S. Census, excerpt from the manuscript schedule for Sutter County, California

The top of the page identifies this part of the census schedule as concerning two locations in Sutter County, California: Lacy's Bar and Manhattan Bar. I am totally unclear as to where these places are, and the names may no longer be in use anyway. But we do know that Sutter County was an important site of gold mining in the 1850s, and "bars" were (I think) parts of streams where placer mining took place. (Can anyone help me on this? Someday I will learn my mining lingo!) Anyway, we should not be surprised then, to find Native Hawaiians here looking for gold.

Back in 1850, we didn't fill out census forms and mail them in like we do today. Instead, white men working for the government traveled around and took stock of the people in different locations. If you were white, they probably jotted down your true name, occupation, and the sex and age of everyone in your household. If you were a slave, you certainly didn't end up in this census (it was for "Free Inhabitants" only, as it states on top), but maybe there was a separate slave census? Or were they truly considered only property and not counted as humans? But the census workers found more than just whites and blacks. In California, particularly, they found many South Americans, Chinese, and even Pacific Islanders. So how did they record these people in the census?

Look at the manuscript schedule above. In dwelling house #421, lived "Kanaka." Occupation: "Mining." Place of Birth: "Sandwich Islands." That's it. We don't get his age. We don't get his sex, but I'm assuming he is male. (In fact, there were Hawaiian women in California, too...so we can't be positively sure.) We don't get his "color"; presumably, we already know what it is. We don't get the "value of real estate" he owns. He likely doesn't own any. Well, at least not in California. We don't know if he's married. He very well might be married back home, and within the 1850s many of his Hawaiian friends would marry Native American women in California. But we aren't told any of this. We don't know if he can read or write, whether in English or in Hawaiian. Et cetera. All we are told is that in this building lives someone named "Kanaka" who mines gold and is from Hawaiʻi.

In fact, the next three rows on the census say the exact same thing. Actually, they say "ditto." Thus, four people named "Kanaka" live in this building. They all mine and they are all from Hawaiʻi. We know that they are not all named "Kanaka." Indeed, to the census taker they literally are "Kanakas." It is what they are; it is a type of person. Even though they have to tell us that they are from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiʻi) anyway - and so we might guess that they are Native Hawaiians - they still feel like writing down "Kanaka" under Name. That seems strange to me. But look at other pages of the schedule for Sutter County and you will see people named "Chinaman" who are from China. I ask myself: what is the purpose of this naming? Is it a racial designation? Is it a labor designation? (But for that, we have "mining" listed as occupation.) Why call them "Kanaka"?

Notice that building #422 has twenty-two "Kanakas" living there. Must be some kind of boarding house. What is a historian to do with this mass of unnamed "Kanakas"? Thankfully we have all the letters written to Hawaiian-language newspapers from California. But that is a bigger topic - much bigger. More on that in future posts.

Item #4:

"Kanaka" in Print

Have you heard of Google's Ngram viewer? Apparently some younger, tech-savvy historians have begun using it to mine the prevalence of various terms in the history of English-language print. (They have other languages, too, but Google admits their English-language data is strongest.)

This is how it works: type in a search term (or two), and Google automatically mines all of its scanned books, magazines, etc., in Google Books for that term. It instantaneously creates a graph showing the prevalence of that term (or several terms) over time. I have heard that there are one million and one caveats to using this data, and I'm not surprised. I'm still not even sure what the data is actually telling me. So, I'm not going to make any broad conclusions from the following, but I thought I'd share it with you. And then you can always experiment on your own.

Let's start with this. Take the historical period I am covering in my dissertation (roughly 1780s to 1890s). What is the prevalence of the term "Kanaka" in print?

You can see the term "Kanaka" slowly grew in usage in English-language print throughout the nineteenth-century as Americans came to know Hawaiʻi and Hawaiian people. But look at the dramatic increase of the use of the term "Kanaka" in the 1880s and 1890s, reaching a fever-pitch around 1898, the year of U.S. annexation.

This one just shows what happens when you compare "Kanaka" with a capital "K" to "kanaka" with a lower-case "k." Was lower-case "k" really more prominent in the 1820s and 1830s? Why? Something to do with the missionaries' orthography for the Hawaiian language they came up with in the 1820s?

When you throw "Hawaiian" into the mix, though, "Kanaka" and "kanaka" fall way behind. It's interesting because I always thought the term "Hawaiian" did not come until later. Clearly, "Hawaiian" grew stronger over time, especially in the 1890s with the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (1893) and U.S. annexation (1898).

So I then tried to throw in "Sandwich Islander," but that made little difference. Here, though, is the term "Sandwich Islands" thrown in for good measure. You can see that the term was used more frequently than "Hawaiian" was up until the late 1880s. There is something about the overthrow (1893) and annexation (1898) that really pushed the term "Hawaiian" to prominence. But Captain Cook's term "Sandwich Islands" really held on for quite some time, at least into the 1870s or 1880s.

Here we go: "Sandwich Islanders" versus "Kanaka" and "kanaka." Notice how in the 1880s "Kanaka" soars ahead of "Sandwich Islanders."

Here we compare Captain Cook's term "Sandwich Islands" to our more modern "Hawaii." Again, it's around 1890, when American power is rising in the islands, that "Hawaii" overtakes "Sandwich Islands." The hump(s) in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s speak, I think, to the importance of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiians during this period. Or at least I will claim something like that in my dissertation. That was the peak of whaling in the Pacific, and also the period of California settlement. All these things are related.

Here's the long view, from Captain Cook to today (or 2008, to be exact). Now we see that "Sandwich Islands" really become out-of-style after 1898. And English-language print culture kept mentioning "Hawaii" with increasing frequency until hitting a fever pitch during World War II and the attack on the Pearl Harbor. Then a big drop after the war. A little hump for 1959: Hawaiian statehood. Damn, and what's with the huge drop since 2000? No one cares about "Hawaii" anymore? (Or is it that there is just so much in print these days that the percentage mentioning "Hawaii" gets smaller and smaller? I think that's how this works.)

This is fascinating. From 1780 to 2008, "Sandwich Islanders" versus "Kanakas" versus "Hawaiians." Note that "Sandwich Islanders" is the dominant term into the 1840s. Then "Sandwich Islanders" kicks the bucket around 1898 as "Kanakas" and "Hawaiians" both rise. Interesting how "Hawaiians" falls circa 1910 but "Kanakas" and "Sandwich Islanders" get a bump. The rest is predictable. But notice how important the word "Hawaiians" is in the 1990s! More on that in a second; I think it has to do with the centennial of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom (1993) and the power of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, as well as the Hawaiian Renaissance in general, to grab the nation's attention at that time. But has it all slipped away in the 2000s?

Here I focus solely on territorial Hawaii (1898-1959), from annexation to statehood, to see what terms were used in the beginning of Hawaiʻi's colonial era. Nothing too surprising here. Notice how immediately after annexation nobody even wants to talk about "Hawaiians." The term drops for about 15 years before it picks up into the 1920s (thanks to the debates over the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act?). Again, after World War II the same drop, and then rising up again for 1959 statehood.

#10

Now to the era of Hawaiian statehood (1959-present). This is "Hawaiians" versus "Kanaka," but I also throw in the term "Maoli," often used as part of the term "Kanaka Maoli" to denote a Native Hawaiian person. Notice how "Maoli" only begins to be used in English-language print in the 1990s, thanks to much Kanaka Maoli activism calling for use of this term. But this exposes the fallacy of the argument some activists make that "Kanaka Maoli" is a traditional term for Native Hawaiians. Everything I've read in Hawaiian-language newspapers does not back that up. That said, I think the term "Kanaka Maoli" is very meaningful and useful today, not least because "Kanaka" on its own has so much baggage from the nineteenth century. And "Hawaiian," of course, is not a Hawaiian-language term but rather an English-language term. Anyway, notice how after statehood "Hawaiians" weren't much discussed until the 1990s. This graph truly shows the great influence Hawaiians had in getting the attention of English-language print at that time.

#11

This is for statehood (1959-present): "Kanaka" versus "kanaka" versus "Maoli" versus "maoli." Taking into account different capitalizations. Look how lower-case "kanaka" lines up with lower-case "maoli" in the 1990s! Very cool. Lots of people were writing "kanaka maoli" at the time. But of course the proper form today is capitalized: "Kanaka Maoli." We can see a shift from the early 90s to the late 90s with the rise of the capital "Maoli" instead. All in all, we see that the term "Kanaka"/"kanaka" is still very important today, no matter what it meant in the nineteenth century.

#12

Last one. I wanted to see if we can track the use of the ʻokina (glottal stop) in the spelling of Hawaiʻi. This chart is "Hawaii" (without ʻokina) versus "Hawaiʻi" with. But note that Google would not let me use the true ʻokina. I had to use an apostrophe instead. It is interesting to see the slow rise of the ʻokina usage in the 1980s, perhaps thanks to the 1978 Hawaiʻi State Constitution which mandated orthographic reform including use of the ʻokina. ʻOkina usage rises continuously up to 2000 and although it declines since, notice that its decline is not as great as that for "Hawaii" without the ʻokina. This means that from 2000 to 2008, "Hawaiʻi" with the ʻokina has been used much more than "Hawaii" without it. Or, at least I think that is what the data is saying!

Well, anyway, this was fun. As usual, I have shared way too much for one blog post. Mahalo nui for reading with care and patience. The history of the term "Kanaka" is worthy of a dissertation all by itself. I hope this post has opened some doors for future thinking on this topic.

Aloha!

An OWS Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T22:23:00.022-05:00

In previous years, whenever holidays like Thanksgiving rolled around, many of the marriage equality groups that I support have sent out messages calling on us to have "courageous conversations" with family members around the dining room table. Be courageous, they say. Bring up your support for marriage equality. Explain why this matters so much. Hearing from someone they know and love as much as they know and love you might just change the way your family thinks about this topic.

Well I've done that. And it all finally paid off here in New York when in June the New York State legislature passed the Marriage Equality Act!

This year, I suspect the dining room "courageous conversation" will be about Occupy Wall Street. (But I've promised myself not to voluntarily bring the subject up on Thanksgiving, because my parents taught me never to bring up religion or politics when dining with company. That's generally a good rule. So that's why I'm bringing the subject up here in this post!)

What am I thankful for?

My "courageous conversation" about Occupy Wall Street takes the form of a list of all the people I am thankful for this Thanksgiving. So here goes...

I am thankful for my family. For my mother who always warns me to stay safe and not get too occupied (pun intended!) with dangerous pursuits. Now she and I agree to disagree about the exact dangerousness of Occupy Wall Street. I argue that the mainstream media has overly exaggerated any dangers; yet on the other hand, first hand experiences have shown me that if any danger is underplayed by the media, it is the danger posed by the NYPD towards peaceful, nonviolent protestors. So I try to stay close to my friends in the movement, because they will protect me, and I them. And we all try to keep a good distance from the police. Don't worry, mom. I've got thousands of supporters here who will protect me!

NYPD "white shirts" and riot police at Washington Square Park, Oct. 15

Yes, I am thankful for my family. For my grandmother who warned me on facebook (and for that, you are the coolest grandma!) to not get overly occupied with dangerous pursuits. For her, and for everyone else in this family, I have to explain that what it looks like I'm doing on facebook is not exactly the same as what I spend my time doing in real life. I might read for four to six hours each day, but I don't broadcast that exceedingly boring news to the world every day via social media! On the other hand, when I attend a march or rally and I witness the police using excessive force or disallowing us to engage in our constitutionally protected forms of speech or assembly, yes I do post the heck out of that onto facebook, with photos, and videos, and whatever other evidence I have. Because we are up against a Goliath here: a mayor who is one of the 20 richest persons in the United States and could care less about us, and a police force that is corrupt, deceptive, and has shown itself willing to bend and break the law as they see fit. Our power is in the stories we can tell, and that, my family, is why your news feeds are always overflowing with radical postings from my wall!

NYPD as Goliath. Multitudes of riot police against handfuls of protestors. This was 3 am on Nov. 15, the night of the raid on Liberty Square.

I am so thankful for my family. Today I left militarized Manhattan for the peace of my upstate childhood home. I got home today, to be with my parents and my brother. We have already had many "courageous conversations" about Occupy Wall Street. But I know here, in the safety and security of my home, among my own kin, that these are safe conversations to have. That we can agree to disagree and still love and respect one another. And even if the conversation with family most frequently revolves around questions of personal safety rather than economic inequality, I know this is because I have people who love me deeply, and care deeply for me. And I love you in return. This is why I came home for Thanksgiving. Standing on Wall Street makes me angry. But sitting around the table with you makes me smile.

I am also thankful for more than just my family.

I am thankful for my friends. For my best friend, my partner, my companion through everything, night and day, rain or shine, winter, spring, summer, or fall (all you've got to do is call), I am so thankful for your unceasing, unfailing, limitless love. But on this special OWS Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that you support my involvement in this movement. Most telling, in everything we've been through in these past two months, was the comment you sent me online the morning after I had ran around downtown Manhattan all night trying to comfort and support those who were violently evicted from Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park). You told me that you were "so proud." I was afraid you were going to be mad at me for being so reckless, for staying out on the street all night until 10am in the morning, facing off against police half of the time. But you told me you were "proud," and that one word from you made me ten times stronger. I love you so much. Thank you for your love.

Facing off against police near Liberty Square, 2:30 am, Nov. 15, night of the eviction.

I am thankful for my friends. For my friends who have gone down to Liberty Square on their own initiative, who have recorded the stories of the occupants, have taken photos, and have supported the movement. For my friends who introduced me to the movement in the first place, when the subject came up at a dinner party with friends on Oct. 1, and I heard for the first time about the 700 protestors who had just been arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. Without friends to share their knowledge, ideas, and insight with me, I would not have come to the movement in the first place, to march with OWS on Oct. 5 along Broadway, to visit Liberty Square for the first time that night, and to give myself, slowly, and cautiously, but with growing determination, to this nascent movement.

One of our friends has been recording video of the occupation at Liberty Square since nearly the beginning. This video is from Oct. 4.

I am thankful for my friends. For the ones who disagree with me. Who say that we are all whiny babies just asking for government handouts. Thank you for the courage to share your criticisms with me. I have never been as sure about the importance of Occupy Wall Street as I am now, but it has taken most of the past two months for me to get to this point. I did not just unquestioningly jump onto this bandwagon. There are some aspects of OWS I still disagree with. You have helped me work through many of these issues by criticizing and questioning me and the movement. Thank you for making this harder for me! Which in the end somehow makes things easier. That's because debate and dialogue are more productive that shouting matches and standoffs. (Ironically, though, I do appreciate a good "mic-check" now and then!)

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin gets "mic-checked" by Occupy Chicago, Nov. 3.

But I am thankful for more than just family and friends.

I am thankful for Occupy Wall Street, too.

Now what does that mean?

I am thankful for the young man who marched next to me on Oct. 5 and held this sign (and that's me in the red shirt with the blue-green backpack!):

Oct. 5 march with organized labor to Liberty Square.

(Source: occupywallst.org)

I am thankful for the union men and women, and students, and 9 to 5 workers, who showed up at 6am on Oct. 14 to help defend Occupy Wall Street from eviction. I am thankful to the young men and women who brought brooms and who swept down the park, showing Mayor Bloomberg that we could keep the park clean without the NYPD's "help."

I am thankful for the drummers, of the group Pulse, who have drummed away at Occupy Wall Street since the beginning. For the drum circle on Broadway on Oct. 14 where any and everyone was welcome to grab a drumstick and hit something. For the young woman with the dyed hair who I have seen at every single OWS event these past two months, for just being there, I thank you. When you go to enough of these things, you start to recognize the people who hold the whole thing together. I thank you for being there day in and day out. And for the crazy man who dances so wildly, yet captivates protestors and Wall Street bankers alike with his movements, I thank you. I especially like the dance you do where you point a finger at your forehead and tell us to "think" to the beat of the drums. You made me think, for sure, and I also bet you have made many others think. (If you haven't seen him dance yet, he appears a few times in the clip below.)

Pulse drum circle at Liberty Square, Oct. 14, including the "think" dancer.

I am thankful for those around me, at Times Square on Oct. 15, who taught me new chants.

Over 5,000 assembled at Times Square on Oct. 15.

For the older man with the thick immigrant accent who couldn't keep up with the chant "Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!" But he tried his best. And he screamed out the words with conviction and passion. I was so proud to stand with you.

Times Square, Oct. 15.

I am thankful for the NYU students who made room for me to sit on top of a row of police barricades with them at Washington Square Park in the middle of the night on Oct. 15 so that I could participate in my first General Assembly. I thank the young man in front of me for teaching me how the "human microphone" works. And for teaching me the hand signals for "I like," "I'm not sure," and "I don't like," as well as "Get to the point already," and "I can't hear you!"

My first General Assembly. 1,000 gathered at Washington Square Park, Oct. 15.

I am thankful for the reporter from South Korea who really wanted to talk to me at Washington Square Park that evening at 11:50pm, but who finally agreed to exit the park with me before 30-40 riot police were to come in and bang our heads in for breaking the midnight curfew. I had to ditch him, but I hope he got a good story out of it anyway!

Police guard the Washington Square Arch after the midnight curfew has passed, in the wee hours of Oct. 16.

I am thankful for whoever ordered the pizza that night, and for the young female student who nicknamed it "NYPD pizza." We all got a kick out of that!

Two students, many police. Washington Square Park, Oct. 15-16.

I am thankful for Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie, and the other folk legends who led us in a march from the Upper West Side down to Columbus Circle in the middle of a cold night on Oct. 21. I am thankful for Pete, who at 92 years old, marched and sang with vigor! And to Pete, again, for teaching me some new songs, like: "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. Turn me around. Turn me around. Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. Just gonna keep on walkin'. Keep on talkin'. Marching down to Freedomland."

Pete Seeger, 92 years old, marches and sings with us on Oct. 21.

I am thankful for the young woman who I met at Wall Street and Broadway on the morning of the first eviction attempt at Liberty Square. We were watching the NYPD restrict access to only those with company IDs. I am thankful for the man behind me screaming "Show me your papers" in a fake German accent. I did not agree with his analogy between this situation and Nazi Germany, but I respected and thought hard about his point. And so I thank him for that. I was thankful to meet the same woman again on Oct. 28 in front of the public library as we prepared to march on bank headquarters at midtown. She had my back when we confronted the police, and she shared a snack with me when I was tired and hungry. Thank you!

Oct. 28, meeting in front of the public library for our march on the banks.

I am thankful for the young man who got really angry at that protest, who raised his voice against the bankers. He pointed at them and yelled "Shame! Shame!" Your strength in turn strengthened me and others. You inspired us to be stronger in our collective resolve. Thank you.

I am thankful for the Chase employee who collected thousands of letters we delivered for the banks written by people from all across America. And for those banks who refused our letters, thank you for letting us fold them up and throw them as paper airplanes at your corporate doorstep.

"You've Got Mail" Occupy the Boardroom march on the banks, Oct. 28.

I am thankful for the Occupy Wall Street Jobless Working Group. I am thankful for all unemployed and underemployed people who have found an "occupation" here at OWS. Others will say that you'd be better off looking for work and applying for jobs rather than holding banners and marching with us, but they are wrong. (And of course you can, and do, do both.) It will be because of your self-sacrifices that we will create the public support necessary for passing a true jobs bill, with teeth, in the U.S. Congress. But there will always be a job for you, if you want it, right here with us, letting people know that unemployment and underemployment is no fault of our own. It is the fault of a much larger system that advantages the wealthiest and disadvantages the rest of us.

Members of the Jobless Working Group at Union Square, Nov. 6.

I am thankful for the New Museum, for "subletting" your event permit to the Occupy Wall Street Arts and Culture Working Group on Nov. 6 so that we could witness some amazing performance art at Union Square. I am thankful that you stood up to the police who wanted to shut you down. Your subversion of the "law" was beautiful and inspiring.

I am thankful for the NYU, CUNY, New School, and other student bodies who continue to convene every Saturday at noon at Washington Square Park to discuss issues that matter most to students.

All-NYC Student General Assembly at Washington Square Park, Nov. 5.

I am thankful to everyone who has ever occupied Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), up until that last fateful night, Nov. 14-15, when Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly violently evicted you from what was your home. They called you dirty, deranged, and lawless. But I visited you countless times and all I ever saw at Liberty Square was cooperation, creativity, and passion. I saw white people and black people, young and old, male and female, living together in an environment where everyone's voices were heard, and where none were turned away.

Liberty Square, as it was, on a very cold morning, Nov. 5.

I thank the Kitchen for feeding everyone.

I thank Comfort for clothing and sheltering everyone.

I thank all the New Yorkers and visitors who donated food to the Kitchen, or who donated clothing, tents, or sleeping bags to Comfort. Many of our donations were destroyed during the NYPD raid on Nov. 15, but our donations were not in vain. Some criticized that Liberty Square was attracting the homeless. I say, good! I say, thank you to OWS for feeding the homeless. Thank you for sheltering and clothing the homeless. New York City has an estimated 40,000 people who sleep on the street or in emergency shelters every night. Those are 40,000 voices we need to hear. Those are voices that belong on Wall Street, and don't let anyone ever say that they were a "bad element" at Liberty Square. The bad element is, and has always been, inside of the corporate buildings on Wall Street.

A spiritual space, a place for centering, at Liberty Square, Oct. 14.

I thank all the media. I thank those who publish the Occupied Wall Street Journal. I have collected all five issues so far, and I have submitted a piece for your next issue, if you'll accept it. I thank those who produce and participate in Occupied Wall Street Radio. I try to listen every weeknight at 6:30pm to your informative and insightful program.

I thank everyone who has ever taken a picture or produced a video clip about something they saw at Occupy Wall Street. We are the media. Facebook, twitter, and youtube have blown up with our own creations. And that's the way it should be. We know the story better than those on the outside. So let's tell it! (And yet I also thank the card-carrying journalists. The NYPD have bonked you on the heads, and have arrested you, for trying to tell our stories. Thank you for doing everything you can to share our stories with the world.)

