Episode 36 Somebody's Wife and Hawaiian Missionary Wives

Summary

In this episode of the Remedial Herstory Project, hosts Kelsey and Brooke explore the fascinating history of Hawaiian missionary wives through an insightful conversation with historian Michelle Stonis. They dive into the United States' imperial endeavors during the late 1800s, focusing on how white missionary women played significant roles in the socio-cultural transformation of Hawaii. The narrative highlights both the brave ventures of these women into unfamiliar territories and their complex interactions with native Hawaiian populations. The episode critically examines the implications of missionary work on Hawaii's indigenous culture and political sovereignty, revealing a nuanced perspective on America's historical impact on the island state. The conversation is both educational and engaging, encouraging listeners to reflect on the broader consequences of historical missionary activities.

Highlights

• Explore the role of Hawaiian missionary wives and their cultural impact. 🌺
• Understand the historical context of U.S. expansionism in the late 1800s. 🏝️
• Dive into the complex legacy of missionary work and its unintended consequences. 🌊
• Learn about Queen Liliuokalani's resistance against U.S. annexation. 👑
• Discover the personal stories of women who ventured into the Hawaiian frontier. 👩‍🏫

Key Takeaways

• Hawaiian missionary wives were crucial in the socio-cultural transformation of Hawaii. 🌺
• The U.S. imperialistic expansion had significant consequences on Hawaiian sovereignty. 🏝️
• Missionaries inadvertently contributed to the erosion of native Hawaiian culture. 🌊
• Queen Liliuokalani was the last reigning monarch of Hawaii, her story is pivotal in understanding U.S. history. 👑
• The episode uncovers the overlooked narratives of brave missionary women. 👩‍🏫

Overview

The episode kicks off with an engaging introduction to Hawaiian history and the pivotal roles missionary wives played during the U.S. imperial era. This exploration embarks on what could be considered unfamiliar territory for many—a dive into the cultural exchanges and clashes initiated by these women in Hawaii.

The conversation with Michelle Stonis, a dedicated historian, brings to light the brave endeavors of white women who sailed vast oceans to bring religion and education to the Hawaiian islands. These women, often unsung heroes, negotiated their domestic roles while leaving a profound impact on the islands' social fabric.

