Politicking, Policing, and Preserving in Turn-of-the-Century Hawai’i

• In Event: Policing Religions: Secularism, Race, and Governance

Abstract

This paper looks at the move from policing Hawai’ian traditions to preserving them, before and after annexation.

In the 1890s Nathaniel Bright Emerson, child of missionaries, was an ardent advocate of annexation. He justified armed takeover as necessary because of the Hawai’ian monarchs’ latent heathenism. Though boosters had trumpeted the success of the missionaries who had been coming to the islands since the 1820s, Emerson contended that King David Kalākaua and Queen Lili’uokalani were threatening to re-heathenize the population by encouraging traditional medicinal practices, meles, and the hula, all of which Americans saw as idolatrous and dangerous superstitions that threatened to spin the Kingdom out of (Euro-/American/white) control.

Fast forward a decade and Emerson had become one of the foremost proponents of preserving the very Hawai’ian traditions he had previously dismissed as heathenish. Waxing poetic about the “far-off, sweet, pagan days” of the past, he committed himself to recording and translating Hawai’ian folklore and customs until his death in 1915.

How did Emerson go from policing heathenism among the monarchs, to preserving the “sweet, pagan days” of yore?

This paper contends that Emerson’s and other twentieth-century anthropological and folkloric attempts to preserve the practices and myths of “heathen” peoples were facilitated—indeed, made possible—by earlier efforts to police the same. Only once heathenism was cordoned off and made to seem a safe and harmless part of the past, rather than a present political threat, could it be preserved and studied.

To make this argument, the paper examines how the government of the Hawai’ian Kingdom, and later Republic and Territory, claimed to respect freedom of conscience while relying on the policing of “right” and “wrong” religion. Secular powers—children of missionaries, businessmen, and planters—worried that their influence on the islands might be undermined by the continuation of what they saw as heathen ways. And so they classified the practice of Hawai’ian traditions as “vagrancy,” on par with prostitution, gambling, and breaking and entering, and subject to the same penalties. They also brought traditional Hawai’ian ways of healing into the secular realm of medicine, deeming practitioners as unworthy of medical licensing, and subject to fines and hard labor. In the 1880s and 1890s, these sorts of classifications worked to define Kalākaua and Lili’uokalani as unfit to govern, since they created and supported the Hale Nauā, a secret society aimed at revitalizing the monarchy and restoring the health of the Hawai’ian people through the practice of traditional rituals.

It was only after they had overthrown the monarchy that men like Emerson could relax into paternalistic roles as preservers of defanged heathen ways. Supposed heathenism could no longer present a serious political threat to secular governance, so it could be relegated to the realm of primitive fable.

The paper supplements the writings of Emerson with the papers of James Bicknell, founder of the Association of Christian Workers for the Suppression of Idolatry, the records of the Hale Nauā, Hawai’ian penal codes and constitutions, and centennial celebrations of the missionaries’ arrival.

Author

• Kathryn Gin Lum, Stanford University