I am thankful for those who led me to Foley Square at 3 am on the morning of the eviction. I am thankful for those who facilitated that emergency General Assembly. I am thankful for the young man who slept beside me around 6 am as the sun rose, and who made a little space so that I could shut my eye for a second, too, as I leaned up against a cold concrete wall. I am thankful for the guy who showed up with piles of Occupied Wall Street Journals for us to look at while we waited for Bloomberg's morning press conference.

Dawn at Foley Square, after the eviction from Liberty Square, Nov. 15. We slept whenever and wherever we could.

I am thankful for those who scaled the wall at Duarte Square at 9 am that morning.

Duarte Square, the morning after the eviction, Nov. 15.

I am thankful to the National Lawyers Guild, and to the OWS Legal Team. You have drilled your phone number into my brain for all time. I will never forget it. I don't even need to write it on my arm. If I get arrested, I know who to call. Thank you for sending out your legal observers to all our events. Thank you for collecting evidence on NYPD transgressions of the law. Thank you for defending what now must amount to thousands of protestors who have been arrested on trumped up charges. And thank you to the New York Civil Liberties Union who have also sent legal observers, and who are helping with some major court cases right now against the city and the NYPD.

I am thankful to Medical for having bottles of that liquid, whatever it is, that you will throw in my face if I get hit with pepper-spray. If an 84-year-old woman can handle it, then I can.

I am thankful to the tens of thousands who came out on Nov. 17. I am thankful to those who engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience outside the New York Stock Exchange. I am thankful to the thousands of students who went on strike and gathered at Union Square. November 17 was so beautiful. I will never forget that day. 30,000 people. 300 arrests. We nearly shut down the New York Stock Exchange. The New School was occupied. Foley Square was a dance party! It was amazing.

Video of civil disobedience and mass arrests on Pine Street, one block north of the Stock Exchange, 9am, Nov. 17.

2,000 striking students take over Fifth Avenue on a long and winding march to Foley Square, 4pm, Nov. 17.

I am also thankful to the students. For my students, for challenging me to make the past relevant. To my graduate student colleagues, for supporting the movement in your own special ways. To the students at UC Berkeley, who courageously occupied a space on campus only to face batons and arrests from the police. I also thank the faculty who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the students, some of whom also got beaten.

To the students at UC Davis, at least ten of whom were pepper-sprayed at close range for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. You are courage embodied. You have inspired a generation to put down their books and take to the streets. Across the UC system, I thank the students and faculty who have kept up the fight against tuition increases and privatization. We face the same issues here at SUNY, and we can, and will, learn a lot from you all.

To Students United for a Free CUNY, thank you for marching and rallying for a return to the days (from 1847 to 1975) when CUNY was free and open to all New York youth. You are right that tuition increases will make CUNY inaccessible for the most disadvantaged students and families in the city, who also happen to be overwhelmingly people of color. Thank you for bringing your voices to the public hearing on Nov. 21. Even though you were literally beaten away by the police, and 15 of you were arrested, the whole world was inspired. Next time, we will march with you in the thousands.

And finally, thank you to Tunisia. Egypt. Yemen. Syria. Libya. You have inspired us all. There would be no American Autumn if it were not for the Arab Spring. This might be the topic of a future post, so I will leave it at that. But I want to particularly thank the revolutionary youth of Egypt. You are our direct model and inspiration. And as I write, you are continuing your fight for freedom and democracy in Tahrir Square. We support you. And thank you for supporting us.

So, in summary...

I am thankful for my family, for my friends, for the new friends I have made at OWS, for the students, and for everyone involved in this fight. We have accomplished much in these past two months, but there is still a long and difficult road ahead of us.

It is vital to remember that our greatest asset is each other. So this Thanksgiving, reach out to those around you - those who support OWS, and those who don't - and have "courageous conversations" about whatever it is that matters to you. And give thanks. Give thanks to your family for letting you join this movement. Give thanks to your friends, for having your back. Give thanks to each other, for it is only collectively, not individually, that we have achieved this much. And it will be collectively, not individually, that we will eventually win.

This is my new favorite video of the moment! It is the best introduction to what we have suffered these past two weeks.

From Occupied Wall Street to the world, thank you!!! And Happy Thanksgiving to all!

On Language Study

2011-11-12T08:35:00.026-05:00

"The kingdoms, states, and empires that became involved in Atlantic exchanges together contained thousands of different languages (two thousand in the Americas alone, with considerably less variation in those European and African states oriented toward the Atlantic)."

- Alison Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," AHR 111.3 (June 2006): 741-757.

I remember reading this passage for the first time, and thinking to myself: "Anything short of learning and utilizing the thousands of languages of the Atlantic World would be to commit historiographical injustice against the 'lesser' peoples of that world."

I fashion myself as a Pacific historian. In my view, the Pacific World has no more linguistic homogeneity than the Atlantic. I have no ready figure, as Alison Games does, for how many hundreds or thousands of indigenous languages exist, or have existed, along the Pacific Rim and among the thousands of Pacific Islands. The answer is probably just as intimidating as Games' statement that the Americas alone contain two thousand indigenous languages.

Now if we could step back in time one or two generations, before ethnohistory, before subaltern studies, before the new social history, who among us historians would have even acknowledged that these languages existed, or mattered? One thing I've learned in my orals prep this semester is that in the American historiography of China, for example, you could get away with writing Chinese history without using Chinese-language sources up until the 1980s! We used to have such faith in the English-language documentarians of the past; we thought that it was okay to interpret world history solely from their perspectives, Eurocentric, Orientalist, and all.

Skip to the historiography of Hawaiʻi, where use of Hawaiian-language materials has only become "necessary" since the 1990s. True, some historians - including many Native Hawaiian historians - never stopped using Hawaiian-language materials to research and tell moʻolelo (stories; histories), even through those dark ages of the territorial (1898-1959) and statehood (1959-present) periods under U.S. colonialism. But now, most historians of Hawaiʻi, I think, consider it a historiographical injustice to research Hawaiian moʻolelo without using the ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) to guide his or her research.

Step back in time two generations ago, maybe even just one generation ago, and if I had entered a doctoral program to study U.S. history, as I nominally did here at Stony Brook in 2009, I would have been expected to use mostly English-language materials in my research. And I probably would be expected to learn French and German, too. Because many of the classic works in the Western social sciences were written in French and German. The French would also be useful for studying colonial American history, I admit. Today, no one requires me, or even suggests to me, to read Ranke or Marx or any other Western theorist in any language other than in English translation. Indeed, as the Eurocentric biases of these founding fathers of Western social theory are uncovered and criticized, we are realizing that the whole foundation of Western social theory is only so useful in making sense of Chinese history or Hawaiian history, for example. (On this point, I suggest reading Andre Frank's ReOrient. It really opened my eyes on this issue.)

So where does this leave us? Let us examine these relationships between language study and doing history further. We may do so by taking on as a case study my own nascent experiences in developing competency in the languages of the Pacific World.

Languages of the Pacific World: Chinese

Excerpt from a memorial from the Zongli Yamen (總理衙門)

concerning the Tianjin Massacre (1870)

I started studying Chinese in 2003 while in college. The whole endeavor was inspired by some rather weird twists and turns in my life, in my ideology, and in my imagination. In 2001 and 2002 while living in Southern California I was exposed almost simultaneously to Taoism (道教) and to macrobiotics. Macrobiotics led me to a study of Zen Buddhism, which lasted for a while. But Taoism only led me deeper to Taoism. I remember that I first tried to teach myself Chinese language by checking out a bilingual version of the Dao de jing (道德经), the most important Taoist text, from my school's library. I compared the English to the strange Chinese characters next to it, and I looked for patterns. Let me say, that was not a good way to learn Chinese! I got nowhere!

The next few years brought me closer to something approximating true language study. I took Mandarin classes in college. I studied for one semester at Yunnan Normal University (云南师范大学) in Kunming, China. In my senior thesis on the ethnomusicology of Yi music in southwest China, I even used Chinese-language sources for reference.

Fast forward to 2009 as I entered Stony Brook nominally to study U.S. environmental history. But I could not pass up the opportunity to study for the first time in my life Chinese history. I had studied language and culture and music for six years on and off, but I had never taken a class in Chinese history. True, abroad in Yunnan, we studied twentieth-century history, and I learned about communism, but I did not yet know my Qin (秦) from my Qing (清), or my Tang (唐) from my Song (宋) from my Ming (明)! (I hope I got all those characters right!) :)

Fast forward to the fall of 2011, at present, and I have begun studying Classical Chinese for the first time. The term "classical" is debatable here. What I mean to say is that I am studying pre-vernacular Chinese: pre-Lu Xun; pre-twentieth century.

I had never tried to read a historic Chinese-language document before. That was, until I read the memorial reproduced above. Reproduced is an excerpt from a memorial sent from the Zongli Yamen to the Qing emperor. "Memorial" refers to a document that was used in official communication between the emperor in Beijing and all his advisors as well as men out in the field such as governor-generals, etc. I don't yet fully understand the complex bureaucracy of Qing dynasty communications. All I know is that the Qing had expanded the bounds of "China" to its greatest extent ever by the end of the eighteenth century, and so when this memorial was written, it was part of a huge imperial communications apparatus that stretched thousands of miles across the varied climes of "China." This was before email and the internet (you knew that, right?), and yet somehow the emperor always stayed on top of his imperial news - like the Tianjin Massacre, for example - through the regular memorials he received. And he dispensed instructions back out through memorials. Or something like that!

This particular memorial is pretty much a big summary of what a number of different people have said about the Tianjin Massacre. It is almost legalistic in its organization, with the memorialist saying first that X said this, and then Y said that, therefore the next thing to do should be Z. But of course, whatever the emperor says to do, do it! It begins:

Prince Gong memorializes that, according to Jiangsu Province governor Ding Richang, who memorialized that...

See how we are already in a memorial within a memorial within a memorial? :)

Well, Ding Richang basically says that those government officials and common people who acted out in Tianjin had good cause because the foreign Christian missionary presence there was becoming a major headache. Then the memorial offers the emperor's statement, something to the effect of, these are the facts now, so...

Let the Yamen discuss and memorialize.

More memorializing! One interesting thing to note here is that when the emperor is first mentioned, he is placed symbolically above all other matters. This is why in the original document shown above you see in the fourth column from the right (classical Chinese is read form right to left, from top to bottom) that the character zhi (旨) is placed up high above all the others columns. It is part of the phrase fengzhi (奉旨), meaning "by order of the emperor." You can see it happens again two columns later as well.

So even if you do not read Chinese, you can still learn something from the original document above. You can see how in official imperial correspondence the emperor is symbolically placed above all others. It is often said that a Chinese emperor ruled over "all under heaven" (天下). And in a Qing dynasty memorial, all words under heaven were placed beneath the emperor, too. You perhaps have heard of how visitors were required to kowtow (叩头) before the emperor, that is, to bow down. Well, you can imagine all the meager words in the memorial kowtowing to the emperor in a similar way.

Perhaps the other curious thing about the document above are the many open circles. Those are the equivalent of periods in Chinese; they mark the end of sentences.

Languages of the Pacific World: Hawaiian

Nupepa Kuokoa, Vol. 5, No. 27, July 7, 1866, page 1 (published in Honolulu)

I first began researching Hawaiian history after an initial trip to Hawaiʻi in January 2010, almost two years ago. That trip convinced me that there were a lot of moʻolelo (stories) about Hawaiian history that were simply not being told on the mainland. I have become convinced that most Americans believe Hawaiian history began in 1893 or maybe 1898, or maybe even 1959(!), but few Americans know much about nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi.

By the fall of 2010 I had already written my now-published article, "Boki's Predicament" about the Hawaiian sandalwood industry in the 1810s and 1820s. I did not consult or use any Hawaiian-language materials for that study. But then, out of the blue, a reader of this blog from Hawaiʻi contacted me with more information about ʻiliahi (Hawaiian sandalwood). When our conversation turned to my more recent project, on Hawaiian migrant labor in the American guano industry, he pointed me to a website where I could find more information. When I went to that website, I discovered that the text was all in Hawaiian! Bummer. I tried the old "comparing Hawaiian and English translations side-by-side" thing that I had done with the Dao de jing a decade ago, but of course that did not work! I wish language study was that easy!

It was not initially clear how much material existed in the Hawaiian language on the guano industry. But once I found a website called nupepa.org (an online database of digitized Hawaiian-language newspapers from the nineteenth century), and I typed "guano" into the search engine, scores of entries appeared! And later when I discovered other ways of saying "guano" in Hawaiian, hundreds of entries appeared. It was then that I realized that it would be a historiographical injustice if I continued to write my article on Hawaiian guano workers without consulting the Hawaiian-language archives. And so I found a Hawaiian language teacher in Harlem, and the rest, as they say, is history!

So what can we learn from Hawaiian language documents? Take the newspaper above: Ka Nupepa Kuokoa: The Independent Newspaper. It was called the "independent" newspaper because it was not affiliated with, or sponsored by, the Hawaiian Kingdom. According to historian Noenoe Silva, another newspaper that I frequently reference, Ka Hae Hawaii (The Hawaiian Flag), was indeed sponsored by the Hawaiian Kingdom. Ka Hae Hawaii ran from 1856 to the early 1860s, and then Nupepa Kuokoa took over and stayed in print, I believe, well into the territorial period (1898-1959). Silva is critical of both of these newspapers. Of Ka Hae Hawaii, edited by Christian missionaries, she says it "primarily engaged in civilizing discourse by urging Kānaka Maoli [Native Hawaiians] to work, by denigrating them and other native peoples, and by attempting to domesticate Kanaka women." Of Nupepa Kuokoa, she says the editor's goal was to "replace Kanaka identity, traditions, and the like with foreign (haole) ways and thoughts."

Silva is right to critically read between the lines and identify the haole and missionary discourses that permeate these papers. But I read the newspapers differently. I am most interested in the letters submitted to the editor. The newspapers frequently published letters written by Hawaiian men (and less frequently women) from all walks of life, reporting on conditions of life and labor from all across the Pacific World. In my work on guano, I relied almost exclusively on the writings of Hawaiian laborers thousands of miles from Hawaiʻi on guano islands writing about the conditions they experienced. In my newest project on Hawaiians in California, I have found many sad letters from Hawaiians who have outlasted the Gold Rush and are too embarrassed to return to Hawaiʻi nei from California without the riches their families expect them to return with. These letters highlight the "public sphere" of these newspapers. The letters demonstrate not only that Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi were aware of the activities of the larger diaspora across the Pacific World, but also that Hawaiians across the diaspora were reading the same news as their ʻohana (families) back in Hawaiʻi. This process of reading and writing could easily have lead to what Benedict Anderson calls the formation of an"imagined community," the nation. Whether or not the development of a lāhui Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian nation) originated in part from this diasporic community of newspaper reading is a major research question that still deserves much attention in Hawaiian history.

Unfortunately, I have yet to visit the archives in Hawaiʻi and actually see these newspapers. Based on the scans (like the one above), these newspapers appear to have often been four pages long, and they look like four big pages! Some newspapers mixed Hawaiian and English reporting, as you can see in the document above where in the first column at left the newspaper advertises itself first in Hawaiian and then in English.

Below those initial self-promotions, still in the far left column, there are listed the moku (ships). At first glance, it is not clear what services these ships are providing. Many are kuna (schooners), and some are kalepa (trading/merchant) ships.

Below that are olelo hoolaha (advertisements, or notices). The first one is for the Ahahui Hooholo Mokuahi, the Society for Riding (or Operating?) Steamships(?). Not sure what that is all about. Mokuahi is an interesting compound word: Moku is "ship" and ahi is "fire," thus "fireship" or steamship. Below are listed a number of ships, so probably this ahahui is advertising some of the finest new steamships...but I'd have to look more carefully to really find out what is being advertised here.

Below that is an advertisement for buke (books) for sale. At passing glance I would say these may be the sort of books Christian missionaries would like Hawaiians to read. Prices are given, but I have no idea how these costs compare to daily wages for a Hawaiian makaʻāinana (commoner) in the 1860s. Something to look into.

Now, if you look at the second column from the left, at top begins the real news. And the news on this day is quite somber: Na Hana ma Hale Alii Iolani, no ka Hoolewa ana of Ke Kama Aliiwahine Victoria K. Kaahumanu. The royal princess Victoria Kaahumanu has died, and this particular article concerns the work at Iolani Palace for her funeral(?). Great article for a political historian.

I see the word kanikau come up a lot. It means "song of lamentation" or "song of mourning." Perhaps this piece describes the funeral itself, the words that were spoken, and the mele (songs) that were sung. I have not read it carefully.

The final column at right deals with ahaolelo (legislative) matters. Hawaiʻi became a constitutional monarchy in 1840, and legislation thereafter became the domain of legislators, no longer the domain of the aliʻi, the traditional chiefs, although there was some overlap for a time.

But none of this is what interests me. Flip to page two of this issue of Nupepa Kuokoa and you get to the section on hunahuna mea hou, literally "bits [or scraps] of news." These are just two or three sentences per hunahuna (scrap), saying this happened, or that happened, and so-and-so is here or there doing this or that.

Page 2

Top of page three: ka nu hou hope loa, "the very last news," signaling to readers that the "news" portion is now finally ending? The second column is the "English column": only one column of about 20 in this entire issue of Nupepa Kuokoa. Who read this English column? Who would read it rather than read Hawaiʻi's totally English-language newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser?

Page 3

Then you have the nu hou o na aina e mai, "news from the foreign lands." As follows, there are news summaries for: Na Feniana (it took a while to figure this out, but it is a reference to the Fenian movement); then Ma ka Ahaolelo Amerika ("in the American Congress" - this was 1866 just after the end of the Civil War and I see Jefferson Davis is mentioned in the article. Interesting); and then No Europa (Europe).

Then finally at the bottom of column 3 on page 3 we get to Na Palapala (Letters). This is where the letters to the editor are printed. And the first letter is from J.M. Kailiopio, a writer from Baker's Island in the equatorial Pacific. His letter, titled "Moolelo o ka Mokupuni Baker's Is. Puakailima" (Story/History of the Island Puakailima [or Baker's Island]) details his experiences as a guano laborer on a tiny island thousands of miles from Hawaiʻi.

Kailiopio describes the size of the island, and what is looks like. He describes some of the biological, geological, and oceanographic features of the place. He mentions how the Hawaiian workers collected cowry shells in their spare time to sell to the resident haole (their overseers) in exchange for work clothes, tobacco, tobacco pipes, matches, and other little things. He describes how little plant life there is on the island because the bird poop is so overpowering it kills the plants. He describes the seabirds, and how in lean times the workers rely on the birds and their eggs as a source of food. And he ends with a very strong critique of the Hawaiian laborers' working conditions on the island. When they get sick, he says, the luna (overseer) just gives them castor oil, salt, and painkillers, and then sends them back to work. The luna keeps changing the rules as he sees fit, he says. Kailiopio also says that many of the Hawaiian workers' bodies have become weak, and some have even died on the island.

In conclusion, for all that these Hawaiian-language newspapers are not - as much as Silva is right that they did not represent the true voices of the Kānaka Maoli, the native people - there are still these fascinating letters to the editor. Kailiopio's letter is exceptionally interesting, moving, and significant for historians. But all the letters have something to say, and they give "voice" to the subalterns who previously were voiceless in Hawaiian history.

Languages of the Pacific World: Spanish

In January 2012, I will begin taking Spanish lessons. It is partly because my lovely fiancee and I are planning a trip to South America, and as of now I know no Spanish! But it is also because as I pursue my newest project on Hawaiians in California, I am realizing how important the Spanish language is to understanding Alta California in the pre-U.S. days of the early nineteenth century. I presented a paper last spring at a Latin American history conference on "Polynesian Explorers in Latin America," but that was more of a research proposal than a discussion of any research findings. I have not yet looked for Hawaiians in the Spanish-language archives, but there is enough evidence to suggest that Native Hawaiian laborers were extremely important actors in the economy of the Alta California coast in the early nineteenth century. And so starting this spring I will bring in Spanish as my third language of the Pacific World.

And so on?

Chinese. Hawaiian. Spanish. There are so many other languages to know. Alison Games would say there are thousands of languages to learn here. From Hawaiian one could naturally progress to studying Māori, or Tahitian, or Samoan, or Tongan, or Rapanui. From Chinese, next would certainly be Japanese. From Spanish, it wouldn't be too hard to add French (certainly useful for studying French Polynesia). One language seriously missing here is Russian. Indeed, Russian is probably next on my dream list of languages to learn for the Pacific World. Because if you want to understand Alaska before it was American, you need to know Russian. Of course, Imperial Russia simply took over other people's lands in the Pacific World, so perhaps it would be just as important to study Aleut, or perhaps I should ask my Siberian friend to teach me Yakut, her native language. Ditto for Spanish California: why not learn Chumash? And even in considering China, why not study the indigenous languages of Taiwan, and the many languages of the ethnic minorities of the South China coast?

Generations ago, few people questioned that history was written by and for the victors. In an imperial world, where a handful of North Atlantic superpowers controlled much of the Southern hemisphere through colonialism, few historians thought there was any history worth telling besides the history of the conquerors. Imperial historians went out to the peripheries and collected and co-opted indigenous stories. Through Orientalism, these historians made up a heck of a lot of stories about these "others," too. And so the many, many histories (most of them orally transmitted) of the world were synthesized into a single meta-narrative, that of the clash between civilization (white folks) and savagery (everyone else), where 99% of the world was classified, of course, as the latter. They were, as Eric Wolf has termed them, "the people without history."

But through language study, we can rediscover the long-lost words of the "others." In fact, we are responsible, as historians, to find these words and give them a critical rehearing. This is a simple matter of historiographical justice. That these documents exist demands us to learn as many languages as possible so that we can really hear what the past is telling us.

Now who wants to join me? What languages should we learn?

Occupy Stony Brook!