Listeners are provided with a nuanced picture of the socio-political turmoil the island faced, including Queen Liliuokalani's resistance against the annexation by the United States. The narrative encourages a reflection on historical complexities and contested sovereignty, broadening the understanding of Hawaii's intricate past.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Episode Overview In this chapter titled 'Introduction and Episode Overview', hosts Kelsey and Brooke introduce the theme of the episode. They are excited to venture into the subject of Hawaiian history, specifically discussing Hawaiian missionary wives. Kelsey expresses her eagerness for warm weather as they are set to have a conversation with Michelle Stonus, a professor who worked on a master's thesis about this subject. The hosts set the stage for an epic discussion, highlighting their enthusiasm for the topic.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Podcast Introduction The chapter titled 'Podcast Introduction' serves as an opening to the podcast 'Remedial Her Story: The Other 50%'. It begins with a warm welcome from the hosts, Kelsey Brooke Eckert and Rook Neva Sullivan. The introduction hints at the podcast's focus on uncovering the often overlooked role of women in history classes. The hosts mention a specific topic — 'Somebody's Wife and Hawaiian Missionary Wives' — signaling the type of intriguing subjects they will delve into to fill the gaps in traditional historical narratives regarding women's contributions and experiences.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Historical Context - Imperial Era and U.S. Expansion The chapter introduces a historical analysis of the United States during the imperial era, focusing on the expansion and annexation events that marked this period.
• 03:00 - 08:00: Queen Liliuokalani and Hawaiian Monarchy The chapter discusses the imperial era in US history, particularly highlighting the late 1800s and 1890s as a period of expansionist thinking following the Civil War. It touches upon the shift in focus from domestic concerns during the Civil War to broader goals of territorial acquisition and expansion. Specific details about how the US acquired territories, including the influence and impact on areas like Hawaii, are likely explored in the context of this era.
• 08:00 - 11:00: Michelle Stonis Introduction and Research Background The chapter discusses a significant yet brief conflict known as the Spanish-American War, which was referred to by Secretary of State Hay as 'a splendid little war' due to its short duration. However, despite its brevity, the war resulted in the death of approximately 3,000 Americans. The chapter introduces key figures such as Secretary Hay and explores the perspectives on the war's impact and significance.
• 11:00 - 19:00: Missionary Wives and U.S. Religious Influence The chapter discusses the expansionist ideology of the United States following the achievement of Manifest Destiny, where the nation aimed to acquire territory 'sea to shining sea.' It explains how, with these territorial ambitions realized, the U.S. began to look beyond its continental borders, setting its sights on distant islands across oceans. This period is characterized by a metaphorical 'spreading of the eagle's wings,' indicating the extension of American influence and interests beyond its current geographical limits.
• 19:00 - 28:00: Missionaries' Arrival and Early Challenges The chapter discusses the mindset prevalent among white people in both Britain and the United States, centered on the belief in the 'white man's burden.' This concept originates from a poem by a British poet who articulated the notion that it was the responsibility of white people to civilize other races. This belief was influential during the time missionaries arrived in new territories, impacting their approach and interactions with local populations. The chapter highlights the challenges faced by the missionaries, which stemmed from this controversial and paternalistic worldview.
• 28:00 - 39:00: Role of Missionary Wives - MOP Analogy The chapter titled 'Role of Missionary Wives - MOP Analogy' discusses the notion of spreading Anglo-Saxon Christian values globally, reflecting a sense of responsibility or superiority felt by those who considered themselves 'enlightened'. This worldview is critiqued as 'cute', implying its naive or problematic nature. The chapter references the Spanish-American War as a historical manifestation of this mindset, suggesting the conflict was justified as a means to help Cuba gain independence.
• 39:00 - 56:00: Indigenous Perspectives and Cultural Impact The chapter discusses the impact of Spanish colonial actions in Cuba, particularly the use of concentration camps that resulted in significant loss of life. It touches upon the grim realities faced by Cubans during this period. Additionally, the outcome of these actions led to Cuba becoming a protectorate of the United States, indicating a shift in influence and control.
• 56:00 - 66:00: Chronology of Foreign Influences in Hawaii The chapter discusses the historical context of Hawaii's involvement in global geopolitics during a time when the United States was expanding its territories. The focus is on how Hawaii became strategically important due to its location, as the U.S. sought to establish naval bases for military purposes while engaging in conflicts with declining powers such as Spain. This led to the acquisition of foreign territories including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, with Hawaii inadvertently becoming part of this expansionist agenda.
• 66:00 - 71:00: U.S. Influence and Military Interest in Hawaii The chapter discusses the strategic military interest of the United States in Hawaii, particularly in the context of the war in the Philippines. It highlights the logistical challenges of moving naval ships from San Francisco to the Philippines and the need for a closer naval base, which made Hawaii an ideal location. The mention of existing American presence in Hawaii sets the stage for its historical relevance in U.S. expansionism. Additionally, there's an indication of the dissolution of the Hawaiian monarchy in the context of U.S. interests.
• 71:00 - 72:00: Conclusion and Podcast Sign-off The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Podcast Sign-off' discusses the 1890s in Hawaii, focusing on Queen Liliuokalani, the last monarch of Hawaii. She holds the distinction of being the only Polynesian woman mentioned in U.S. state standards, highlighting an example of how U.S. history often treats figures from different cultures or backgrounds. The chapter likely reflects on the implications of her reign and how history has represented her legacy.