2011-10-07T20:37:00.015-04:00

After attending the huge student walk-out/labor march/show of solidarity with Occupy Wall Street Wednesday night, I got to wondering what all my students at Stony Brook might be thinking about this whole Wall Street occupation thing. Do they support it? Will they participate in it? Will this movement affect them and change their lives? Will it redirect their future paths? Or will it pass us by and then so quickly be forgotten?

When I was in college, I participated in numerous demonstrations. I was even arrested by the police. I have always boasted about that incident. I remain immensely proud of what I did and I have never regretted it. We were protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was 2003. Hundreds of students and members of our community gathered downtown and "occupied" a central bridge connecting two cities. Some students moved from the sidewalks into the roadway and occupied that space, snarling traffic, forcing bystanders to chew upon our message. Crudely painted onto cardboard placards, we proclaimed the inauguration of "No Business as Usual." We wanted to shake things up, because we thought that the military invasion of a sovereign country thousands of miles away was a big deal. We wanted to force every citizen to take a stand on the issue, and if any man or woman came to find that the invasion of Iraq was foolish or ill-conceived (which it was), then they could join us in song, and in step. We wanted them to contact their representatives in Congress and ask them to oppose the invasion.

I did not join my friends in the middle of the bridge's occupied roadway that evening, but I also did not leave the bridge's sidewalk. The combined police forces of two cities plus the state troopers tried to force us to "go back to campus," as they condescendingly told us, but I refused to move. So one officer kneed me in the back, pushed me to the ground, and tied my hands behind my back with plastic twist-tie "handcuffs." We, the arrested, were led into a police van and later escorted to the county jail. We spent only a few hours in jail. This was because our fellow protestors who returned to campus after the rally rushed into the college's dining hall and solicited bail money from our classmates who were eating dinner. They raised hundreds of dollars in mere moments. We were freed from jail before midnight. The whole experience, we found, had re-energized our movement to oppose the war by all means necessary. In the end, we did not hold off President Bush's "shock and awe" campaign, and we did not prevent the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have followed. The war has sucked up billions of dollars of our tax money - including those I ritually pay, even while I do not support the ends to which that money is going.

Yet one thing I do support paying higher taxes for is SUNY, the State University of New York. I believe that our society benefits immensely when all New Yorkers have access to low-cost public higher education.

College should not only be for the wealthy. Private college tuitions are now bulging well past $50,000 a year, and financial aid for low-income and minority students is drying up. Thankfully, for those families that cannot afford private college, the State of New York offers a public university system. We have 4 major research universities, plus 60 other SUNY campuses, including 4-year residential colleges and numerous two-year county community colleges. I won't lie. It's a system bloated with bureaucracy and marred by mismanagement. The SUNY (mis)management has tried to cast all the blame for this on the state. But they are wrong.

Here's the deal. SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher likes bureaucracy. She works in a big "castle" in downtown Albany - the building actually used to be the headquarters for a regional railroad company. She is surrounded by a multitude of administrative staff. Indeed, even as the Stony Brook administration is forcing academic departments to consolidate into "shared service centers," with the ultimate goal, no doubt, of trimming down on personnel - (this will be a disaster for students) - Ms. Zimpher and her staff continue to rake in outrageous salaries for doing what they do back at the castle.

The SUNY "castle"

(source: Wikipedia)

What do they do exactly? One thing is clear. Chancellor Zimpher has spent much of the past few years grandstanding about the need to privatize SUNY. Stony Brook President Sam Stanley has stood beside her all along as she grandstanded, and he's done a bit of grandstanding himself, despite continuous (if not complete) student and faculty opposition to the plan. Despite all the protests, Stony Brook has already broken ground for the planned construction of a hotel on campus. Just the kind of revenue-making venture our students will profit from, he reasons. And heck, students might even get jobs there cleaning rooms after they graduate!

One of my favorite Stony Brook protests, from March 2010

This summer SUNY and the state came together to pass legislation raising tuition. Between selling-out SUNY to private development and now raising tuition on New York's working-class families, SUNY and the state believe we can improve the quality of our public(?) higher education system.

This brings me back to Wall Street. On Wednesday night I attended the rally/march at Liberty Plaza in downtown Manhattan. I visited the inspiring encampment of hundreds of people from all walks of life who are presently living there. These are people firmly committed to bringing about radical change in the way wealth is distributed in our society. The rally/march coincided with the National Student Walk-Out. On SUNY campuses across New York, students walked out of classes and held protests against newly-increased tuition and fees.

I support these students. And I support the occupation of Wall Street. And for me, there is little difference between the two. First of all, the occupants of Liberty Plaza say that "We are the 99%" (in contradistinction to the wealthy 1% of Americans who control an unequal share of political power). SUNY students, too, are the 99%. We are not the boys and girls of Harvard and Yale. SUNY students come from middle-class and working-class backgrounds. Some students simply cannot afford the burden of increased tuition and fees. Heck, some grad students, like myself, are frustrated with paying higher fees for services we do not even regularly use. The fees I pay each semester, I should note, come out of the money that the state gives me to teach SUNY students. After subtracting fees and health care, what I earn is well under the federal poverty line for a household of two (myself and my partner). I believe I am eligible, if it ever comes to such a point, to apply for food stamps and receive other social welfare services from the state and federal governments. After you subtract my fees, health care costs, and taxes, I make just enough to pay for rent and buy groceries. If you are a parent thinking of sending your child to SUNY, just remember that s/he may spend much of his/her academic career being taught by highly-educated, well-trained professionals like myself - really awesome grad students - who, by the way, make only about $10,000 a year. If I can't ever make it into class, assume it is because I am waiting in line at the Department of Social Services to sign up for food stamps.

What about student debt? Here is another point of convergence between students and the occupation of Wall Street. Student debt is astronomical. Students at Liberty Plaza in Manhattan hold cardboard placards calling on the government to forgive them of tens of thousands of dollars they owe in student debt. Who profits from saddling young, educated professionals with thousands of dollars of debt? Banks and crediting agencies do. Students and young professionals do not.

Third, the unemployment rate is really high. Around 10% of all Americans are unemployed. But it is more like 20% for youth ages 16-24. Stony Brook students don't have much to look forward to after they receive their degrees. Some unemployed youths are making their beds at Liberty Plaza, advertising to their world their desire for work. Stony Brook graduates are going to end up there too. Some pundits say these young folks would be better off applying for jobs than squatting in a park. But will Stony Brook graduates really be happy enough cleaning rooms at Hotel Stony Brook for minimum wage when they've got a bachelors degree stuffed into their back pocket, just collecting lint?

The situation for Stony Brook students is unacceptable. It is time to Occupy Stony Brook.

One of my best memories of college was joining hands with my friends and marching in the streets. One of my best memories was getting handcuffed, thrown into the paddy wagon, and later getting bailed out by my classmates. From these experiences I learned a lot more about how to speak and how to listen, how to pull myself back onto my feet after getting knocked down, than I ever learned in any college course. Granted, I had amazing professors. They marched with us. They supported us when we ditched class to protest. They even took time during office hours to talk about the movement, to offer advice, and to hear our jumbled thoughts and help us make sense of everything.

That was 2003. This is 2011. A new generation of students are raising their collective voice. I now sit on the other side of the desk, as an instructor. Now is my opportunity to be a mentor, as my professors were when I needed them the most.

Stony Brook students will have to make hard choices for themselves. They can put their tuition and fees to work by taking greatest advantage of the services that the university has to offer: by taking awesome classes with passionate professors, using all the research capabilities of our libraries, engaging in organized athletics, joining student clubs (or starting new ones), writing for the newspaper, heck, just having an awesome time because that's what college is all about.

But if any students choose to walk out of class, I will support them. If they camp out in front of (or inside of) the Administration Building, I will support them.

Stony Brook students are the 99%. I am the 99%, too. Who are the 1%? The 1% work in the administration building on campus, and inside the big "castle" in Albany. They spend all their time trying to come up with the most creative ways to raise revenue for SUNY. But an alternative solution has been sitting underneath their noses all along. They are just too cowardly to grasp it: Tax millionaires and corporations.

If either our state or our federal government (or both) would simply raise taxes on the wealthiest 1% of people and corporations (no, corporations are not people), we could raise billions of extra dollars every year. If New York State passed such a law, we could put some of the money into SUNY. In fact, if we as a community shared the conviction that public higher education should always be accessible to even the poorest of the poor, and that tuition and fees should be capped at a certain level, we could force the government to use extra tax revenue from millionaires and corporations to subsidize students' education.

And why not? Why should we make low-income New Yorkers live on the edge of the socio-economic precipice? Why should they have to worry about balancing tuition and rent, tuition and food, tuition and debt?

I can't tell you why the 1% refuses to pay higher taxes to support the education of the other 99%. That doesn't make sense to me. Everyone in this state should have equal access to an equally good education; it should not matter what our background is, what language we speak, what kind of apartment we live in, what gender we are, what color our skin is. Why can't we have a world where there is just a 100%, rather than a 1% and a 99%?

The time for dialogue with the administration is over. Now is the time for dialogue with students, faculty, staff, friends, family members, supporters, and those on the fence. Right now. Students might decide to occupy Stony Brook. They might not. But if they do, we all stand to learn so much from the experience. We will not get paid big bucks for teaching each other at the occupation. We will not receive academic credit for anything we learn there. We cannot put this on our transcripts, and it probably won't appear in our letters of recommendation. We won't be adding this kind of thing to our resumes and our cover letters. Look, we won't get immediate benefits out of this; no college degree or new job will just suddenly appear out of thin air because of this.

But we will teach. And we will learn. We will learn from one another; we will all become teachers and we will all be as students. We will make our voices heard. We have the opportunity to dream up a new vision for SUNY. We just need to say what we want, and keep saying it until we get it.

We are the 99%.

The Census, Part III: More 2010 Data and Analysis

2011-08-27T10:12:00.007-04:00

I was exploring this interactive census map on CNN's website, and if we dare take this site's mapping of 2010 census data as mostly accurate, here are a couple things I've discovered since my last post in the "census" series:

1) On a state-by-state level, I thought that the State of Hawaiʻi certainly must have the highest number of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders of any state in the Union, right? Was I wrong? Yes. According to CNN's map, California (with 128,577 Pacific Islanders) edged out Hawaiʻi (with 128,222 Pacific Islanders) in 2010. As you can see, California takes the honor with only 355 more persons that Hawaiʻi.

This is an amazing turn of events in Pacific history. During the period of Mexican and early American California that I am currently researching (1830s-1860s), Hawaiians lived and worked along CA's coasts, and even in deep inland, mountainous regions fishing and mining for gold. But all indications seem, so far, that even at its peak during the Gold Rush there were only hundreds, but certainly not thousands, of Hawaiians living in California. Now the Pacific Islander American population has grown so much that more people from Pacific Islander backgrounds live in the Golden State than in the Aloha State!

2) I have wondered for years now why Jefferson County in Northern New York State has a disproportionate amount of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders as compared to the rest of the Empire State. The CNN data, which allows viewers to break down demographics to the level of the census tract, has finally let me see exactly what is going on in Jefferson County, NY.

Of the 273 people in Jefferson County identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (note that my data in the last post in this series, from the U.S. Census, lists 298 individuals for the county), a majority -154 individuals - live within two relatively small census tracts centered around the U.S. Army Base Fort Drum. Now this makes more sense. That's because Pacific Islander Americans serve in the U.S. armed forces in disproportionately high numbers compared to other racial groups. In fact, during research for my class this summer on Pacific Islands History, I discovered that American Samoans in fact have the highest rate, per capita, of any U.S. state or territory, of service in the U.S. armed forces. From this CNN data we can't know if Fort Drum's Pacific Islanders are mostly Hawaiian, or American Samoan, or Chamorro, or what; but this seems to explain, once and for all, why Jefferson County has an unusually high Pacific Islander population.

3) Finally, the CNN map also shows population change (from 2000 to 2010) in the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population, something that I haven't seen in any other map yet with 2010 data. What it shows is remarkable.

Of all the states, California had the greatest growth in Pacific Islander population, not Hawaiʻi. Massachusetts had the greatest decline in population (just a few hundred individuals though. The overall national trend is towards fast growth in the Pacific Islander population; on this, see my previous post in this series). Arkansas had the greatest increase (percentage-wise) in Pacific Islander population, whereas Massachusetts again had the greatest decrease in Pacific Islanders.

The overall trend in Pacific Islander American migration appears to be away from the Northeast (specifically New England, but the Mid-Atlantic isn't faring much better), and towards the South, the southern Plains states, and the Far West (especially the Southwest). These trends largely mimic the entire American population's movements, so I hesitate to say there is much uniquely Pacific Islander American about this data...but more interpretation might shed light on more unique trends.

And here, for fun, are a couple really unique trends in Pacific Islander American demography for the twenty-first century:

Of any county in the entire United States, Buena Vista County, Iowa saw the greatest increase in Pacific Islanders from 2000 to 2010. This is because in 2000 there was apparently only 1 person in the county identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and in 2010 there were 95! Is this a case of earlier underreporting? Or of a major migration? It's not clear.

And here is the strangest and most surprising find of all: On the level of the census-tract, of any place in the entire United States, Eloy, Arizona had the greatest increase in Pacific Islanders from 2000 to 2010. The population apparently spiked from 3 Pacific Islanders in 2000 to 932 in 2010!

How did this happen? Well, Eloy is a small city of about 10,000 people, halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. But about 1,800 of that population consists of prison inmates. And not just any prison inmates...

Apparently the Saguaro Correctional Center, which opened in 2007, is run by a private correctional services corporation, Corrections Corporation of America, that has a contract with the State of Hawaiʻi worth tens of millions of dollars for providing "correctional services" for Hawaiian male inmates. Based on the numbers we have, it seemed that about half, if not more, of the prison facility is comprised of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, whereas we have to imagine that the other inmates are from Hawaiʻi, but are not ethnically Polynesian or other Pacific Islander. Still, 50% Pacific Islander is totally disproportionate to the real demographic breakdown in Hawaiʻi where Pacific Islanders only comprise at most 20% of the population. What does this all mean? Well, it means that the State of Hawaiʻi is sending a disproportionate amount of Pacific Islander men to jail - and not just to any jail - but they are shipping them out to a small desert town in the middle of Arizona. If you are familiar with the history of British "transportation" of convicts to Australia, this, to me, is eerily reminiscent of that dark episode...

The data from Eloy, AZ, reminds us that not all migration is voluntary. Forced migration still takes places in this troubled world. It is exciting to see the shifting Pacific Islander American populace across this vast country, and for the most part I think these shifts reflect voluntary choices across what is becoming an evermore complex diaspora. But that the largest shift in Pacific Islander American population occurred in the past decade because of the forced transportation of Hawaiian criminals to the U.S. mainland suggests that the dark stain of U.S. colonialism and ongoing racial discrimination still operates in our contemporary world. And that Hawaiians, who have lived under U.S. colonial rule for nearly 115 years now, are still not nearly free.

Pacific Island History in a Long Island Classroom

2011-08-19T20:14:00.015-04:00

A Tale of Two Islands

In March I wrote a post about my upcoming summer course on Pacific Island history. Well, the course has now ended and I think it would be useful for me to review what worked, what didn't, and to remark upon how much I enjoyed teaching this course!

As I like to tell anyone who will listen, my course covered 6,000 years of history, and 1/3 of the Earth's surface, in just 6 weeks! (But get ready for this, my January 2012 winter session course on early China will cover 3,000 years of history in just 3 weeks! More on that later.) Our grand sweep through Pacific Island history took place in a small classroom in the Social and Behavioral Sciences building on the campus of Stony Brook University, SUNY, on Long Island. There we were, islanders talking about islanders...and yet the actual Pacific world seemed so far away. (For the record, I am a Manhattan islander --- I wonder if Pacific Islanders would really consider us fellow "islanders" though?) :)

The images in this post are reproductions of the opening slides from the various lectures I presented as part of my course "Pacific Islands: Histories of Paradise." Each image has a unique story to tell, and I am happy to share those stories with anyone interested.

The Pedagogical Approach: A Review

For those interested in the thinking behind my course, "Pacific Islands: Histories of Paradise," I invite you to read the March 2011 post for more information. Here I would like to simply recap my pedagogical approach, and then evaluate how different aspects of this approach actually played out in the classroom.

I assigned two textbooks: Alastair Couper's maritime history of Pacific Islanders, Sailors and Traders, and John Kneubuhl's trilogy of plays (written for the stage), Think of a Garden, and other Plays. I didn't necessarily plan to have this balance between academic historical writing and fictional playwriting, but the students seemed to appreciate the "change of pace" that came with our switch to Kneubuhl halfway through the semester, and so did I. I used Kneubuhl's plays "Think of a Garden" and "Mele Kanikau: A Pageant" to explore, respectively, the Mau movement in Samoa in the 1920s and the Hawaiian Renaissance in 1970s-Hawaiʻi. It was a lot to ask of my students to read 80-90 page plays instead of 20-30 page chapters or articles, but they pulled through, and to everyone's benefit. Indeed, if I had 60 weeks instead of 6, I'd assign Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors, Herman Melville's Typee. Jee, we'd just read tons of novels and skip all the dry academic stuff. (Unfortunately, I can't offer a course like that right now!)

Besides the textbooks, I put tons of articles and essays and primary sources on Blackboard to accompany each class session's theme or topic. We read writings by Epeli Hau'ofa, Noenoe Silva, Greg Dening, Bruce Cumings, John McNeill, Alan Ziegler, Ronald Takaki, Patrick Kirch, Jared Diamond, Jennifer Newell, David Chappell, and others. Our primary sources included excerpts from Hiram Bingham (American missionary to Hawaiʻi in the early 19th century), Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (author of Two Years Before the Mast, about cosmopolitan Mexican California in the 1830s), and from Queen Liliʻuokalani (who was removed from power by American businessmen during the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom). On a whim, I also brought in some Hawaiian-language primary sources for the students to look at (in both Hawaiian and in my awful English translations!). I was truly impressed by how much the students got out of these sources: mid-19th-century letters to the editor written to Hawaiian-language newspapers by migrant laborers working on remote guano islands or mining gold in California. If there was ever a marginal, subaltern actor in the all the history we covered, it was the Hawaiian migrant laborer who toiled thousands of miles from home. (Well, at least that's the case I'll be making in my dissertation about these dudes.) Anyway, the students really empathized with the laborers. As a Ph.D. student working on what sometimes seems like an obscure topic, this was really heartwarming to me, and using these materials in class was one of the highlights of my semester. (Also, who would have ever thought that Hawaiian-language documents would be examined in a history class at Stony Brook? I've been thinking that when I teach classes in U.S. history I should really strive to do the same: to bring writings by indigenous peoples in indigenous languages to the table. Usually we don't let these subaltern actors speak - perhaps we don't even know that their voices are there, hidden in languages we don't even understand. Anyway, this is a call to action, for all of us, to avoid Anglophonecentrism. Did I just coin a new word?)

So those were the readings. Now, the films.

I had the students write responsive essays about any one of four main films that we all watched together in class: The Bounty (about 1780s-Tahiti), Hawaii (about 1820s-Hawaiʻi), Picture Bride (about 1910s-Hawaiʻi), and Once Were Warriors (about 1990s-Aotearoa [New Zealand]). I split the students up so that an equal number of students wrote about each film. Generally, the students enjoyed the films. Some thought Hawaii was too long (we watched the director's cut - it was over three hours long! Warning to teachers: don't use the library's director's cut!). Everyone seemed to enjoy The Bounty; they were generally surprised that Anthony Hopkins, Mel Gibson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, and other stars of today were actually alive and making movies in the mid-1980s, which is, of course, before most of my students were born. Once Were Warriors moved some students to tears, and I, too, cried. I was thankful to be sitting up front watching the movie so that I could shield my wet eyes from my students. That would have been embarrassing! Once Were Warriors is just, hands down, perhaps the most powerful movie about contemporary indigenous peoples' issues that I have ever seen. I have never seen any movie of similar weight made about contemporary Native Americans, or Native Hawaiians, or any other group. I mean, I love Whale Rider; that is a great movie, too. Both films are about contemporary Māori life in Aotearoa. Anyway, the only film that perhaps doesn't work perfectly here is Picture Bride. Because it focuses so heavily on the Japanese immigrant experience in Hawaiʻi, and offers so little information about what Native Hawaiians were experiencing at that time, it was hard for me, and my students, to put the film within the context of the rest of the class which really centered on the indigenous Pacific Islander experience.

Besides having to write about a film, I also asked my students to write about a museum object and a visual representation (image) of Pacific Islands/Islanders. The museum object assignment was fun. A number of students received extra credit for visiting the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Pacific Peoples and writing about an object found in the collection. Students who did not visit the museum had the option of writing about an object from various online museum collections, but I really wanted to encourage students to be present with the real objects. Students chose a breadth of objects from across the spectrum of Pacific Islander cultures to write about, from New Guinea to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). I was very impressed with their work.

For the image assignment, I had students choose an 18th or 19th century visual representation of Pacific Islands or Islanders created by an outsider (most often a European or Euro-American artist). Many chose works by British artist John Webber who accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage to Hawaiʻi in the late 1770s. Webber's were the first images of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiians that many Europeans and Americans ever laid eyes on. Others chose works by French artist Jacques Arago, or those of British painter Robert Dampier. Pushing to the end of the 19th century, some students even discussed the work of French painter Paul Gauguin who lived for a time in French Polynesia.

Finally, if you thought that was more than enough material and assignments for a six-week course, I also had my students write a short research paper on a topic of their choosing. I have been more than impressed by the results they have submitted! They chose topics ranging from pre-contact Māori history to the impact of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) on Pacific Islanders in contemporary Oceania. Some students even researched questions in historiography, such as how European accounts of Captain Cook's death compare with Native Hawaiian accounts. Over the semester I pushed students to go beyond typing in their queries into Google and then just using whatever information came up in the search results. I stressed to them that only like 1% (if even close to that much) of what you find online is worthy of use in your papers. But I said that if they were to visit our very own Melville Library, on the other hand - which one student classified as a "scary place," while another student, a senior, admitted s/he had never taken a book out of the library, ever - close to 100% of what they'd find at the library would be acceptable for use in a history paper, if used in the right way. And, impressively, only a handful of students used any internet sources in their final research paper. Many used the library's online databases to access journal articles, and others even read piles of books from the stacks - books on Pacific Islands which probably had not been read in thirty years, if ever!

It's not that I am anti-internet and pro-dusty-old-books. Indeed, more and more of the best information on historical topics these days is easily accessed online. But that dusty old book on Samoan history just sitting on the stacks at our campus on Long Island is really a "treasure." I mean, it may be a horrible work of scholarship...but just coming to terms with it is an experience - like seeing a Pacific Islander-made object in a museum. Reading a dusty old book is something I think should be classified as an essential part of the college learning experience. For all the students who classified the library as a "scary" black-hole, there was at least one student who told me during class that s/he had an amazing experience reading a mid-19th-century book from our little library's shelves. S/he described the leather-bound cover as almost ripped off, the pages as yellowed and weathered; there was even a personal inscription in the front of the page written by some reader of days gone by. S/he could not believe that our library even had stuff like that. In my mind: that student had an awesome experience at the library! Success.

Concluding Thoughts

And so that's what we did for 6 weeks. I can't say that teaching a summer course pays well. (It doesn't.) And I can't say it was easy. (Each class was 3.5 hours long, and each 3.5 hour class required probably 10 hours of reading, writing, and powerpoint-making to pull it off. If any reader ever wants someone to lecture to an audience for an hour about topics such as colonialism in the Pacific, pre-contact Polynesian societies, the 19th-century Plantation System and blackbirding, or contemporary social and political issues in Oceania, you know where to find me!) Also, on the topic of "it wasn't easy": now that I've said nice things about the library, I do have to say that the quality of their VHS videos is really poor! Oh, my poor students! During The Bounty they had to watch clips of the Phil Donahue show that some library patron had recorded over the opening credits of the movie; during Hawaii they had to deal with the sound going in and out and in out (that was partly the fault of the A/V equipment in our department); during Picture Bride they had to deal with roving alternate bars of color and black & white across the screen throughout the whole movie. Not just that, but the sound also changed along with the roving bars so that a constant static "wave" of sound kept crashing against the spoken dialogue of the film. (Thankfully, much of the dialogue was in Japanese and we were reading the subtitles anyway!) The point is: if there is any reader out there that wants to donate to SUNY, we could sure use some upgrades in our library collection! Or, you could call your state legislator and demand that they find a sensible way to fund high-quality public higher education in this great state. Privatizing SUNY is not the answer. Raising taxes on the wealthy? That's my two cents if you care to know.

Winter 2012

In January 2012 I will be teaching a three-week course on "Society and Culture in Early China." I hope to post a course description online within the next month, and I'll be sure to include a link to that description in a future blog post.

If you have any comments or questions about my course on Pacific history, I'd love to hear from you.

Mahalo for reading!

The Census, Part II: Pacific Islanders in New York City

2011-07-08T21:54:00.019-04:00

Last year, I wrote a post about the 2000 U.S. Census data on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the United States, in New York State, and in New York City. Now the data is in from the 2010 census - yay! - and it is very interesting stuff!

In the United States

First off, much of my data for this post is from this U.S. Census Bureau report, and this interactive U.S. Census Bureau website.

As you may recall, the 2000 census was the first time in U.S. history that respondents could select more than one race in describing themselves. What we got, then, with the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population was a greater number of respondents checking "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" in combination with other races than those who checked "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" alone, suggesting that most Pacific Islander Americans self-identify as multiple races rather than as only Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

The big news about the 2010 census has been the surprisingly new and large number of respondents self-identifying as more than one race. In terms of the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population, the 2010 data maintains the trend from 2000: 55.9% of the respondents in 2010 identifying as "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" also listed one or more other races, while 44.1% identified as "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" only. It should be noted that Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are the only racial category in the 2010 census where a majority of respondents identified as multiracial. For all other racial categories, including American Indian and Alaska Native, the majority of respondents identified as only one race.

In the United States as a whole, the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population grew phenomenally over the past decade! The Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (one race only) population grew from 398,835 in 2000 to 540,013 in 2010, a 35.4% increase! In addition, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in combination with one or more other races now comprise 685,182 persons in 2010. (Sorry, can't find 2000 data to compare right now.) In sum, Americans claiming some Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander racial identity comprise 1,225,195 persons. When we look at the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander-only population's 35.4% increase in the past decade, we need to keep in mind that the U.S. population on a whole only increased 9.7% since 2000, and non-Hispanic Whites grew by only 1.2%, the smallest increase of any ethnic/racial category. The only racial group outpacing Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in growth were Asians, growing 43.3% since 2000. Students of Hawaiian history who are familiar with the rapid decline in the indigenous Hawaiian population since 1778 (and well into the twentieth century) will be heartened by these numbers!

As a percentage of total population, every racial category in the United States grew except for one, Whites, whom altogether decreased from 75% to 72% of the total population. Taking up some of that lost ground are the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders who from 2000 to 2010 increased from 0.1% to 0.2% of the U.S. population. Not such a great gain, but I always like to keep in mind that Native Hawaiians make up a full 1% of the U.S. Senate (Daniel Akaka)! (It is nice to see some overrepresentation of racial minorities in U.S. government for a change!)

Now, wouldn't it be interesting to break down the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population that identified as multiracial into subcategories based on which other races they identified as? I couldn't find this data in 2000, but the Census Bureau has made it available for 2010, so let's do it! I'm about ready to label the 2010s as the decade of U.S. multiracialism! (I find these trends really exciting, as does the New York Times, and ya know, if white supremacists don't like that, well then they can just stop reading this blog!) :)

Total multiracial Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population: 685,182

Two races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and White: 169,991

Two races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Black/African American: 50,308

Two races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native: 11,039

Two races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Asian: 165,690

Two races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Some Other Race (not listed): 58,981

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, White, and Black: 9,245

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, White, American Indian/Alaska Native: 8,656

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, White, and Asian: 143,126

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, White, and Some Other Race (unlisted): 9,181

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and Am Indian/Alaska Native: 2,142

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and Asian: 7,295

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and Some Other Race (unlisted): 4,233

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Am Indian/Alaska Native, and Asian: 3,827

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Am Indian/Alaska Native, Other Race: 2,000

Three races: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Asian, and Some Other Race: 5,474

Data for four or more races not available at this level.

Fascinating! I am especially intrigued by how neck-and-neck the two-race White mix is with the two-race Asian mix. And then there is the three-way Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Asian, and White mix that is almost as large as either of the two. As a historian, I think about the frequency of White-Hawaiian mixing in the early nineteenth century, and then the rise of Asian-Hawaiian mixing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to the importation of tens of thousands of Asian "coolies" to labor on Hawaiian sugar plantations. But even beyond these multiracial groupings, which are well-known to most residents of Hawaiʻi if not most Americans (or at least students of history like me!), each other combination tells an equally compelling and intriguing story about American history. But we can't so easily come up with over-arching narratives for each category. I could speculate as to why, for example, historically, Hawaiians and Alaskans have intermarried (although marriage doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it, and also, the data above does not exactly support any claim that Hawaiians and Alaskans specifically have had mixed-race children; it is just a hypothetical example), but the reality is that each person and his or her family has a unique story to tell. Yes there were reasons why Hawaiian laborers traveled abroad in search of work (a sub-topic of my forthcoming dissertation!), but that can't explain why people fell in love with who they did, or didn't. I'd love to know some of these stories, to trace the genealogies of multiracial Pacific Islander America. Maybe in 2020 they can include a section for stories on the census form! Let people identify themselves by their heritage: not just the color of their skin or the nation of their birth, but by reciting the stories that have been handed down by parents, grandparents and ancestors that all come together in that big mash-up of narrative history that is our own biography.

Looking back at these numbers, it seems certain (I'm crunching numbers in my head here!) that people claiming Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander racial identity comprise well over 5%, if not close to 10%, of all Americans identified as multiracial. Remember that one-race-only Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders comprise only 0.2% of the entire U.S. population, but they are much better represented when shown as a proportion of the American multiracial community.

In New York State

Now the fun stuff. Last year I noted that in 1990, 4,457 New York State residents identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (no multiple race option in 1990), but that number jumped to 8,818 Pacific Islanders (one race only) and 28,612 multiracial Pacific Islanders in 2000. That big change was apparently due to changes in reporting. Anyway, in 2010 the number of New York State residents identifying as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (one race only) is 8,766. Sadly, a decrease of 52 persons since ten years ago! Unfortunately, I do not have state-level multiracial data to compare with 2000, so it could be possible that the total population identifying as at least part-Pacific Islander may have increased since 2000, but the one race only population has indeed fallen.

I also reported last year that in 2000 the top three New York State counties with Pacific Islander populations comprising more than 0.3% of the total population (above the national average of 0.2%) were Bronx, Jefferson, and Tompkins counties. Strange, yes, but true.

I am sad to report that in 2010 the Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander population of beautiful upstate Jefferson County where Lake Ontario flows into the sparkling St. Lawrence River fell to just 298 people, 0.256% of the county population. Thus, be it due to reporting errors or a mass exodus from this northern paradise, we have to take Jefferson County off that special list from 2000.

Tompkins County is even more distressing. In 2010 only 45 locals identified as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, just 0.044% of the county population! There would have been over 250 other Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders in town ten years ago to account for the 2000 data. What happened? Perhaps they were all enrollees at Cornell - a massive influx of Pacific Islanders getting Ivy League degrees ten years ago, but now graduated and moved on to greener pastures?

And in The Bronx? 1,288 Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders. Just 0.093% of the county population! That means close to 3,000 Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders took the last MetroNorth out of town (headed to Jefferson County?) in the past decade, abandoning the Bronx's once thriving Pacific Islander American community.

But wait! I am sorry to say that this data analysis is reflective of a major reporting error on my part. See, those three counties made the list in 2000 because 0.3% of the population comprised not just Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (one race only) respondents, but also those who listed multiple races including Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. That data, however, is not available yet on the county level for 2010, so we just can't say which county has made the list this decade, and which one has not. But as for Jefferson County, with almost 0.3% of the population comprised of one-race-only respondents, it might just have the highest proportion of Pacific Islanders of any New York State county! What is going on up there? If there is a reader of this blog from Jefferson County, NY, would you please explain this to me!

In New York City

Let's take it to the Big (Pine)Apple. I previously reported that in 2000, 5,430 New Yorkers identified as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone. 19,203 New Yorkers identified as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander as one of multiple races.

In 2010, 5,147 New Yorkers identified solely as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, a decrease of 283 persons. Unfortunately, the data on multiracial Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders in NYC is not yet available at this time.

I can say this time around that the borough with the most one race only Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders is Queens County with 1,530 people. The Bronx is next with 1,288. Brooklyn has 1,243. Manhattan has 873. Staten Island - not so friendly to other "islanders," it seems - has only 213 Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders. On a whole, well over half of all Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders in NYS live in the big city rather than upstate or on Long Island.

Unfortunately, my favorite Hawaiian friend in New York City - my former Hawaiian language teacher - has left for the islands - the real islands, Hawaiʻi nei - and that means we've suffered a decrease of yet another 1 person of Native Hawaiian ancestry in this Big (Pine)Apple. But Hālāwai goes on, with hula classes and performances, and get-togethers with lots of yummy food and always lots of aloha. I have cherished so much making new Hawaiian friends here in NYC. They have no reason to share their aloha with me, but they do. And for that I am constantly reminded, and re-motivated, to attend to my dissertation research on Hawaiian history. There are such amazing stories about the past to be told, and somehow it all unfolds into this magical, mysterious present. And somehow it makes sense of the census data, or at least it will make sense someday once I figure out all this damn data!

Aloha kākou!

Prepping for Orals II

2011-07-02T11:56:00.013-04:00

It has been two and a half weeks since my last post about "Prepping for Orals," and I haven't read as many books in the meantime as I had hoped to. This is likely because I got so caught up rallying at the New York State Capitol for LGBT rights - for the right of all New Yorkers to marry the person they love. And we won! On Friday evening, June 24th, after weeks of making phone calls to senators, delivering petitions to senators at the Capitol, and rallying many days after work inside the Capitol building, singing, chanting, dancing, and making new friends - after all that - many courageous Republican senators stood up for civil rights and voted "yes," making same-sex marriage legal in New York State!

This is one of my favorite photographs I took on Friday, June 24th, just hours before the New York State senate approved marriage equality. "Love is love is love."

More of my photos from June 24th can be seen at my Flickr page.

I took two videos of our chanting/singing on the Great Western Staircase of the New York State Capitol, just hours before the senate's passage of the marriage equality bill. This one was our anthem: "Chapel of Love"

This chant came out of nowhere, but quickly overpowered our opposition's chant of "Vote No!": "Love will win. Hate go home."

After rallying at the capitol on that final day, I got on a bus to NYC to be with my partner. By the time I arrived in Manhattan, the senate was just about to begin deliberations on the Marriage Equality bill. We joined nearly 50,000 others tuning in to watch the senate live online. We cried multiple times during the proceedings! I certainly did when Senator Steve Saland, from the Hudson Valley, spoke and for the first time publicly committed to supporting marriage equality. We both cried when Senator Tom Duane, the sponsor of the bill, explained why the bill mattered so much to him, about the discrimination he had faced his whole life as an openly gay New Yorker, and about the dream deferred that he and his partner, Louis, shared - the dream of marriage.

After the vote we joined nearly 1,000 others outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street where the LGBT rights movement began almost exactly 42 years earlier! What a celebration!

Celebrants outside the Stonewall Inn (covered in rainbow flags) along Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, NYC, June 24, 2011.

More of my photographs from that historic day can be seen at my Flickr page.

Two days later we marched alongside Governor Andrew Cuomo (and personally met former Governor David Paterson!) in the NYC Pride Parade:

View from within the Pride Parade, looking down Fifth Avenue. There were approximately 500,000 celebrants there! June 26, 2011.

And so, caught up first in the fight, and then in the euphoria, I missed the opportunity to really get ahead with my orals preparation. (Oh, boo hoo. Big deal.) :)

An ever-evolving bibliography

Now a word about what I've been reading lately. You can see my earlier post about orals for a refresher on my three examination fields, and what I've read so far.

Early American history:

Since reading Richard White and Karl Jacoby, I haven't picked up any other early American history reads except for one, and this one is by far the best of the lot: John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). Demos is pretty forthcoming in his introduction that, after decades of social-science-y social history - after reading too many books focused more on numbers than on stories - he really wanted to write "narrative history." And he has done a remarkable job. Scholars might accuse him of being a bit fast with the facts, or at least not fully forthcoming with where he gets all his ideas, but I say "so what?" I have never believed that history is a science. I think it truly is just another form of story-telling, perhaps one where we take ourselves a bit too seriously. I think facts are messy, fluid, and can change over time. Yup, I think facts can change. I don't even think objectivity was ever that "noble" of a dream! Anyway, after a colleague remarked that my effort to tell the story of a captive red-tailed tropicbird in the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific guano industry was like trying to write a "John Demos"-style history of birds, I knew I had to read this classic book. The book concerns Eunice Williams, a young girl from a Puritan family in Massachusetts who is captured as a child by Mohawk Indians and transported to a French-Catholic influenced Indian town on the St. Lawrence River. While her other family members are eventually released and return to good old Protestant English country life, she stays behind. She forgets English. She converts to Catholicism. She takes an Indian husband. She raised a family. She is "unredeemed." Demos tells a compelling story, and the reader learns a lot about early eighteenth-century America. Frankly, the book was so much fun to read! Why can't all history books be like this one?!

Chinese history:

Besides Demos, I've devoted the past three weeks to reading Chinese history. Yes, I'm still reading Elvin's Retreat of the Elephants. I have made little progress since last update, and I don't plan to make much more this summer. Spending a beautiful summer afternoon reading Retreat of the Elephants is like sitting next to a beautiful, cold stream in upstate New York and choosing to burn under the sun rather than jump in for a swim. (Let's just say reading John Demos is more like swimming!) I can be ascetic when I want to, but I think that selecting this book as summer reading went just too far!

I finished Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s Strangers at the Gate (1966). It really is a great work considering it was written in the 1960s, a dark time for history when few were concerned about the history of "little people." But Wakeman is concerned. He tells a tale of local resistance to Western imperialism in Canton (Guangzhou) in the 1840s and 1850s. Certainly allegiances shifted quite a bit over these twenty years, but the one constant was that local people just could not stand the idea of allowing Western peoples, or especially Western soldiers, inside the Canton city walls. Other histories I've read sometimes paint the 1842 signing of the Treaty of Nanjing as a done-deal: as if with the stroke of a pen Britain had conquered China and changed it irrevocably. Wakeman makes clear that the resistance did not end with 1842, and he shows nicely how the social disorder that led to the Taiping uprising (the largest internal rebellion / civil war in Chinese history, 1851-1865) was born out of the local disruptions caused by the imperial desires of the British.

It was of benefit after reading Wakeman to read Paul Cohen's Discovering History in China (1984), a historiography of American writing on "modern" Chinese history. After all my talk last post about "early modernity" versus "modernity" in different historical contexts, Cohen gave me a lot more to chew on considering how our idea of "modernity" is shaped by a Eurocentric historiography. It was long considered that China's "modernity" began with the "Western shock" of the Opium War (1839-1842), but Cohen shows (and this was back in the 1980s) that younger historians were beginning to question this periodization. Contentious terms that Cohen attempts to deconstruct include "modernity" but also "imperialism" and "tradition," and he seeks to develop a "China-centric" approach to Chinese history. It is an interesting read, mostly because the book is now almost thirty years old. It is interesting because, in one sense, I think that teachers - if not scholars - still have a fight ahead of us in terms of moving away from a Western-centric approach to Chinese history. Students still find it much easier to memorize the Opium War as a moment of cataclysmic change in Chinese history, than to move beyond the generalizations towards an understanding of the currents of change and continuity within China that occurred apart from Western influence. On the other hand, Cohen's historiography is dated. His enthusiasm for "bottom up" social history is exciting to me - because I think we still need more of that kind of history - but it is also really "old news" now thirty years later. His concern with how the Vietnam War shaped American writing on China is also interesting, but now, in a post-Cold War world, where U.S. relations with China are quite different, how applicable are his concerns?

So now I turn to Keith Schoppa's Xiang Lake (now published as Song Full of Tears: Nine Centuries of Chinese Life at Xiang Lake) (1989; 2002). I only began reading this a few days ago. It deals with nine centuries of history around one small, artificial lake near Hangzhou in South China. I am already reminded that Elvin, in Retreat of the Elephants, wrote quite a bit about Hangzhou Bay and its millennium of ecological change in his chapter about Chinese water usage. But Schoppa's approach is so different, focused on stories told about the lake, rather than about the gritty details of silt deposition, etc. Robert Marks has dealt with a similar watery, silty topic in his analysis of the Pearl River Delta. Each author has a different approach to telling the history of watery change over millennia as forests are cut, soil erosion increases, deposition and sedimentation increase, deltas grow, rivers change course (especially the Yellow River in North China!), people reclaim lakebeds or polders, etc., etc. It is amazing to see the maps showing how the borders of lakes, rivers, or deltas have shifted so much over one thousand years, partly due to natural change, but mostly due to anthropogenic change. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading Schoppa's book for what it might tell me about how historians can approach writing Chinese environmental history, because I need better models than what I've read so far!

Next up in Early American history is: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale (1990). I can't wait!

Finally, here are some photographs I took at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC to get us thinking more about Chinese history:

Early twentieth-century Chinese bridal chair. This object would have been made by the groom's family. A number of very influential Chinese films begin with scenes of brides being carried in this type of chair, although not nearly so elaborately crafted, including Yellow Earth (1984) and Red Sorghum (1987).

Detail from the bridal chair

Tobacco pipes from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Tobacco, an American plant, was first imported into China in the late Ming dyasty (early seventeenth-century), and was rapidly incorporated into Chinese culture. Timothy Brook, in his lovely book Vermeer's Hat (2007), tells this story in a chapter called "School for Smoking."

These are examples of snuff boxes used for holding tobacco. They also date from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Snuff boxes, be they carved from jade or some other precious material, showed the status of the smoker, much as smoking tobacco itself was often a signifier of status.

Between the pipes and the snuff boxes, we can see the great influence that one American plant had on Chinese material culture. Unfortunately, most museum visitors won't recognize this fact, because there is no interpretation about tobacco in this exhibit! Most visitors will see these objects as "indigenous" and "timeless" reflecting a long history of Chinese smoking culture (just as most Americans probably think Chinese have smoked opium for millenia). The reality is that recreational smoking was a learned activity in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and was greatly influenced by China's transoceanic relationships with European empires.

An imagining of Ming-era Beijing, probably fifteenth or sixteenth century CE. The view is from the southwest corner of the city wall looking in. It is interesting to note what is taking place outside the city wall: lots of dromedaries (!), obviously lots of traders from across Inner Asia; the canal and canalboats: more trade. Is what takes place outside the city wall extralegal? Who is allowed in, and who is allowed out? I find this diorama raises lots of interesting questions for me about Ming urbanity. Anyway, anyone who has been to Beijing lately (I was there in 2004 and 2006) knows that the city's footprint has expanded WELL beyond the original city wall!

Here is a close-up view of the Forbidden City, and the big hill next to it (which I climbed up in 2006) which was artificially constructed with landfill.

Well, got to get back to my readings! Happy summer everyone! And happy 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party! And happy anniversary of American Independence! It will certainly be a weekend of much history-distortion by our political leaders!

Prepping for Orals!

2011-06-15T15:53:00.014-04:00

It feels as if the summer has already dragged on long enough, and yet it is not even officially summer yet! I have taken a full-time temporary job in the Hudson Valley and thus had to bid my lovely NYC goodbye for seven weeks. :(

Lovely Canada Geese: parents and child.