Episode 36 Somebody's Wife and Hawaiian Missionary Wives Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hey kelsey hey brooke you want to tell everyone what's happening in today's episode today we are venturing to hawaii oh yay i need some warm weather me too we are going to be talking with michelle stonus who is a professor about her master's thesis on hawaiian missionary wives oh all right get into this yeah it's gonna be epic
• 00:30 - 01:00 hello and welcome to remedial her story the other 50 the podcast that explores what happened to the women in history class now here's your host kelsey brooke eckert and her partner in crime rook neva sullivan [Music] somebody's wife and hawaiian missionary wives yeah i know nothing about this topic other than being away from myself
• 01:00 - 01:30 hey that is that is significant category a category of knowing okay so tell me more okay so um hawaii the 50th state the event i did not know that oh now you know i thought it was alaska but no no negatory um so let's let us back up a little bit in time it's the
• 01:30 - 02:00 imperial era in us history which most people think is like the late 1800s 1890s would be like a really good time to pinpoint because after the amer you know the civil war is very preoccupying in american politics and so after the war people can start to think about expansion again so there's sort of all these things that i think in history get really glossed over um that happen where we acquire a bunch
• 02:00 - 02:30 more land yeah uh after that and one of the biggest ones which was a very short war actually the secretary of state during this time was from new hampshire secretary hay um he called the spanish-american war a splendid little war because it was so short but like you know 3 000 people americans died but you know casual um so i like to think of it as
• 02:30 - 03:00 and this is maybe like a a way to explain this sort of time period to most students yeah um that once manifest destiny had gotten the united states to acquire sea to shining sea united states begins to look beyond those the beginning of those oceans at islands that are out further okay and so sort of like the spreading of the eagle's wings
• 03:00 - 03:30 no like you've gone too far but i'm way too far okay cool um both in britain and in the states there are this sort of like mindset and um people believe in white people i should say believe in this idea of the white man's burden and this comes from a british poet who wrote the poem um white man's burden um and he basically believes that like
• 03:30 - 04:00 it is our responsibility as enlightened people or something to go spread our ways our anglo-saxon christian ways around the world how cute how cute and in the states this really results in the spanish-american war which was a war to if you want to like justify the war to help cuba get independence
• 04:00 - 04:30 from spain okay and because the spanish were doing pretty horrible things in spain in cuba sorry putting cubans into concentration camps and like you know lots of people died and it's it's a pretty horrible thing um but you know this the bonus is that cuba will become an american protectorate and it will sort of like be under our under our thumb for a while and by
• 04:30 - 05:00 taking on the spanish which is kind of like this dwindling empire we can then get territories like guam and puerto rico right and the philippines and so hawaii unfortunately gets kind of like caught up in the mix of all of this and because at this time it's really important for um you know our military to have naval bases that they can stop at so if
• 05:00 - 05:30 we're gonna go to war in the philippines which is yeah we need some more closer you know southeast asia we can't it's hard to get ships from our naval base in san francisco to the philippines so we need somewhere in between and fun fact there's a bunch of americans already there and so that's where this history i think really fits to like bring it in i'm sorry does the monarchy no longer exist yeah so okay so that brings us back to
• 05:30 - 06:00 the 1890s um the queen at the time is queen liliuokalani she is the like nailed how to pronounce that good for you she is the last of the hawaiian monarchy and um first of all she's the only woman polynesian woman mentioned in any of the state standards so that's i think interesting and it's it's really kind of like classic how u.s history treats
• 06:00 - 06:30 indigenous people it's like when white people bump up to indigenous people then they talk about so queen lily okalani is the queen of hawaii of the islands of hawaii when the united states wants to acquire hawaii as essentially this massive naval base for for our navy right to so that we can continue on to the philippines and to guam and to defend these new territories that we've
• 06:30 - 07:00 that we've acquired from spain um and and so she's sort of in the way and queen liliukilani is um basically asked to give up her spot she says no and they the u.s military surrounds her um mansion and what basically under threat is required to like sign
• 07:00 - 07:30 the necessary documents to surrender hawaii i mean her choices are basically do we go to war with the united states or do we just surrender and so it's not a like it's this is not like she she doesn't the situation is terrible and following her surrender she's actually under house arrest for a very long time she petitions to the president of the united states for years um and it's not until
• 07:30 - 08:00 the 90s mr shel stones is going to talk about this um wait the 1990s the 1990s so 100 years later bill clinton apologizes for how she was treated and that's important that it was acknowledged that this was a forcible overthrow of a government of a government of a queen the end of the monarchy of hawaii but um you know so what do we what do we do like how but that yeah hawaii still
• 08:00 - 08:30 state so like what are we doing here like what does that mean so queen liliuokalani is a very awesome topic in american history and there are lots of really great lesson plans that people have already made on her and we've got a bunch up on our website but what people haven't talked about are the first of all there are other hawaiian queens that are really cool and michelle stones talks about that and um and then of course there are white women coming over as missionaries in the years
• 08:30 - 09:00 prior to this so it's not like when the u.s military arrives at hawaii hawaiians have like never seen white people before right like no yeah and so so there's this long history of like captain cook and with with the english and um but then of course christians coming over to christianize the hawaiian people and so i feel so privileged because i learned so much about