Photos taken in the Catskill Mountains during an excursion as part of my summer job!

So how, then, you might ask, am I staying connected with school and with my ongoing research on Pacific history?

Two ways: 1) watching lots of episodes of the original "Hawaii Five-O" television series on Netflix. That, unfortunately, is all that constitutes my "staying connected" with Hawaiian history for the moment. Sad, I know. But at least it looks like I will soon become an expert on 1960s crime, fashion, and society in Hawaiʻi. Look for a future blog post reviewing the first season (1968) of the show.

2) more seriously, I am beginning my readings for "Orals." What is this thing called "Orals"? "Orals" is what we grad students call our Oral Examination(s). It is a different procedure for each department, and different in every school. In my program there is just one big oral examination at the end of the third year. It consists of the student (me) having to answer questions posed by three faculty members (of my choosing) about anything related to about one hundred to two hundred books (selected by consensus).

Many students in my program will do their examination in two periods of one geographical field plus one other thematic field: say, U.S. History to the Civil War; U.S. History from the Civil War to the present; and women's and gender history, just to take an example. But this model is not set in stone. It works very well, I figure, for students in U.S., European, or Latin American history where the field can be divided into two chronological halves. But it works perhaps not as well for students in Asian history where we have less faculty representation in the department. And if you are doing "Pacific history," then just forget it. The model will not work for oceanic history.

Thus, attempting to complete my oral examination in "Pacific history," because that is how I define my scholarly interests, I have come up with the following three fields:

1) U.S. History to the Civil War

2) Late Imperial China (really, Qing dynasty and Republican period, 1644 to 1949)

3) environmental history

Framed in another way, my two geographical fields are:

Early modern U.S. and early modern China = hence, the "early modern" Pacific World (or at least two poles of it).

Now, the term "early modern" perhaps cannot be so broadly used across this vast transoceanic scholarly terrain. The "early modern" period in U.S. history (not a term that is used that much in this field) may not map so neatly onto the "early modern" period in Chinese history. Actually, I know for a fact that it doesn't! And "early modern-ness" does not necessarily define the era of "U.S. History to the Civil War," the well-defined undergraduate teaching field that it is in my interest to become a master of. When the onset of full-on "modernity" took place in the U.S., and hence when the endpoint of "early modernity" was, is still up for considerable debate. But we can at least say that the period from 1492 to 1776 in North American history was surely part of the early modern Atlantic World. Atlanticists like to argue that that "Atlantic World" held together as a coherent unit at least through the end of the so-called "Age of Revolution," up to, perhaps, the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. If we look at U.S. history from a Pacific perspective, also, thinking about the role of sea otter fur, cattle hide, and whale oil traders in the early nineteenth century Pacific, perhaps we can place these American agents within that larger "early modern" U.S. world of the continent as well. I'd definitely say that the U.S. west coast up to 1850 was part of a distinctive era that was radically different than what came after 1850. And perhaps what were "early modern" conditions on the East Coast in the eighteenth century remained "early modern" conditions on the West Coast in the nineteenth century. As frontiers shifted over time, and new peoples came into contact and into conflict, where should we locate "modernity" in this puzzle? It is not like the whole country just suddenly went "modern" overnight...

And so there you have it: a jumbled anti-definition of the "early modern U.S." :)

So let's just say that early modern North American history (it's not really "U.S." history for most of that period anyway - oh brother, so many caveats!) contains the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and at least the "early Republic" period of the nineteenth century in some ways.

Early modern China, however, is yet a different matter. It does not map onto the Atlantic World as well as North American history does (maybe because China is on the Pacific Ocean, duh?). Anyway, the term "Late Imperial China" generally refers to the period of the last two imperial dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911). But a more common teaching field is Qing (1644-1911) and Republican China (1911-1949) combined. But the Republican period is not part of imperial history - since the whole idea, of course, was that Sun Yat-sen and others had founded a republic without a monarch - so what do we call this field, then, that straddles imperial and post-imperial periods? And I would think a course on "Modern China" should definitely begin in the nineteenth century (although not all would agree), even though that is still during the imperial period. Again, just like in the U.S., China did not become "modern" overnight, and certainly some areas became "modern" earlier than others. So, this can get quite confusing. But as long as I focus on the Qing dynasty no matter what, then I will cover the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries - which provides a nice overlap with my U.S. period, too! And the most exciting part is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where, finally, U.S. history and Chinese history combine. This is where I can really bring in my passion for "Pacific history" and discuss the world that trade created (to steal the name of a book [which I haven't read]) in the Pacific between the years 1784 and 1842.

And how does environmental history fit in? Most of my readings are in U.S. environmental history, and honestly, many of them concern the twentieth century U.S., so this helps round out my expertise in the U.S. department a little bit. I am also reading up on Chinese environmental history, and some world environmental history.

What I am not reading for my Orals is Pacific history. No faculty member I work with specializes in the field, and honestly, there are very few teaching opportunities in Pacific history, so I'm not sure how advantageous it is to focus too closely on this oceanic field. Instead, I can market myself as both a historian of early modern U.S. and early modern China, including looking at transpacific relationships between the two countries, their peoples, their environments. And, of course, in between the two modern superpowers, and holding the Pacific World together, are the Pacific Islands and Islanders at the heart of my research. And my aloha will always be reserved for Hawaiʻi!

An ever-evolving bibliography

Here is what I have read so far this summer, and what I am currently reading:

Native American history:

Richard White, The Middle Ground (1991). A classic revisionist history of Native American-European relations on the western frontier of French and British empires (and on the eastern frontier of Algonquin peoples' shifting homelands). Focuses on the period 1650 to 1815, ending with Tecumseh's last stand defending Shawnee lands in the territory of Indiana. For a nice film version of Tecumseh's stand, I recommend the documentary "Tecumseh's Vision" from the PBS series We Shall Remain (2009). I find it interesting that White had originally intended to write his book about Tecumseh, but then he became obsessed with the backstory instead, a backstory that stretches back nearly two hundred years and includes a diverse array of historical actors. The book is long, but memorable.

Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn (2007). Second effort by Jacoby following his award-winning book Crimes Against Nature (2001). Takes four perspectives (Apache, O'odham, Mexican, American - sorry, I'm simplifying things a bit) on one event (the Camp Grant Massacre of 1871) to show how history is written by the victors, as they say, but also how memory shapes the revision of historical understanding over time, and across communities. This is a great read; really well written and engaging. I am putting it in my "U.S. History to the Civil War" category, because even though the Camp Grant massacre occurred five years after the Civil War ended, it really was a product of a longer history of escalating tensions and conflicts in the Arizona borderlands that includes U.S. history. But it is also more than just "U.S. history": the Spanish and Mexican colonial periods are equally important to this story, as are the native perspectives, and thus help reorient our understanding of "U.S. History to the Civil War" away from an overly Anglophone, East Coast interpretation. I like that.

Environmental History:

Andrew Isenberg, Mining California (2005). Another new approach to Californian history, following in the footsteps of David Igler's earlier Industrial Cowboys (2001). Igler had argued that the post-Gold Rush economic and ecological development of California was anything but pastoral or based on the efforts of small-scale pioneering producers, but rather that the Far West's rise was defined by large-scale agribusiness - or, industrial agriculture, if you will -, not unlike what we see in modern-day California agriculture. Isenberg builds on this interpretation, but adds yet further layers, showing how mining, logging, and urban development - in addition to ranching (the topic of Igler's book) - similarly followed in an exploitative, industrial manner in the decades following the Gold Rush. Isenberg covers the period from the 1850s to c1880. My favorite chapter of the book actually concerns the Modoc War, something I knew nothing about until reading this. And I really appreciated Isenberg's refreshingly Marxist approach to the origins of the Modoc situation. It made me wonder about how I could apply the same approach to understanding changes in Hawaiian labor and environment in the nineteenth century (very likely the topic of my dissertation).

Chinese History:

Jonathan Spence. The Death of Woman Wang (1978). Just finished this a few days ago. Spence takes one county in Shandong Province during the early Qing dynasty - specifically the late seventeenth century - and weaves together a series of short, smart stories exploring the lives of everyday people. This is social history at its best. The book is certainly one of the great gems of English-language scholarship on Chinese history. But is it history? Spence's stories sometimes draw heavily upon the fictional stories written by a man who lived in the said county during the said time period. Clearly this man's views of the world reflect, in some ways, the true history of his community in that moment. Also Spence offers very little interpretation or analysis of the stories he presents. It truly reads just like a collection of stories, and the reader is left to wonder what, if anything, s/he learned from reading the book. And yet I learned so much: about the ways in which local peoples and officials worked with and sometimes worked around Qing imperial policies, how local power met state power, and how the affairs of the home were also the affairs of the state. Spence does a great job allowing his readers to empathize with characters who are poor or powerless, including Woman Wang. I would love to write history like this, but professors would surely scold me for it. (And yet publishers would love it.)

I am also currently reading Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants (2004), the first comprehensive environmental history of China (although it does not cover the "modern" era. It is long, but that does not necessarily make it whole. Quote me on that one.). It is a really hard read. Makes me realize how grateful I am for Jonathan Spence! This is actually the second time I have tried to read the book, and I am losing patience once again because I just cannot make sense of Elvin's style of presentation. I wish an editor had taken a harder look at this one.

I am also in the middle of a classic work on mid-nineteenth-century Chinese history, Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s Strangers at the Gate (1966). The book covers the period 1839 to 1861. Very well-written, thoughtful, and engaging. A great read so far!

Unfortunately, after any given ten-hour day at work, one has little motivation to pick up an academic book.

Perhaps I should start lifting the books up and down for thirty minutes everyday to build up my biceps and then impress people with my hotness rather than with my knowledge? :)

Home

2011-05-10T12:06:00.011-04:00

Too busy this time of year to think up anything original.

Returning home:

The first night I hear the frogs outside of my window.

(I don't hear them in NYC, just the mourning dove that nests in our courtyard.)

Little frogs, hundreds of them, loud.

I wake to walk into the wetland, to hear a duck quack.

Other days I see two duck lovers in the air.

Other days a red-tailed hawk zips across the canopy of the dead poles mounted in the murky water.

One morning, all of a sudden, the skunk cabbages all turn bright green!

Hundreds of them emerge to greet the sun!

I recently purchased binoculars for the first time. I looked through them, and this is what I saw:

BIRDING @ wetlands, Schenectady County, New York

Sat April 16, 6:30-7AM

Mallard Duck (male)

Blue Jay

Black-capped Chickadee

American Robin

American Crow

Sun April 17, 1-1:30PM

Red-tailed Hawk

Black-capped Chickadee

American Robin

Mourning Dove

Downy Woodpecker

Mon April 18, 11:30AM-12PM

Red-tailed Hawk

American Robin

Downy Woodpecker (male and female)

Blue Jay

Wed April 20, 12:30-1PM

Downy Woodpeckers

Ducks (at a distance)

Tufted Titmouse (lots of them!)

Fri April 22, 3:30-4PM

Downy Woodpeckers (male and female)

Red-tailed Hawk

Ducks (at a distance)

Mr. Mallard hanging out at my home

Me, binoculars, a camera, and the wetlands at home. What could be better?

Chinese Cinema

2011-04-21T19:01:00.012-04:00

My interest in the "Pacific" usually focuses upon Pacific Islands and Islanders, or at least that has been the case since I began this blog over a year ago. But my interest in the "Pacific" originally stems from another source: For a much longer time - since 2002 in fact - I have been simply fascinated by Chinese history and culture...and film!

I lived and studied in China for four months in 2004 and returned to China for two weeks in 2006, but I have not been back there since; it has been more than four years now and I am aching to go back (I hope to go in 2014 to re-trace my steps of ten years before; that would be cool!). I was probably at the height of my command of Mandarin (普通话) in 2005 after having returned from Yunnan Normal University (云南师范大学) in Kunming and having enrolled at the Middlebury College Chinese Language School.

On the roof-top terrace of a restaurant in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, in 2004. I lived with the restauranteur's family for a week in this charming Naxi village. This photo was taken by my friend Gladys, a tourist from Northeast China, who I had met at the restaurant earlier in the day or just the day before. She said I looked like "Jesus." :)

It is true that the hair around my face has never been so large!

Alas, my command of the language has slipped so much since those days. But in a few weeks I conclude my Hawaiian language lessons and will return to studying Chinese. Studying Hawaiian has been an incredible journey for me, and I could not be more pleased with the results of my most recent research on Hawaiian guano workers and my use of Hawaiian-language sources to tell these men's unique stories. This experience has, for the first time, really proved to me the importance of learning foreign languages for narrating history - something I have never tried to do with Chinese or any other language before now.

I prepare to spend much of this summer re-learning Chinese, especially working on my reading comprehension skills, in preparation for a foreign language translation exam in the fall. And so my mind naturally turns to Chinese film, too, for these films are great study tools for learning the language, as well as fascinating windows into Chinese history.

Mainland (PRC) Cinema

What I intend to do here is just to briefly review some of my favorite Chinese films, nearly all of which come from the mainland (People's Republic of China) from the most recent two or three decades. As for Chinese film before the 1980s, I know next to nothing. As for films from Taiwan, I know next to nothing. And while I do know that Hong Kong has been a center of great filmmaking for a long time, I am yet quite unfamiliar with the cinema that has come out of that region (now part of the PRC since Britain gave the colony up in 1997).

My introduction to Chinese film took place largely during my four months in Kunming at Yunnan Normal as I took part in a program run by the U.S.-based School for International Training. We watched many films in Kunming that at one time were actually banned in China, and although many of these films are now available to the masses in the PRC - including in pirated versions streaming online - I am nevertheless thankful for the crash-course the we got at the time in radical Chinese cinema.

Or, at least these films were once considered radical. I still think they are. The ones I remember most are the films by Zhang Yimou. From the early 1990s: Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and To Live (1994). Of Raise the Red Lantern, I scarcely remember the story - it has been over six years since I saw it - except that I remember it concerned the oppression of women - multiple wives of a wealthy man. What I remember best is the cinematography - Zhang is a master of color and form: the redness of the lanterns, the gray of the compound where they live. Zhang tells stories by painting pictures, and he reminds us of the true possibilities of the cinematic art - that a story can (or should) be told through the artful interplay of color and sound, not just through dialogue. (The musical score in this and other Zhang films is just amazing!). Of To Live, I remember it follows the story of a man through much of the Mao Zedong era (1949-1976). Actually, I think it even continues beyond the end of the Cultural Revolution into the late 1970s(?). What struck me the most about the story was how this man and his family constantly had to stay on their toes and keep shifting their approach to the state as Mao took the nation on a roller-coaster ride - a ride also artfully told in part two of the three-part documentary series China: A Century of Revolution.

At Middlebury in 2005 I remember seeing other films by Zhang (actually, I can't remember if I saw these in Kunming or in Vermont): The Road Home (1999), Happy Times (2000), Hero (2002). Happy Times, a touching comedy, was an enjoyable film, but not "epic" as I had come to expect from Zhang. And as it turns out, circa 2000 seemed to mark a real turning point for Zhang in his career. His next film, 2002's Hero, seemed to come from a completely different playbook than anything Zhang had attempted in the 1990s. His earlier films were almost always set in the twentieth-century and dealt with interpersonal conflicts set within the context of social and political change. But Hero takes us over two millennia back in time to the end of the Warring States period on the brink of the founding of the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). Zhang's beautiful cinematography - his use of color and form in framing artful compositions - plus what I think is one of the best movie soundtracks of any film in the past decade, by composer Tan Dun, make the film visually and aurally stunning and captivating, and the story is fine, too. But I think that the best storytelling about the Qin dynasty period is actually Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin (1998). Indeed, I suppose that Zhang was influenced both by the dip into ancient history by Chen in The Emperor and definitely by the break-through success of Ang Lee's 2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to make his own movie about martial arts.

Now, a few nights ago I watched The Road Home (1999) again. It is about a young village woman and the city-educated schoolteacher who comes to her village and becomes the object of her affection. The film is set in the 1950s in the get-go of the communist era. Their small-town love is really all the story of this movie is about. There is also a sub-story that serves as bookends to the 1950s drama: it is about the same woman in the late 1990s after her schoolteacher-husband dies and her persistence that he receives a traditional funeral. The beauty of the film, however, is the interior section set in the 1950s. The cinematography is Zhang Yimou at his best. He truly makes a star out of young Zhang Ziyi, who would later become such a famous actress. There are a lot of slow-motion shots; the color is fat, lush, and vibrate; the soundtrack is monotonous, but that's what makes it so captivating: the lover's theme played on an erhu - sometimes on a dizi - returns again and again and again and our hearts ache too as we watch the young girl wait for her paramour to return from his "political troubles" in the city.

This is a not a trailer per se, but a compilation of some of the richest images and tunes from The Road Home. It gives you a good sense of the pacing and style of the film:

Since receiving netflix as a gift, I have also seen Zhang's 1992 The Story of Qiu Ju (understated, but beautiful as ever, as is Gong Li), and Not One Less (1999). I did not know what to make of Not One Less at first; then I learned that the film was shot on location in the actual rural schoolhouse that the film depicts. Not only that, but all the actors in the film, including the young schoolteacher and all the kids, were actual local kids! Everyone in the film was "acting" out Zhang's vision, but in essence they were also acting out their own story: the story of their small town in the late 1990s and their incredibly sub-standard educational apparatus. There are such poignant scenes in the film that still dart through my mind: when the young teacher (she's just a young teenage girl) makes all the schoolkids go with her to some brickyard to stack bricks in hope of making some money (so that she can afford to travel to the city to find a missing student?). They don't really know what they are doing, but they just mess around with the bricks until the brickyard supervisor finds them and scolds them for messing everything up (a commentary on capitalism/wage labor?). Or when she takes the kids into a small shop because they are all dehydrated (from moving bricks) but she can only afford one coca-cola and so they all have to take little sips and share the one can among all. She eventually does go into the big city to find that missing student, and those scenes of her and the student living on the streets without shelter or food are so moving, not least because they capture what in the 1990s - and still today - was such an important trend in Chinese history: the rural to urban migration which probably constitutes the world's largest ongoing migration at the moment. (Many rural Chinese end up jobless and homeless once they make it to the big city; this was a trend I myself witnessed in Kunming when I was there in 2004.) A great documentary film about this trend is Last Train Home (2009).

Everything Zhang has made since Hero in 2002, in my opinion, has been pretty shallow. Many have accused him of selling out to the government. For example, he was intimately involved in designing the 2008 Olympic ceremony for the state, as many of his critics tirelessly point out. I don't blame him for switching up his style, but nothing will ever match the excellence he produced between Ju Dou (1990) and Not One Less/The Road Home (1999). (I haven't said anything yet about Ju Dou. Actually, it was my favorite Chinese film for many years after returning from Kunming. I'm not sure if it Zhang Yimou at his peak, but it is an incredibly beautiful movie [as always]: great color, composition, great use of sound, and in this one, too, great character development and storytelling. I think that this film really showcases Gong Li at her best.)

Now, there are other great mainland Chinese film directors other than Zhang Yimou! I just think his work from the 1990s is by far the best! I already mentioned Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin. The movie begins with awesome shots of chariots traveling across the barren land, and the rest of the movie really does wonders in terms of showing us life in the third century BCE before China was unified. It also was an early vehicle for one of my favorite Chinese actresses, Zhou Xun, who plays a blind girl whose entire family is murdered and then kills herself. Another well-received movie of Chen's is Together (2002) about a child violinist. I saw the film in 2005 but hardly remember it now. However, Chen is most famous for one of the great Chinese films of all time: Farewell My Concubine (1993). I believe I saw the film for the first time in Kunming, and like many others, I can hardly remember it today (which I guess isn't a good sign). But I do remember that it portrayed the communist-era, but also introduced viewers like myself to the traditional art of jingju, or Beijing opera. I really want to see it again to revive my memory. Finally, Chen's debut movie, Yellow Earth (1984), with a cinematographic debut also by Zhang Yimou, is widely considered one of the great Chinese films of all time - perhaps even more so than Farewell my Concubine. I watched the whole thing in chunks on youtube a few days ago. All I can say is that, even by 1984, Zhang definitely had his "look" down in terms of cinematography. The movie speaks wonders about the young branch of film students (Chen, Zhang, etc.) who came out in less than a decade after Mao's death (1976) and the end of the Cultural Revolution, whereas for many decades before that all films in the mainland were basically connected in some way with the state's propaganda apparatus. I also love Yellow Earth because it honestly portrays the promises of communism for women's rights, at least how it looked to many Chinese in the late 1930s.

Watch the first four or five minutes of the opening of The Emperor and the Assassin to see the great war scene with horse-drawn chariots that I love so much:

Other great films? Wu Tianming's The King of Masks (1996) is great storytelling. It deals with issues of gender, specifically whether or not a young girl is as valuable to the aging street performer (the king of masks) as a son would be. He, of course, overcomes his sexism and embraces the girl. It is a multiple-kleenex movie! Huo Jianqi's Postmen in the Mountains (1999), which I saw at Middlebury in 2005, I really like because it tells a story of rural China. Its depiction of local peoples and villages in Hunan Province reminded me a lot of what I myself saw in Yunnan.

Another great director of the past decade is Lou Ye. His rise to fame was with the 2000 film Suzhou River, which I saw in 2004 or 2005, but again I can hardly remember it now. It showed the gritty side of modern China. And it was a break-out role for Zhou Xun. Lou's Summer Palace (2006), however, is one of the greatest Chinese films I have ever seen. Not all would agree with me on this, but for me, this is a masterpiece. I'm sort of surprised I liked it so much - but the film moved me to tears and chills so many times. It tells the story of an unhappy, lonely, confused college student in Beijing during the late 1980s in the days leading up to the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989. That's the first half of the film. Then the second half takes us through the 1990s to the turn of the twenty-first century. We see a girl who had a million and one things to rebel against in the 1980s slowly turn into apathetic mush in the decade following China's crackdown on students. Some of her friends leave for Germany where they imagine they'll have more freedoms, but they seem unhappy there, too. The film is noted for containing enormous amounts of graphic sexual scenes, which is true, but these served as important windows into the girl's life, into what bothered her or what was important to her. I love the bar scenes where we see 1980s China thrown full-throttle into globalization after decades of repression, with European and American music and fashion defining the opportunities the young woman and her friends imagine for themselves and their nation. All this is crushed in June 1989, of course. And the rest of this very long, slow-paced, quiet movie is just sadness as we know that the optimism of pre-June 1989 can never be recovered. Best movie about 1989 hands-down.

I must also say that another one of the best Chinese films of the past decade is Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2002) based on the director's own semi-autobiographical memoir of the same name. It tells the story of two very smart, educated boys who are sent out into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. There they teach a little Chinese seamstress (Zhou Xun) about the French writer Balzac. It is a simple story, but speaks to the power of learning and knowledge, and arts and literature, and the value of foreign influences, all during a period when the PRC had closed China off to foreign thought, culture and influence. The point might be made a bit heavy-handedly, but I found the storytelling beautiful overall.

I have tried to get into the films of Wang Xiaoshuai, such as So Close to Paradise (1998) about some shady deal gone awry...two guys have to find this Vietnamese night-club singer about something...(I gave up part-way through!). His Beijing Bicycle (2001) I saw at some point within the past five years, and I remember it being at least better than So Close. I have also had a lot of trouble getting into Jia Zhangke's films, such as Platform (2000), which was just too subtle and slow for me! I am interested in seeing his more recent Still Life (2006) about a family from a village along the Yangzi River that will be flooded by the Three-Gorges Dam. I recently saw an amazing documentary about the same subject: Up the Yangtze (2007) which I recommend to anyone interested in learning more about social and economic issues in modern China.

In the past year or so I've also seen Blind Shaft (2003) (about the ruthlessness of unemployment, labor exploitation, and other nasty effects of capitalism in modern China), Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2004) (about efforts to stop the poaching of wild animals in Tibet; it's a fictional account, but concerns a true problem. Great for an environmental history course, especially after reading Karl Jacoby's Crimes Against Nature), and Tuya's Marriage (2007) (about a Mongolian woman in modern China - in Nei Menggu [Chinese-controlled Mongolia]; really nice flick). Now, in the past five years, the number of films coming out of China has increased so rapidly, it is impossible to keep up with them. Huge blockbuster films like John Woo's Red Cliff (2008-2009) have made China's film industry into a true rising giant, and I fear this spells the end for the art-house days of the 1990s. (Of course, banned filmmakers like Lou Ye, and other Chinese overseas directors will continue to make good art-house films.) (As for Woo's Red Cliff, I turned it off after 10 minutes; too much ridiculous violence!)

Well, I'm sure I've left out many worthy films. And I know I've left out many unworthy films! For those unfamiliar with Chinese cinema, I hope this post encourages you to check out some of these great films. I myself am reminded that I need to review many of these films, as clearly I have forgotten what many of them are about!! And for those who are connoisseurs of Chinese cinema, I am sure I have given ample evidence here to showcase my true ignorance on the matter, and I would appreciate all your criticisms of my judgements and/or interpretations!!!

谢谢！

After Slavery?

2011-04-18T20:32:00.018-04:00

Exodus

In the Torah is written a timeless story: a story of a people held in bondage in Egypt. These people were my people. Sometimes they are referred to as the "chosen" people, but I don't really believe that. We were not any more "chosen" than anyone else; until we can see that those who held us in bondage were just as important in God's eyes as we were, then we will never be truly whole. I do know that these people were of my blood, of my family line, my great, great, great, great, great, great, etc. (to the hundredth power) grandmothers and grandfathers. These people were held in a system of slavery, living under the rule of the Pharaoh of Egypt. A man named Moses courageously led our people out of Egypt, out of slavery. He led us as we were chased into the howling desert, towards a very uncertain and unknowable future. Through shared sacrifice and struggle we became a people: Jewish people. A religion and way-of-life formed that would be alternately celebrated and attacked for the next thousands and thousands of years, all the way down to our present day. Jews around the world may have never fully escaped persecution, but for many of us, especially here in the U.S., we have moved, step-by-step, generation-by-generation, towards a more peaceful coexistence with peoples different than ourselves. Many of us, like myself, descend from a mix of Jews and Christians and non-believers. Faith for me is a matter of choice, not a matter of survival as it was for those who came before me and left their lives behind them in Egypt.

As I type this essay on the first night of Passover, I am munching on my first leaf of matzoh (unleavened bread; a kind of bland cracker really). Peanut butter and jelly style. :) In the desert outside of Egypt, my people did not have peanut butter and jelly. But today we eat the matzoh (however which way we like it!) to remember that when the opportunity came for the Jewish slaves to flee from Egypt, they did not have time for bread to rise. They had to gather their loved ones and a few things to munch on (like unleavened bread) and hit the road as fast as possible. So on Passover we eat matzoh, and refrain from eating leavened grains, for eight days so as to bodily re-experience and reimagine what it must have been like for our ancestors to courageously leave everything behind them and escape from slavery. Eating matzoh is not suffering, not like slavery. In its dry, bland taste and stale texture, though, it reminds us that liberation too can be a period of suffering, a period perhaps just as hard as slavery, a period when the ordered world becomes disordered, and the future appears so uncertain and so unknown that it is scarier than the past. Munching on matzoh makes me want to be just a little bit braver, a little bit more courageous, just like my ancestors were.

African-Americans

On Passover pasts, I, as the youngest child, used to have to ask the four questions. This was part of the tradition of the seder (the shared meal enjoyed on the first night of Passover, a meal that I had no one to share with this year). One question was always "What makes this night different than all other nights?" But this year we should be asking "What makes this year different than all other years?" I would answer: this year is the 150th anniversary of the start of the U.S. Civil War. Because of this, people are thinking about slavery more now than we have in many decades. Now we want to open up old wounds and ask the age-old question: was the Civil War fought over slavery, or states' rights, or both? (See an interesting poll of Americans' opinions on these sort of questions.) I am not a historian of the war itself, but I feel I can safely say that the war was about a lot of things, and since it has ended it has been reinterpreted to be about even more things. The search for one golden answer - a search deemed necessary by some on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum - is not true to history. History is messy, complicated, and ambiguous. There are no easy answers, and there shouldn't be.

But one fact of the Civil War is certain: slavery was legal before it, but illegal after it. African-Americans got their freedom. Historians of the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) know that "freedom" for these men and women was not all that it was cracked up to me. Blacks made incredible gains in the late 1860s only to see them torn down throughout the 1870s as the country settled into what was a comfortable retreat from radicalism and the embrace of a new system of racial politics called "Jim Crow." But there are parallels to the Jewish "exodus" here. Liberation, as I said, provides its own hardship. It often involves steps forward, steps back, and no consensus as to where the road is heading. In African-American history we can look forward to the 1950s and 1960s and see the incredible Civil Rights Movement as a second "exodus" from slavery. But that liberation, too, had its quagmires. Fits of radicalism are so often followed by fits of conservatism. We get stuck in complacency as we begin to celebrate the past more than we keep pushing forward towards the future. This Passover we might pat ourselves on the back for the successful exodus of African-Americans from slavery and segregation over two long centuries, but where are we now?

A recent book (The New Jim Crow - haven't read it, but heard lots about it) states that more African-Americans are held behind bars in prisons today than were enslaved in the 1850s. An upsetting statistic, no? I myself drove past two prisons - euphemistically termed "correctional facilities" - today on a drive around upstate New York. The Schenectady County Correctional Facility sits on the bottom of a hill below the neighborhood where the highest percentage of black families live. This is in my hometown: Schenectady, NY. I wanted to be able to see into the windowless facility and see the men inside. Why are they spending the first night of Passover in prison? Are they slaves? Serving what master? There is a long history in America of prisoners being used as forced labor - it's called convict labor. It is slavery. Forced labor under penalty of confinement or violence without any compensation goes by no other name here or anywhere else. So as I munch on matzoh, I remember the men and women behind bars tonight. I cry for them because the majority of them are there for sometimes minor offenses (possession of drugs), and those who are there for grave offenses were only led towards committing those offenses because of the poverty and disadvantage of the household or neighborhood they grew up in, or dare I say because of the color of their skin or the accent of their English...because the dominant white society never believed in them, and so they never believed in themselves. I munch my matzoh angrily tonight because more of the taxes I give to my government this month will go towards maintaining prisons rather than teaching tomorrow's potential prisoners the skills they need to fight back against slavery.

Immigrants

Following the U.S. Civil War, slavery was illegal in the United States. It had become illegal in many other developed nations earlier, and by the end of the nineteenth-century, as far as I know, slavery was - at least on paper - illegal throughout much of our world. The end of the African slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and the abolition of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, provided African migrants and their descendants with an "exodus" story to rival that of the Jews. But what happened next? Did all the cotton plantations in the south go bankrupt and turn back into meadows, forests, and swamps? Did all the sugar plantations in the Caribbean turn back into tropical forests? In an age when New World sugar, cotton, and labor made the world go round, who would do the work now that the Africans were "free"?

One of the often untold stories of slavery in the Americas is how quickly African slaves were replaced by Chinese and other Asian "coolies." Chinese had been emigrating across the Pacific in great numbers ever since the late 1840s (to California for gold) and early 1850s (when "coolie" importation began on Hawaiian sugar plantations). This was a time when Chinese laborers were also brought to Peru to mine guano and to Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean to harvest sugarcane. A great book on the late nineteenth century Chinese experience in Cuba is Lisa Yun's The Coolie Speaks, which uses the writings of Chinese plantation laborers to paint a picture of these men's cruel sufferings as"coolies." Being a "coolie" meant working as a contract laborer. The "contract" often involved an agreement whereby the laborer was bound to work for an employer for x amount of years until they could pay off the costs of their transport and other expenses. But coolies soon discovered that under conditions of wage slavery on the plantation they could never raise enough funds to purchase their freedom. Abolitionists who had fought against African slavery in the New World rapidly came to recognize that contract labor involving Chinese, Indians, and others was pretty much the same thing as slavery. Yun writes of Chinese men who suffered so deeply under this system that they threw themselves into the boiling pots of the sugar refinery just to avoid having to live another day as a slave to capitalism.

I recently finished reading another book called The New Chinatown about labor conditions in New York City's Chinatown in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this book I learned that the film I reviewed in my last post, Take Out (2004), was pretty much spot-on about modern-day living and working conditions for Chinese immigrants in the United States. Immigrants from Fujian - especially from the city of Fuzhou - are paying tens of thousands of dollars to be smuggled illegally into the U.S. in hopes of making money for their families back home. But the reality - much as it was for Chinese "coolies" who took the same path over a hundred years ago - is that these men inevitably find it impossible to raise that kind of money once they arrive in New York. Immigrant men are hired by Chinese restaurants and women hired by garment factories. Their Chinese employers take ruthless advantage of them - even though it may be construed as their employers giving them a fair chance at work where otherwise they could not fairly compete against English-speaking non-Chinese laborers in the marketplace. But when it comes to breaking U.S. labor laws, this is not a fair excuse. The Fujianese are paid less than minimum wage, receive no benefits, are pressured - sometimes violently - to refrain from unionizing. They work well over forty hours a week. Unions and government officials and agencies alike largely steer clear of helping these men and women because they believe that Chinatown functions as a self-regulating city within a city. But that way of thinking only allows the most powerful elite of the neighborhood to set the undemocratic rules for everyone else. A simple look at a map of NYC census data and we see that the lowest household incomes, the lowest monthly rents, the lowest levels of educational attainment on the lower half of the island of Manhattan are congregated in Chinatown. Therefore, disengagement with Chinatown by those on the outside of the Chinese community does not help those within. It only serves to continue to allow wage slavery to fester in the sores of this city.

I will chew another slice of matzoh now. To remember all the illegal immigrants in NYC tonight who have gotten themselves in between a rock and a hard place and are subjected to the most ruthless exploitation. The men and women from Fujian who came here illegally remain enslaved to the "snakeheads" - the human traffickers who bribed them here in the first place. In turn, they remain enslaved to their employers in the vain hope of earning enough wages in order to one day pay off the "snakehead" so that they may then begin saving for their own future. But in the meantime they are just treading water, living in modern-day slavery in a city that never sleeps, a city that moves so fast that no one notices them here among us, holding together our world of fast cars and bright lights with their aching backs and tired hearts. I don't even know how to lead these men and women out of slavery, or who their Moses will be, or when or why their "exodus" will take place, but this Passover I hope that liberation comes to them - my neighbors - as soon as can be.

Animals

Finally, I bite off another piece of matzoh tonight for all the animals enslaved in factory farms. I read a great book in college called The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. When I proposed to my colleagues and administrators that someone should teach a course on the history of animal slavery so that we young folks could go out in the world with the tools necessary in order to abolish this evil practice, I remember one faculty member pulling me into his office where he said that: he appreciated my passion and my ideas, but calling agriculture "animal slavery" was going too far. I disagreed. I still disagree.

I cannot hash out all the arguments that have gone back and forth for decades about whether or not animals are enslaved. I have tried to be careful and considerate in this post in my discussion of prisoners and wage laborers so as not to fully conflate these conditions with actual slavery, but I hope rather to suggest that the similarities between these various conditions might be more significant and useful to our own thought and action than analyzing the differences between them. For many readers, the largest leap might be from considering human slavery to considering animal slavery. On Passover many families will recognize the parallels between our story - the Jewish "exodus" - and the story of African-American history. Fewer, I bet, will think of the plight of Mexican and Chinese immigrants in the U.S. today and the unjust labor conditions under which they work. Many will outright disagree with me when I say that: these people should not be blamed or ignored for coming here illegally, but they should rather be unionized, protected by our laws, educated of their rights - their God-given human rights that transcend the policies and politics of any party, any state, any nation. But how many will join me in calling for animal liberation as well?

When humans are held in slavery, they are confined to a proscribed space and their mobility is severely limited. Their offspring automatically become the property of their parents' master; the reproductivity of the female human fully becomes the productivity of the masters' economy; in what Foucault has called "bio-power" or "bio-politics," the master controls the women's body in order to make her produce more human labor for the benefit of the master's economy. On factory farms, animals are similarly confined indoors and sometimes in cages - such as the battery cages chickens are held in - where their mobility is so limited that they cannot even fully extend their wings or turn themselves around. Imagine being forced to stand in one position for weeks on end. With extreme pain, your muscles slowly atrophy until they can no longer function. Watch a video of a chicken removed from a battery cage after weeks of confinement and you can see that the bird cannot move on its own; furthermore, its bones have become so brittle, even gentle human handling at that point will break them. Consider pigs or cattle: the females' reproductivity is controlled by the master with fine tuning. She is continually re-impregnated again and again until her body can no longer serve that role. She becomes a machine, tuned to the needs of a human economy rather than to the call of her own body.

My definition of slavery is a state wherein a sentient being is held against his or her will and forced to labor for the benefit of someone else. African-Americans did this in the early nineteenth-century South; Chinese did this in late nineteenth-century Cuba; Chinese in Chinatown today do this, although with varying degrees of "freedom." But I am not yet convinced that seeking gainful employment - which is what today's immigrants hope for - is an exercise in "freedom." Is it not just because we live in such a class-stratified society that those on the bottom are forced to work not just one job, but two, or three, to work over forty hours a week, or to accept substandard wages, etc.? Is it not just because of global capitalism and global "savage inequalities" (the phrase is from Jonathan Kozol's book about socio-economic inequality in the U.S.) that certain citizens of the world must break laws in order to find work, to find wages, to somehow keep their families alive? Karl Marx saw things for what they were, and so presciently saw them for what they would become when he described a global system of slavery disguised as a fair handshake between capital and labor in an economic marketplace. But is wage-slavery slavery?

Anyway, I should get back to my point about animals, but the matzoh is beginning to make my mouth dry and I need to get up, stretch, and drink water. Moses and my ancestors did not have the luxury of tap water in the desert. The truth is that they probably had more access to water and good food (like leavened bread) in Egpyt - in slavery - than they did on the long march to freedom. I am reminded once again that liberation can be just as hard as slavery. The point of this essay was to argue just that: that global "liberation" has been a long and arduous march, and in many ways a failed one, too. Liberation did not really occur after African slavery was abolished in the Atlantic World, nor after the "coolie" system was abolished in the Pacific World. The best efforts of Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists in the twentieth-century also did not abolish slavery. And even the best efforts of vegans and vegetarians have made little real impact on the global abolition of animal slavery. So as we remember the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, or the anniversary of the Jewish "exodus" from Egypt that we celebrate tonight as Passover, we must keep close to our hearts the understanding that there was no time in history "after slavery." Slavery still lives with us. Slavery is the history of now. Sex slavery and sex trafficking are perhaps the most well-known examples, but we should also consider the exploitation of illegal immigrants, of prisoners, and of animals as serious threats to justice, equality, and righteousness in our world.

If you are celebrating Passover this week, please join with me in remembering all who are oppressed and all who are enslaved. Also please consider doing something - I don't know what, but be creative!! - to help ease the lives of those living today in slavery, or to help them in their liberation as they head out into the desert.

Film Review: The History of Now: Take Out (2004)

2011-04-03T17:05:00.015-04:00

Among historians, I must not be alone in this feeling: I am struck sometimes - like right now - by how irrelevant, how seemingly meaningless even, my own research feels to me. For a moment I step back from the incessant reading, writing, critiquing, musing, trying to be original and creative, trying to push boundaries, trying to add to my CV, and I am struck by the thought that "this is all meaningless." Last time this struck me I wrote a blog post called "Am I White?," trying to see how an application of the critical deconstruction of race that we so commonly do as historians might feel like if I were to actually apply it to myself. (It actually felt quite good I must say; I did not mind being deconstructed; it was sort of cathartic and refreshing, although it wasn't really fair because at the end of the day I still had almost no control over my racial identity; whether or not I constructed myself as "white" or as anything else, when I stepped out onto the street after blogging everyone still saw me the way they wanted to: white man, gay man, gringo, Jew, general "dirtbag"; believe me, depending on what street I am on, at what time of day, wearing what clothes, and surrounded by what people, I have been constructed as all these things and more! I do not believe we have very much control over how we enter history; it is quite often through others' eyes that we live out our lives.)

But anyway, here I am again with that feeling of "so what?" about the whole big thing called "history."

I have been spending a lot of time in Chinatown recently. There is nothing romantic about the place. Yes, it looks, sounds, smells, and tastes different than any other part of Manhattan; I guess that is what attracts so many tourists, even though this is such an un-touristized place. Contrast Chinatown with Little Italy (which now exists in a bubble within Chinatown along a few blocks of Mulberry Street) and the difference between the history of the past and the history of now becomes apparent. In Little Italy there are strategically placed men who "perform" Italian-ness to those who walk by. They are employed by the Italian restaurants to entice customers to come inside. They "look" and "talk" Italian-American, with the thickest Nu Yawk accents, hair slicked back, suave, handsome: everything a non-New Yorker, non-Italian-American expects to find in a New York Italian. Nearby are shops selling shirts and fake license plates commodifying cultural stereotypes about Italian-American-ness, ranging from references to the Godfather, to the Sopranos, to Jersey Shore.

One block to the east runs the parallel corridor of Mott Street. Along Mott the Chinese shop-owners keep ridiculously long and steady hours, selling all kinds of dried fruits, fresh vegetables, and odorous fish that to the non-Chinese sometimes look or smell like something from out of this world. No one is dressed up in stereotypically Chinese costume here; there is no masquerade. Here are simply a sea of men, women, and children of all ages, many of the adults holding red plastic bags full of market purchases. The items are by and large unappealing to the non-Chinese passerby; to them each organism on display is a signifier of an exoticized Chinese history and culture, but to the residents here they are food, they are fresh, and they are yummy. To be fair, some are also signifiers of the homeland across the ocean; others are signifiers of the new world yet to be understood here. Depending on where one stands in his or her own life history, these street scenes appear as remarkably different productions. The language heard here on Mott Street is Cantonese, or Fujianese, or sometimes Mandarin. People live here. People work here. These people have histories; they have stories to tell. There is a great diversity to the Chinese-American experience in Chinatown. Its richness overflows the bounds of whatever we think "Chinatown" spatially or conceptually is. And whether or not "Chinatown" even exists beyond the way we discursively construct it - and who is the "we" here constructing it anyway? - is definitely open to question.

Chinatown, NYC, 2010.

There is not even a single person depicted in my photograph. Yet we think we know what should be happening at street level because of the "foreignness" of the signs hanging from the buildings. The signs then, even when we can't read them, speak to us via our cultural assumptions and stereotypes about what "Chinatown" is or should be. But as much as we strive to "construct" Chinatown, what happens on the street is not ours to fully know. The historian here can have his "Pacific Dreams," but he can hardly be a true witness to the Chinese immigrant's New York life.

The History of Now

What do I mean then by "the history of now." I guess this phrase helps me differentiate between the history I usually concern myself with at school - the history of the past - and that which is taking place right now, right here, that is of the utmost presentist relevance and significance to real people. Now, usually historians shy away from "presentist" concerns, for our relationships with the present here-and-now supposedly threaten to obstruct the supposed "objectivity" we are supposed to bring, and sometimes falsely believe we can bring, to the past. (Note how many times I used the word "supposed" in that sentence.) Some say "the past is a foreign country," but it is equally a creation of the present. And it is sometimes unmistakably familiar to us in the here-and-now in a way that would be completely foreign to past persons if they could see the way we now see them. That is because we make history in the present as we interpret that so-called past, but the history always exists now as we think about it, not back then when it supposedly happened. If you agree with me on this score, then we might agree that the "history of now" is just as fair game for historians as the "history of then." I am not sure yet of what methodologically a historian would have to do differently to make sense of the now versus the past, but we surely have a good tool kit already for dealing with both eras in my opinion.

Take Out

"Take Out" is a 2004 independent film directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou. It was filmed in 2003 in New York City using both professional and non-professional actors. (For example, the woman who plays the counter lady at the Chinese restaurant featured in the film is actually a real worker at a Chinese restaurant! But she is also an amazing actor!!). The film is shot in an Upper West Side Chinese restaurant, and we see into the lives of the restaurant's many employees, each of whom had migrated to New York City from China during their own lives. The protagonist, Ming, is a young man who was smuggled illegally from China to Canada, and then into the United States. He took this risky journey because he wants to raise funds for his wife and child back home in China; whether he wants to bring them here to New York, or just return home to China someday (somehow) with cash on hand, is not totally clear. His situation speaks to Chinatown's true "history of now": immigration from mainland China is near an all-time high. Most immigrants coming to Chinatown in the most recent decades have come from the Fuzhou region of Fujian Province. Here in NY they have overwhelmed the previous Cantonese community (from Guangzhou, Guangdong Province) that had once held this Chinatown together since as early as the 1880s. The Cantonese fabric of Chinatown now unravels under the weight of the recent Fujianese immigration; the Cantonese community's long and uniquely American history, dating back as far as the Chinese '49ers who pioneered California ("Gold Mountain"), is rapidly becoming the "history of then," subsumed by a new Chinese-American "history of now."

In 1993, the Golden Venture, a ship carrying nearly 300 illegal Chinese immigrants from Fujian, grounded in the Rockaways in the borough of Queens. The men were apprehended; some were deported; some detained in U.S. prisons for years; some apparently brokered off to other foreign nations as laborers. This event in 1993 helped to raise American public awareness of illegal immigration from China, but today there seems to be little mainstream recognition of this ongoing "history of now." Our mainstream media is so overly concerned about the U.S.-Mexico border, and it is true that Mexican immigration to the U.S. today surpasses all other nations of origin. But Chinese are number two. The borders of New York City - its harbor, its train and bus depots, it streets - are an oft-forgotten frontline of illegal immigration that rivals our border with Mexico. (I am certainly not trying to raise some kind of anti-immigrationist alarm here, because what I see wrong with this situation is not government immigration policy nor the policing of our borders, but rather larger issues of global capitalism and the exploitation of New York's hidden underclass of undocumented workers by law-breaking employers.) Fujianese immigration to New York City has made Manhattan's Chinatown the largest overseas Chinese neighborhood in the world. Queens' Flushing is now a close second. Both neighborhoods have about 300,000 Chinese residents. The number of undocumented residents is not known.

"Take Out" follows a day in the life of Ming, a delivery man for an Upper West Side Chinese restaurant. He owes debt to a "loan shark" who forwarded money to Ming to help him pay off the incredible debt that he owes thanks to his having been smuggled here. Apparently smuggling from China to North America can cost a man tens of thousands of dollars. This isn't too off from the history of the past, too, when Chinese "coolies" signed contracts in Hong Kong in the decades following the Opium War (1839-1842) for work abroad, in California, in Australia, in Peru, in Cuba. They soon discovered that paying off the debts of their voyages, or freeing themselves from their contracts by purchasing their own freedom, was almost a total impossibility. "Coolie" employers stacked the cards against the Chinese workers, trapping them in virtual enslavement. European and American abolitionists fighting African slavery at the time rightly labelled the Chinese "coolie" trade as slavery by another name. This history survives in New York today in the many "Chino-Latino" restaurants serving hybridized cuisine descended from the kitchens of Chinese immigrants to Central and South America, their grandparents and great-grandparents having migrated as "coolies" long ago to take the place of African slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations, for example.

"Take Out" is told completely from the immigrant workers' points of view. The language of the film is entirely in Mandarin. We only hear English from the restaurant's customers, who in typical American fashion mock and insult the Chinese workers for their poor English, "sloppy" dress, or otherwise "foreign" behavior. We see ever-so smartly through the film what the interface between Chinese-America and non-Chinese-America looks like: it exists in the tiny interstices of space and time where a door is partly opened to receive a delivery of fried rice and a meager tip is handed back the other way to the quiet Chinese laborer; it appears at the counter of the restaurant where customers talk in awkward grammar because they think (ridiculously) that talking in bad English will help the Chinese workers understand them better. The subtitling of the film helps us see what we usually can't hear, which is the frustration of the workers as they are insulted, and yet how they mock the customers in return, dishing insults right back at them in a language that the customers cannot understand.

"Take Out" seems so familiar to me, although I won't press that point too far because the gulf between my life and that of Ming's is incredibly wide - what, indeed, could be wider? But I will point out that I love riding my bike around Manhattan, including through Chinatown. When I see Ming riding his bike through Chinatown (as depicted in the film at times, even though the story is supposed to take place in the Upper West Side), I recall having seen guys like Ming riding behind, in front of, and beside me in the bike lanes everyday. Actually, in our neighborhood of the city, most of the bike-riding delivery men speak Spanish. Yet we, too, just like everyone else in this city, receive an ample share of Chinese restaurant menus stuck into the crevice of our apartment door, or slipped underneath it. This film shows us how a worker like Ming tries to fit in slipping menus underneath doors while also transporting food all over the city at the same time. But I never actually see these people. And since we never order delivery, I never get the see the real face of the real Mings living in my community.

All this reminds me that history is taking place right now. Not in my head, nor in my books, nor in this blog I am presently typing - although these are all examples of a type of "history" - but on the streets, on the bikes, plastic bags with smily-faces flailing in the wind hanging from the handlebars, rain pouring down, heavy chain bike locks worn over the shoulder like Mr. T, debts owed, families separated by oceans, neighbors separated by language, each block of this city separated by almost unbelievable disparities of race and class. This is the history of now. And who will say that this story deserves less attention from historians than those only found in library books?

The fact is, for me, that I want to see many histories - then and now, here and there - all alive now. Men and women are acting out roles that have happened many times before, and yet their individual experiences are absolutely unique. "Chinatown" is a construction, no doubt about it. It is constantly made and remade, not so much by theorists or historians, but by each new wave of immigrants or each new generation of Chinese-Americans that live in this space. It is a space that was once Irish and African-American, later Jewish and Italian, and only now is colonized by so many men and women from Fujian. But all these histories continue to be and continue to act upon the now. The buildings on each block represent the architecture of scattered eras; the people on the block represent the consequences of varied trajectories: while the Taiwanese flags flap in the wind outside the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association on Mott Street, delivery men quietly hold nationalistic pride in the People's Republic they left behind. Born in the era of Deng Xiaoping and the economic modernizations of the 1980s, delivery men like Ming see a different history of China than those who lived through Mao's rise to power in 1949 or through his failed Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Teenage kids who know nothing but life in New York play in Sara Roosevelt Park with white, black, and brown kids of other national and ethnic origins. What does "history" matter to them? And whose history matters? Is theirs a story of America, or of China, or of both? How many people walking these streets think of themselves as "transnational actors," as we would say in our silly academic jargon? Do they really inhabit a "hybrid" space, or a "middle-ground," or are these simply the fictions of us historians? Does the idea of "transnationality" or of "transculturation" have any meaning for them? And if these terms do not have meaning, what then should we be actually writing about? I can read all I want into the historical landscape of Chinatown, but I can't read Ming's mind, nor anyone else's here. The history of now is one thing to me, but what I think about Chinese-American history probably matters little to the way Ming sees his own history. Can we say one perspective is any better than the other? Certainly not.

Columbus Park, Chinatown, 2010.

An eerie scene of emptiness. Where are the majiang-playing men and those who crowd around and watch and cheer? Where are the taiji-devoted men and women synchronizing the movements of their bodies? Where is the lone man playing his erhu? Will Chinatown always "perform" its Chinese-ness as I expect it? No. The truth is that I approach this space seeking a history of the past performed in the present, but the people here are actually living the history of now, and I don't know the first damn thing about that.

A Blogging Anniversary

2011-03-18T09:37:00.007-04:00

Finally, a secret revealed:

In case you have wondered where this place is - this image that makes up half of the masthead of Pacific Dreams, New York Life - here is the original photograph I took.

It is a view of the Nā Pali Coast of Northwest Kauaʻi in the Hawaiian Islands.

Incredibly, today marks exactly one year since my very first blog post at Pacific Dreams, New York Life. It was called "Hawaiian food, New York groceries" and described my futile attempt to make a meal of lomilomi salmon, poi, and haupia here in NYC - without the right ingredients, and more importantly, without any idea what I was getting myself into!

That meal ended up a disaster, but this blog did not. With this blog I have been able to "meet" and learn from scores of other scholars across this so-called blogosphere. I have received feedback from readers all across Oceania, from Australia, to New Zealand, to American Samoa, to Hawaiʻi, to California and the U.S. West where I've heard from a number of Pacific Islander Americans. The greatest joys of blogging are when I hear from you, dear readers, about how you agree or disagree with what I say. I have learned so much from you. Mahalo nui to you.

As my one-year anniversary post, I want to use this platform today as a shout-out for all the other online presences in Pacific history and/or Environmental history and/or "Other/Grab-bag" that I am influenced by. But before I turn to that, I want to sum up what I have covered so far in one year of blogging at Pacific Dreams, New York Life:

Pacific History, New York Blog

My first post, as I said, was all about food. That's because I missed the taste of poi so much! At that time I was working on writing "Boki's Predicament," an academic article about the history of Hawaiian sandalwood; thus, sandalwood creeped into my blog as well. Off the bat, I also considered reviewing films as an excellent use of this blog. My first film review concerned a film about Tongan history, and in retrospect was poorly thought out. I have written more about Tonga in an entry for a forthcoming Encyclopedia, but for now that one post on Tonga will have to tread water until I can post up something better about that fascinating nation. I also considered reviewing museums on this blog, and I have reviewed at least four Pacific artifact collections to date. Beyond the museums, I am interested in visual representations of Pacific Island peoples, places, and processes, and my "Representations" series is an example of that, focusing on works of art and attempting to see the history behind the canvas. When working on my biography of Boki, I became really interested in material culture, and that goes along with my intense focus on museums and art as well.

Last summer I worked for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and got to thinking about parks, a topic that has been extensively thought about within the field of environmental history. My supervisor Mohammed - although he may not have realized it at the time, as I did not - seriously got me thinking about birds. From viewing the Bronx's birds last summer somehow I've gotten to my new project on Pacific seabirds in the mid-nineteenth-century, as I attempt to weave the stories of these birds into the history of U.S. guano extraction and empire in the Pacific Ocean. I also read a lot of good literature over the summer, giving myself a self-taught education, as best I could, in the field of Pacific Island literature. I have reviewed a number of novels and plays in this forum. If I wasn't working on guano and seabirds, I was going to spend this semester researching Hawaiian labor in the American whaling industry; therefore, I've written a bit about whales here, as well as the experiences of Pacific Islanders in their nineteenth-century laboring diaspora. Some of those laborers made the transition into being Pacific Islander Americans. There are great stories of Pacific Islander migration to be told here, some of which I am beginning to attempt to reveal through my analysis of Hawaiian labor on "guano islands."

I easily get obsessed with all things Hawaiʻi (I have more posts tagged with "Hawaiʻi" than any other keyword), but I have also made a point to focus this blog elsewhere across the Pacific. To that end, I have also written about the Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand), about Samoa and Samoans, and single posts on the Marquesas Islands, and on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and, of course, Tonga, too. You can tell I am "Polynesia"-centric in my approach to Pacific history; this I both celebrate and regret for its simultaneous advantages and disadvantages. Although I've wanted to learn more about Pacific environmental history, I've discovered that there is so much important ground to cover in Pacific history by also thinking with nineteenth-century ideas about, and conceptions of, race and gender. As this blog began concurrently with the beginnings of the 2010 U.S. census, I have written a bit about demography, too, and perhaps will write more when the Pacific Islander American data from 2010 is processed and published, hopefully within the next year.

And finally, this blog was supposed to be about combining Pacific pasts with the New York present, and through museums, and through migrations and diasporas, - and even through my own research and learning processes - I hope that I have revealed at least some of the many Pacific-NYC connections that may exist, both historically and/or today. And so I have written a number of posts about New York City, about NYC's waste problem, and about how NYC sometimes appears more like a pineapple than an apple to me. As I prepare for my summer course on Pacific history, HIS 340-J, at Stony Brook University this July-August, I intend to write more about how that class unfolds here in this forum. Finally, I continue taking my Hawaiian language lessons, I have had nothing to say about agriculture since my first post on the subject(!), and, to fit in my last remaining keyword, I am, like all of you, deeply upset by the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan. In the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. government exposed various Pacific Islander nations to extremely high levels of radiation through the "testing" of nuclear weapons all across, above, and beneath the surface of the great Pacific Ocean. Perhaps, in thinking about our global nuclear past, my older post on this subject might hold new relevance.

Pacific Podcasts, New York Blogs (And other cool stuff online!)

Blogs: I began Pacific Dreams, New York Life after waking from a dream sometime last March. I had dreamed that I maintained my own blog. I had never even really thought much about blogging, but at the ASEH conference in Portland, Oregon, I met Anna Zeide, a graduate student in environmental history at U of Wisconsin-Madison, and I soon discovered her delightful blog Madison in June. Now she keeps another blog full of really smart, critical thinking about cooking, eating, and our whole American culture of food; it is called Dining and Opining. Anna is working on her dissertation on the history of canned food; she is really smart, thoughtful, and above all else, always seems to have her two feet on the ground. Thanks for the inspiration, Anna!

At that same meeting I also met Colin Tyner, a PhD candidate at the University of California-Santa Cruz, but who, for the past year at least, has been living and teaching in Japan. His interests are in Japanese environmental history - and he also holds a place in his heart for Pacific history. He maintains a really thoughtful blog at Colin Tyner, the Labour of Nature, and Island Life.

Beth Montgomery, an author in Australia, maintains a blog Island Stories about Pacific Island literature, especially young adult fiction. I must also shout-out to hamogeekgirl, a young Samoan writer living in Aotearoa (NZ) who maintains the blog Samoan Like Me, which follows her process of self-discovery as she looks deeper into what it means for her to be "Samoan." I have really enjoyed many notes sent back and forth with her, and hope that she continues to blog. (And in the meantime, a shout-out to FreshyNZ, also from Aotearoa, who has similarly shared much wisdom with me about Samoan history, language, culture, and society.)

There are many other great blogs out there; I encourage you to check out my "blogroll" and to also share with me any other blogs that you think I would be interested in.

Podcasts: Maybe I'm a geek, but I love listening to podcasts on my computer late at night when I can't sleep! :) Here are some of my favorites:

In environmental history, Jan Oosthoek's Exploring Environmental History has been so influential, not only for me as a young scholar in the field but for many others too. This is where I heard about Colin Tyner's blog for example, for he was interviewed by Mr. Oosthoek on a recent episode of the program. He has also come out with a newer podcast, Histories of Environmental Change. And from NICHE in Canada, there is the podcast Nature's Past, hosted by Sean Kheraj.

In American history more generally, no podcast is more entertaining that BackStory with the American History Guys, Peter Onuf, Ed Ayers, and Brian Balogh. Each month they cover a topic in American history and look at it through the windows of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century perspectives. More locally, for NYC history there is no better than The Bowery Boys: very delightful, humorous, in-depth tours of important people, places, buildings, and events in NYC history. Finally, Nate DiMeo's The Memory Palace uses a more "story-telling" approach to really intriguing anecdotes in (mostly) American history. On my last busride from Albany to NYC I listened to a handful of these podcasts and really enjoyed them!

Finally, on Pacific topics I have found few podcast series that I really enjoy. From Seattle, I have really enjoyed Rochelle DelaCruz's Hawaiʻi Ways, short little vignettes about her experiences as a Hawaiian immigrant living in the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately it appears that she has just recently stopped producing episodes, but there are over a hundred old ones to listen to! For Pacific Island news, I have tried following Pacific Beat from Radio Australia, but I just don't have the time in the day to follow that much content on a daily basis. So if anyone knows of more weekly or even monthly approaches to important Pacific Island news and events, please let me know!

Video: Finally, my Hawaiian language teacher was kind enough to point out to me that Native Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi have recently begun their own online television station. It is called ʻŌiwi TV, and it is really amazing! Ever since the 1970s Hawaiian Renaissance, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi has been making its pronounced comeback as a viable language for use by the Hawaiian nation. But knowing the power of television media for influencing language use, especially among young kids, how can lāhui Hawaiʻi really bring their ancestral language back to prominence against this great tide of English language media out there? ʻŌiwi TV seems to be a very viable solution. There is a news program in both English and Hawaiian called ʻĀhaʻi ʻŌlelo Ola. And beyond that, there is access to Hawaiian-language children's programming, including cartoons! There are also many short films to watch. I have only just begun to explore this site, but it seems to hold so much promise.

I guess that is all this one anniversary post can hold. Blogging has helped me learn so much from so many people about so many different things - and this sharing is really so different than what takes place in academia. It is a different type of sharing...perhaps just as valuable, if not more so, than the official "discourses" going on within academic journals and conferences.

Much love! and Happy Spring!

My Summer Course on Pacific History

2011-03-06T21:12:00.010-05:00

This summer I will teaching my own undergraduate course for the first time at SUNY Stony Brook. Yay! This course will take place during the second summer session, from early July to mid August 2011. These sessions are only six weeks long, with classes meeting twice a week for three and a half hours each session. That might appear to be a very long session! But with a mix of lecture, class discussion, group work, and audio-visual surprises - including many excellent films - I imagine our time in class will just fly by.

I humbly note that my course, HIS 340-J: Pacific Islands: Histories of Paradise, will attempt to achieve the seemingly impossible:

To cover 6,000 years of the history of 1/3 of the entire Earth in just six weeks!

But that's Pacific history for you. Of course we will have to cut corners in just about every corner. I am, by default of my own research interests and knowledge base, going to focus overwhelmingly on Polynesia and the Eastern Pacific, most specifically on Hawaiʻi. But there will also be significant lessons and/or readings concerning Tahiti, the Marquesas, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Samoa, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Kiribati, Fiji, and New Guinea, if not more.

To get a sense of the major historical topics and themes that the course will attempt to tie together, please see the course description by clicking on the course title (link) above.

Choosing a textbook for this class has been a very hard task. For a course like this, with its sweeping scope over all Pacific time and space, few books that I have read in Pacific history seemed suitable for use in any more than just a handful of lessons. And the books I originally turned to as potential unifying agents for bringing the many threads of the course together - books like Greg Dening's Islands and Beaches, for example - are all out of print. But if you really want a copy of Dening's classic book for your own library, here is a link to where you can buy a bargain-bin copy for as mildly inexpensive as $279.24!

So this is what I've decided to work with instead:

Alastair Couper's very recent Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (2009), and John Kneubuhl's collection of plays, Think of a Garden, and other Plays (1997).

Couper's book will provide the most generalist of overviews for each week and each session, covering all space and time from the earliest Pacific Island colonizations to the lives of present-day Oceanian "voyagers" on transoceanic cargo ships, from New Guinea east all the way to Rapa Nui. Couper has a particular interest in Micronesia, and especially Kiribati, which I think will serve as a fitting compliment to my own lectures which will probably inevitably focus too much on Polynesia and Hawaiʻi. So we will get two different perspectives between us.

Kneubuhl's plays will jump in during the last two weeks of session. "Think of a Garden" concerns the mau independence movement in Western Samoa in the 1920s and 30s, while "Mele Kanikau: A Pageant" engages with the debates over tourism, and conflicting ideas of indigeneity and authenticity in 1970s Hawaiʻi at the outset of the Hawaiian Renaissance. We won't read the third play in the collection, which is too esoteric for the purposes of this class. Overall, Kneubuhl will help us enter the twentieth-century world of Pacific Islanders through very readable and enjoyable dramatic prose.

As for films, I am still sorting out the list and figuring out what will fit within the course's limits, but I do know that these four films will anchor our discussions of cinematic representations of the Pacific:

The Bounty (1984)

Hawaii (1966)

Picture Bride (1995)

Once Were Warriors (1994)

That's probably enough of a tease to get some readers' minds spinning. Course registration for summer session begins on April 6, 2011. New York State residents can take SUNY courses at very reasonable rates (at least compared to the rate for out-of-state students!), so if you are in need of credits towards your bachelor's degree, or if you specifically need that elusive "J" to satisfy your DEC requirements, consider registering for my course! It will be fun!

Mapping Hawaiian Labor History

2011-02-20T15:49:00.011-05:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about two seemingly mundane - but actually quite revealing - maps by Charles H. Judd, the luna (overseer) of a guano mining operation on Baker Island/Puakailima in the late 1850s. These maps were Judd's visual representations of what he hoped the Baker Island/Puakailima guano mining "workscape" might look like after some renovations.

One big problem with these maps, however, as discussed in the blog post, was that the maps were so loaded with Judd's own idiosyncratic, luna-centric perspectives, that it was hard to tease out any information at all about what life was like for the Hawaiian workers! Unfortunately, this seemed to be just another textbook example of how history can so often become a one-sided tale: the words, writings, pictures, objects, etc., of rich and powerful haole (foreign/white) men had been preserved (in this case by the Judd family itself, and then by the Bishop Museum), while the remnants of each worker's life became like a shovel-full of guano dust on a windy day - blown off into the great abyss of the Pacific Ocean never to be seen again!

But thankfully that's not the whole story! Hawaiian guano workers wrote letters home about their experiences. Indeed, their true-life stories of life and labor were published in many Hawaiian-language newspapers in Honolulu like Ka Hae Hawaii and Nupepa Kuokoa. In one such article I found a letter written by one of the guano workers living and working on Jarvis Island in the fall of 1859. This letter listed the names, wahinoho (addresses), and aina (lands/moku [districts]) of all 56 Hawaiians laboring there. Most of these names are incomplete, listing just given-names or surnames. That said, if some kind reader with a good grasp on Hawaiian names would like to tell me which (whether given or surname) is being used, I'd appreciate hearing your manaʻo! Many of the place names, too, reflect village names or valley names that have since - in the intervening 150 years - lost those ancestral titles. This is especially the case in Honolulu which has changed so much since the 1850s. Again, if any kind reader with a knowledge of historic neighborhoods, ahupuaʻa, or moku of any of the main islands would like to share information or clarifications with me, please do so! I need your help!

This undated photograph shows what appear to be the ruins of one of the railroads that was built in the late 1850s to transport guano from the center of the island to the wharf on the western shore. Large piles of unshipped guano appear as lumps in the center of the image.

(Source: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service via Wikipedia)

Below is the map that I have made. But before you click on the link below the map - which will automatically transport you to the GoogleMaps page where the map is based (I encourage you to click into the GoogleMaps page rather than viewing the map on my blog) - please read these simple instructions below:

Begin by noticing the remote and distant location of the Hawaiian men's worksite - Jarvis Island (red marker) - on the equator.
Then feel free to zoom in on Hawaiʻi and explore each of the 56 workers' hometowns (blue markers) and stories...

And here are some final thoughts and questions before you begin exploring:

What is the use of a map like this? What does it tell us about Hawaiian labor history? That's an excellent question without any immediately satisfying answer. Personally, I find it fascinating that these 56 men came together to work at Jarvis from so many different regions; they came from a variety of valleys and villages from every corner of five different Hawaiian islands. Many men came from Honolulu, and that makes sense because they would have been most familiar with the business of the city, the notoriety of the Judds, and they might have even seen and known some of the workers who shipped out and returned year by year on whalers and on other American transpacific vessels. But why did men from Hawaiʻi, Maui, Molokaʻi, and Kauaʻi join this mission? Did they have prior contacts with the Judds? Or were they recommended as good laborers by other haole, perhaps sugar plantation owners? Or did they hear of the opportunity in Ka Hae Hawaii? Why would they leave their families for so many months - sometimes even years - to do such difficult and lonesome work thousands of miles away??

The answers to these questions remain obscure, as do the individual biographies of the great majority of these laboring men. But go ahead. Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine what they experienced. Imagine what it was like to leave home. To live on Jarvis Island. To (hopefully) return home...not all did.

Click on the link immediately below the map to enter the separate map page and begin:

View The Guano Laborers of Jarvis Island (1859) in a larger map

Note:

On the concept of the "workscape," see Thomas G. Andrews' excellent Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Representations: Baker Island / Puakailima

2011-02-01T18:21:00.013-05:00

Plan of the Buildings, Baker Island, by C.H. Judd, 1859

[Source: A.F. Judd II, ed. The Guano Islands (Honolulu: Family Records, House of Judd, c1935)]

Now that the spring semester has begun, so I begin moving forward with my newest research project: Hawaiian labor and environment in mid-nineteenth century guano mining in the Pacific equatorial islands. Sounds like a mouth-full, but in reality my new project on guano is a simple one. It is a logical extension from my previous work on Hawaiian sandalwood. One of the first outside/haole interventions in the labor and environment of common Hawaiians (makaʻāinana) was the sandalwood industry in Hawaiʻi, especially during the 1810s and 1820s. But sandalwood harvesting was only the first step of many in a new direction for the Hawaiian people. Namely, sandalwood was the first step towards the integration of Hawaiian peoples and biological resources into a global capitalist economic/political world order - something I see culminating in Hawaiʻi's sugar industry/plantation economy and the eventual overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by Americans in 1893.

But the labor and environment of sandalwood harvesting was not that foreign to the makaʻāinana. Much stranger and more foreign to the makaʻāinana were their experiences in the American Northwest Coast harvesting furs, in Alta California (Mexico) skinning cattle hides, and all across the South and North Pacific hunting whales. And by the 1850s, yet another overseas labor opportunity became available for Hawaiian makaʻāīnana: mining guano on remote Pacific equatorial islands.

One such guano island was Baker Island, or Puakailima.

Puakailima, or "flower of the ʻilima," is the name Hawaiian laborers gave this small, uninhabited island along the equator, about one or two weeks by ship from Honolulu. The island was so named because, although very few plants could grow on Baker Island, ʻilima was one plant that did grow here, and its small but vibrant yellow flower was one of the few patches of color on an otherwise dreary landscape of grass and sand.

ʻIlima flowers [Source: Forest & Kim Starr via Wikipedia]

My job of attempting to re-create what life was like for Hawaiians on Baker Island (as well as on other guano mining sites such as Howland and Jarvis Islands) during the 1850s and 1860s is made quite difficult by the fact that very few historical documents remain to describe these islands at that time. At least that is what I thought before and after reading Jimmy Skagg's The Great Guano Rush, perhaps the most extensive monograph to date (published in 1994) on the history of guano mining on these equatorial islands. But very quickly I've realized that Skaggs missed a lot of English language sources on these islands - or, in some cases, he just overlooked some really interesting material in the sources he found. And beyond that, there are scores of Hawaiian language newspaper articles that I am now trying to translate that speak to the living conditions on these islands as experienced by Hawaiian laborers during the 1850s and 1860s. And yet Skaggs did not consult any Hawaiian language sources.

But even as I work through these textual sources, images tell a whole ʻnother story as well! And so the remainder of this post is devoted to analyzing two maps of Baker Island from 1859. Although drawn by the hand of the island's luna (supervisor), Charles Judd - known to his Hawaiian laborers as Kale (Charlie) - perhaps we can read between the lines of these maps and bring out the stories of the Hawaiian laborers who lived and worked there.

So, here is the first map again (see the image at the beginning of this post for more information):

Let's start at the center of the map where the eye is drawn. There, in the middle, is a big square. This is the new house that G.P. Judd was having built in 1859 to house the island "Governor." Dr. Judd is a famous character in Hawaiian history, a missionary man who made great inroads among the Hawaiian aliʻi (ruling chiefs). Heck, some might have even considered him to be an aliʻi himself! For example, we find that on Jarvis Island in 1858, when Charles Judd - the Doctor's oldest son - was still luna there, the Hawaiian laborers called him "Alii Charlie." That's some statement on the authority the makaʻāinana laborers granted to these haole (foreign/white) capitalists!

Anyway, Dr. Judd was the Honolulu agent of the American Guano Company, the owner of these islands. But he and his family apparently saw themselves more as rulers of the land. By the way, these islands - such as Baker, Jarvis, and Howland - had been annexed by the United States before commencement of guano mining, so when Judd said he was building a "Governor's mansion," he was very likely really believing that his family had the right or privilege to act as governors of this unincorporated U.S. territory!

That, then, is what is at the center of the map. The "mansion" is broken into four rooms. One reads "store room"; another reads "store." Apparently it was a two-story building. The outer ring denotes, I think, a wrap-around balcony on the second level. From a letter from Charlie Judd to Joseph O. Carter in December 1859, we hear that "the house [is] unfinished on one side." So the map - drawn by Charles' own hand - clearly represents a mansion as he hopes it will be, not as it yet was. Charlie is going to be moving in to this mansion. He has been reassigned - by his dad, I presume - from his luna post at Jarvis for this new one at Puakailima, Baker Island. He will be the island's new "Governor."

Let's step outside the mansion. Assuming that the path leads out the front door, to our left is a pretty sizable "cook house." Charlie's younger brother Albert (the Hawaiians called him Alapaki) tells us that on Jarvis Island the company cook was a Hawaiian named Nueku. But once in a while a Chinese steward named "AKay" also prepared foods, as did Albert himself at times. The haole enjoyed eating items made of flour like duff and pot pies. The kānaka - the Hawaiian laborers - apparently ate mostly poi and fish, as evidenced by the 17 barrels of poi unloaded onto Jarvis Island while Albert was there in 1858, and by the daily fishing that the Hawaiians engaged in when pau hana time came - when work was finished - each day.

Beyond the cook house is a small building labeled "RH," maybe "BH." I don't know what that is! Behind the "Governor's" house are at least four "chicken coops" and a "dog" house. Haole and kānaka invaders of these islands (the island ecology here had evolved for millions of years without human influence) brought along many animals. Five goats were released to graze on the grasses of Jarvis in 1858. Rats had made their way to Howland Island long before the first reports of them in 1854. Dogs and cats were prized domestic animals. Mules were utilized for pulling railcars full of guano (when mules were not available, kānaka were forced to labor in their place). All of this would be fine except that these islands were the preferred nesting sites of dozens of species of migratory seabirds. No animal terrorized the seabirds more than the rats. They attacked baby chicks and ate many eggs. Paleo-ornithologists have recently discovered that Polynesian peoples caused the extinctions of dozens of species of land birds and nesting seabirds over the first two millenia of the Common Era. But it wasn't that Polynesian people directly attacked and destroyed these birds, but in most cases it was that the Polynesians' accompanying animals - pigs, moa (chickens), and above all else, rats - terrorized and destroyed these endemic avian species. Anyway, this kind of devastation - which occurred in New Zealand, Rapa Nui, Hawaiʻi, and all across Polynesia upon first human settlement - thankfully was not repeated upon the birds of the guano islands. Did the seabirds on Baker Island suffer during the guano period. Yes, quite likely. Have they bounced back? Apparently quite well.

All this is to say that the chickens in the chicken coops were just one small minority of the birds that called Puakailima home. And let's hope that the dog was kept in the dog house more often than not so that he/she did not terrorize the birds too much.

The cursive note below the main house tells us what I had already divulged about the "mansion": "house two stories with an attic and cupola with glass doors." Sounds fancy!

Now let's follow the path away from the main house and towards the work area. First, to the right, are two separate cisterns. Were these sites for the collection of precious rain water? On Baker, as on the other guano islands, there existed absolutely no freshwater. Water had to be imported from Honolulu in large wooden casks aboard ships. So the collection of rain water would be quite helpful in reducing company costs. But as one writer noted, because rain only fell during violent storms with increased winds, often guano dust was lifted into the air and mixed in with the precipitation. In other words, the rain often tasted like bird feces...so, perhaps not the best source of drinking water after all!

And then we have more animal stables. On the left is a "stable" with what appears to be two "mule[s]" and one "horse" inside. On the right is housing for "pig," "pigs," and something illegible; it looks like "sheep." Of course, the chickens are cooped because the few luna want to eat either chicken meat or eggs - that's surprising, though, with all the eggs available from the seabirds! The pigs are there to be eaten, too. The mules and horses are there for their labor. The sheep will probably be eaten. I can't imagine they are being sheared for wool. Who here would do that labor? and why? All in all, we can see how the luna are attempting to recreate a dietary world that is familiar to them. This diet is a mix of Hawaiian and American tastes. But if anything, as compared to how Albert and Charlie Judd ate on Jarvis in 1858 - when they ate mostly seabirds and fish - it appears that Charlie's plan for Baker in 1859 includes a dream of a more "refined" diet here. More meat. More American.

Behind the horse/mule stable is the "old house." I imagine this is where the luna lived before the "mansion" was built. It is apparent that the luna (overseer) used to live much closer to the worksite than he will when the new house is finished. The siting of the new house thus confirms my suspicion that the Judds see their ruling over these islands as more of a "governorship" rather than a work duty. They should be working closely with the kānaka laborers and overseeing management of the guano mines. But perhaps the dust and smell and noise of the work site was just too much for this family from elite Honolulu society to bear, accustomed as they were to a more refined way of life.

The old house faces the "rail track...3/4 mile long." Partway down the track are the "scales" used for measuring the weight of the guano before it is loaded onto ships at the wharf. The end of the road from the "mansion" is where the wharf meets with the railroad track. We are lucky to have many descriptions of the wharfs and buoys at all of the guano islands, as this data was essential information for the visiting ship captains anchoring ships here for loading guano or unloading provisions. Many of the wharfs were hundreds of feet long. But boats had to be extremely careful. Islands like Baker are surrounded by coral reefs outlining the former perimeter of these once-high islands. As islands like Baker have eroded and subsided over time, much of the volcanic mountain has submerged underwater, but coral has continued to grow along the original perimeter, thus overtime creating a barrier reef. Baker, Jarvis, and Howland barely remain above sea level. In reality, they are ten thousand feet high (a really rough estimate); they are mountains rising from the sea floor, but only a few score feet of those mountains is now above sea level due to tens of millions of years of erosion and subsidence. So anyway, the point is that as boats approached Baker they are actually approaching the summit of a great mountain; the barrier reef and the underwater slope of the mountain work together to create incredibly volatile conditions for anchoring ships here.

The "rail track," as already mentioned, consisted of open cars that were pulled along by either mules or by kānaka laborers. Albert Judd writes in 1858 on Jarvis of placing his visiting sisters in the railcars and pushing them around on the track for fun. This struck me as quite insensitive to the fact that during the work day these same cars were the site of extremely difficult labor by the Hawaiian workers. I doubt these Hawaiians ever stepped a foot near the railcars during their pau hana time. That the rich Judd children could play in these cars was a performance of their status and authority; this performance also suggested that great divisions remained - or perhaps were even exacerbated here - between haole/Euro-Americans and kānaka/Native Hawaiians.

And then finally, at the opposite end of the island from the "Governor's house" is the "Natives house." This is not so much part of Judd's plan. This building is, rather, where the Hawaiian workers had likely already been living for the first few years of guano operations. It is an interesting house these "Natives" have got: with a decorative roof and a large flag flying [American flag I'm guessing]. It seems as if it was designed to attract the attention of visiting ships. Perhaps it is designed as something that the Judds can point to and say: "see how nice we treat our natives?"

But if we look through these walls, we are reminded that not one, but many kānaka lived in this one house. On Baker, Jarvis, and Howland Islands, the count of how many laborers were working there at any given time varies considerably. Sometimes as few as five to ten Hawaiians were stationed on an island, but the norm during the regular work season appears to have been 30-40 kānaka. When we consult the Hawaiian language newspaper articles reporting on life at these worksites, the Hawaiians tell us the number is even higher: 50 kānaka working on just one island in one instance. So, do you think Judd's one house for the "Natives" was sufficient? Or did some kānaka have to live in tents on the outside?

Just what was life like inside the workhouse? Albert Judd on Jarvis Island in 1858 tells us that he visited with the "natives" often: to teach them English, to hear them debate, to share newspapers with them. He gives us a nice sense of the camaraderie of the workers: how they sang songs together, skinned fish together, discussed current events, world affairs, and politics together. We see a community deeply engaged with their families and friends back in Hawaiʻi, probably feeling quite homesick, often dreaming of Oʻahu.

Next to the "Natives house" there is "water in boat-shed." On Jarvis, Albert Judd tells us that the Hawaiians rolled the imported casks of water up from the wharf to the boat shed where they were stored. And so it seems that Charlie plans to keep up the same system here at Baker, too, where the water casks will be stored in a boat shed. On the other side of "Natives house" is an unmarked building. Let's hope it is more housing for the workers, or perhaps a community center for them! :)

Finally, is it not somewhat strange that Judd has labeled the workers' house as "Natives house"? Of course, the labor force on these guano islands had always been 100% Hawaiian. The luna - the supervisors - were almost always white Euro-Americans. But the actual guano diggers and haulers were all kānaka. But by labeling the building as for the "Natives," Judd clearly imagines the work site's future as a continuation of this racial division. It is not "worker's" housing, but "Natives" housing. Judd does not imagine that any workers will do, but he can only see the guano industry as a function of white Euro-American exploitation of the better suited "copper"-skinned "native" Hawaiians' hard, physical male bodies. These haole saw Hawaiian male bodies as "naturally" suited for the task of guano labor, and they simultaneously disbelieved in the Hawaiians' abilities to serve as leaders, as luna. When you look at this map, therefore, keep Judd's racializations in mind. There are spaces here mapped for whites and others mapped for kānaka. Judd, as mapmaker and as "Governor," will decide what is best, and what is most appropriate, for each type of person.

And if you are wondering: the dotted line on the right is the shoreline. As you can see from the N.O.A.A. map below, the approach to Baker Island is from the west. The wharf and ruins are on the west side of the island. Therefore we need to flip Judd's map around because he has oriented his map with South on top and North on bottom...just FYI in case you plan to go to Baker Island someday to try and scout out some of these ruins!

Map of Baker Island and surrounding waters [Source: N.O.A.A. via nationmaster.com]

I leave you with this second map:

Sketch of the Governor's Residence, Baker Island

[Source: A.F. Judd II, ed. The Guano Islands (Honolulu: Family Records, House of Judd, c1935)]

First, note that this map is referred to as the "Governor's Residence." I wasn't making up that whole "Governor" thing, but do keep in mind that this island was an unincorporated U.S. territory that the federal government never determined needed a "Governor." That Charles Judd would be its "Governor" seems to have been a Judd-ian maneuver.

In cursive at the top it reads: "at...[ ] request: up stairs above is the attic + cupola like...[ ] have(?)...New Haven(?)" My understanding is that at someone's request - his/her name appears to begin with a "B"(?) - the attic and cupola have been designed just like the one he/she/or somebody has in New Haven, CT...perhaps?

The top square shows the mansion's upstairs level: as I said, there is a wrap-around balcony, or "verandah." The upstairs is divided into four equal rooms. Each has two doors leading out to the balcony. My, what a great ocean breeze they must have received in those upstairs rooms! How delightful! There is also a wide central "hall" with "stairs up" and "stairs down" and two doors on either end to allow more delightful ocean air to sweep through. The lower left room is to serve as the "parlor." It will contain a "desk," "table," two "lounge[s]" in opposite corners, and in the other two corners some illegible stacks of things, one of which looks like "books." A lovely room. A door connects the parlor to the room depicted above it, which I cannot make out the exact use of. This room has a "bed," "wash stand," "clothes," a "crib," and many other illegible items. It thus appears to be a bedroom...for whom I will guess shortly.

On the opposite side of the hallway is "Georges room" and "Mrs [ ] room." I don't know who George is, perhaps a luna. The mysterious "Mrs" sometimes looks like "Mrs Judds room" and sometimes looks like "Mrs Cutts room." It could be either. I'll explain who Mrs. Cutts is shortly! The Mrs.'s room has a bed, and that's it. Apparently Mr. Judd did not feel comfortable, or permitted, to decorate the lady's room; he would leave that up to her. George's room has a "bed," "table," "bureau," and some other illegible item.

Downstairs on the left is the "dining room" and "Hannahs room." Who is Hannah? I don't know. The Dining room includes a "cupboard," "clock," and something else. On the right is the "store room" and "store." The store has nothing but "shelf[s]," apparently holding many items of high consumer demand, no doubt! The store room includes a "safe" and "shelves" all around. I assume that the goods (and money/valuables) are kept privately in the store room, while the public customers have access to the actual store. Who were these customers? The occasional visiting ship captain and crew? Sure. But there is no doubt in my mind that Judd planned this storeroom for the "benefit" of the resident laboring kānaka. I wish he would tell us what was for sale in the store. One sure wonders what a store is needed for on a deserted island like this in the middle of the Pacific with only a few dozen laborers living on it. Did Judd pay the workers in scrip and "allow" them to use the scrip to purchase goods at the company store? That's what happened on the sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi. Workers were compensated in a way - scrips - that forced them to convert their compensation into further profits for the company. I wonder if this happened on Baker Island, too. If so, what did the kānaka buy? Did these workers not have endless quantities of fish and seabirds and eggs to harvest during pau hana time? And I'm pretty sure they were given meals as part of their compensation, too. That's what the barrels of poi were for, right? There is more to discover here. It could be that the "store" just means storage: a place to keep goods, like foodstuffs, that will later be prepared by the company cook for the workers free of charge. But I wonder...

Finally, there is a little square denoting a space for the "kitchen," "pantry," and as best as I can see, the "bed room cook": the bedroom for a live-in servant/cook. If this is anything like American houses of the same time period, this square denotes the basement where the live-in servant would live among the tools of his/her trade.

So what. Why does this map matter? Actually, while I find the first map more germane to my own study of Hawaiian labor and environment on these guano islands, this second map is, in my opinion, much more interesting! The Judds are designing a house that will speak for them; the house is meant to be a performance of who they are. It is a performance of their race, of their class, of their background, of their dreams. Whether or not the "Mrs" refers to Mrs. Judd or Mrs. Cutts, I assume that it is Charles Judd's wife's private room. In November 1859, Charlie Judd (age 24) married Mrs. Emily Catherine Cutts (age 19). I imagine they were married in Honolulu. But they wouldn't stay in Honolulu long. Judd's occupation was as "Governor" of Jarvis, and now of Baker. Mrs. Cutts had to know that becoming "Mrs. Judd" meant living on a remote guano island for most of the next few years of her life.

In late November, Charles Judd reported of the house under construction that "Our apartments were quite well along. We put up some furniture in two rooms and before night Emmie [Emily Cutts] had things looking nice." Here he is bringing a 19-year-old woman to one of the most remote islands on Earth, to live among scores of laboring male kānaka and hundreds of thousands of squawking, pooping seabirds. What a courageous woman! No wonder Judd worked so hard to make this residence a beautiful one. He did not want to disappoint Emmie! Charles Judd wrote his dreams in ink upon this map. He placed a "crib" in the upstairs bedroom, anticipating a child with Emily. Perhaps she was already pregnant - although I can't imagine giving birth to a child on Puakailima! Judd drew the map to express his dreams for himself, for Emmie, and for their family. The map might be exaggerative. It might have been something he drew for Emily's sake, to encourage her to take his hand and partake in this rather unusual adventure with him. Perhaps the "mansion" was actually much less thrilling in reality. These maps only tell us how Judd hoped things would be, not how they actually turned out to be.

Judd ends his letter from Puakailima in early December 1859 stating over and over again that Emmie is "happy" and "contended." It sounds like he is trying to reassure himself that he has not failed her as a husband (or as an interior decorator!). I'm sure she smiled courteously and tried her best to hide any disappointment when she actually saw the house and the living conditions she faced on Baker. As she moved in her trunks and life possessions and began unpacking her things, as the salty sea air blew in through the open doors from off the verandah, as the noise of squawking seabirds and of railcars shuffling guano across a lonely island reached her ears, did she not think of home? Did she not think, "What the hell am I doing here?!" Absolutely she did! But still she smiled, and Charlie smiled, and they hid their true anxieties behind the veneer of letters, maps, and the comforting clutter of their interior decorations.