• 09:00 - 09:30 this from her that i'd never that i'd never heard about um so let us start by having her introduce herself great i'm michelle stonis i teach u.s history and u.s women's history at glendale community college near los angeles i'm on the tenure track and i'm also a co-director and co-founder of a new program we're starting on campus with the pulitzer center campus consortium to focus on helping students to research gender so
• 09:30 - 10:00 that in that program that you're starting for uh researching gender that sounds incredible yeah it's actually part of a two-year 20 000 grant we are the first community college in the entire state of california to be part of the campus consortium um other colleges that are part of the campus consortium include georgetown and yale and community colleges throughout the country and it was just a great synergy between our journalism and history programs
• 10:00 - 10:30 to start bringing in education about gender for students who want to be reporters and need to have that context right as we see with journalism right now um right if you're writing about social activism you're writing about how women are treated in hollywood you're writing about the history of sexual assault you need to know the history it's not that past and so we're we're kind of joining forces to educate students and give them this really great opportunity that's really awesome how cool so
• 10:30 - 11:00 today we're going to talk about your research for your dissertation and it was on women's history and do you want to tell everybody a little bit about that to get us started sure so when i was in grad school i needed a project for a specific class that had to do with global history and i was just looking for a topic for a paper and i was part of an evangelical background and i had been a missionary myself and
• 11:00 - 11:30 through going to the dominican republic and southern india and mexico i had been a part of something bigger but also seen some things it didn't quite make sense to me and so my professor at the time uh recommended that i could choose missionaries in hawaii because it would count as a global topic without having to go too much into a topic that was in another language or a place i wasn't um necessarily interested in so the topic really stood out to me because i got to
• 11:30 - 12:00 start looking at the conception of gender and the more i started studying it the more curious i was and it just grew into something bigger that i had some questions about that's awesome and were they pretty supportive of i've talked to a few people who in pitching their research didn't kind of met resistance and were they pretty supportive of your research i think they were um ironically we had a faculty member who had uh done
• 12:00 - 12:30 her undergrad research at harvard on missionaries in hawaii so she was able to argue that it was still a pertinent topic right as historians and history teachers we need to remember we're also part of a broader social cultural movement of how history is studied and at least at that particular time studying religious history was kind of on the way out um i think we can see with what's happened at the capitol recently right that knowing the history of religious influence in our country and
• 12:30 - 13:00 how religion factors into politics into movements is really important um because my research focused more on gender i was able to kind of skirt around the idea that we were just talking about religion um we're talking about colonization religious practices and imperialization so those were really big topics that kind of anchored my work more than just religion so then of course i asked her the question that we always ask which is why is this not
• 13:00 - 13:30 being taught and i think on a very simple level the answer could be something like these women are coming over as wives so they're not coming over as the missionaries themselves and therefore they kind of get erased because they're not the ones being recorded okay um but i think she gives a much she gets into more of the important nuances of that so this is what she said i i want to say i think there's
• 13:30 - 14:00 something else going on there right and i think i was just watching a small clip um from annette gordon reed and she was in a different context because she was talking about slavery and the idea of teaching slavery and what you should be covering and she had this great quote where she said you know with a nation that was founded on the idea of freedom and freedom for everyone we have a really hard time as a people researching and learning and admitting
• 14:00 - 14:30 that we've also been a people a country that's taken freedom away and i i think maybe you know also too if you haven't learned this topic and you go on to write a book or you haven't learned this topic and you go on to be an editor at a textbook company it may not even be on your radar but it really should i mean a little bit of trivia right like this is you know you're ever on jeopardy this is the only monarchy that's part of us history right and this idea of the united states government
• 14:30 - 15:00 including its military and then with the cultural erosion of the missionaries i'm going to talk about the united states annexed a country that 97 of native hawaiians did not want to be annexed did not want to be americans so i think this is a really relevant topic not only in history but now like what do we do with a past when it's messed up what do we do i mean the united states government apologized for this
• 15:00 - 15:30 right it's public law 103 150. under president clinton he apologized on the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of hawaii but it's all words what do you do after the apology and so i think this is really relevant um history not only in the standards of talking about the great awakening and reform movement and empire building um but also this idea of imperialization and that history hasn't ended we're still in it and so i i think it brings up some really great questions
• 15:30 - 16:00 for students so it's really interesting that you mentioned a lot of your listeners are from the east coast because you may not know this actually history that starts in the east coast it starts in boston and so i i just want to take a minute and kind of explain the specific context of the missionaries who went but also like the broader context that they fit into and maybe if you're a teacher professor listening right now it helps you to see where this might fit in to what you already teach um so the missionaries who went um
• 16:00 - 16:30 were immediately impacted the immediate cause of them going was uh an hawaiian young man named henry a puka-haya and henry a puka-haya who they don't pronounce his name correctly can't pronounce his name correctly that's a whole other argument um call him henry ibuka and it was pretty common for wealthy or powerful royal children to be sent away from hawaii to become westernized
• 16:30 - 17:00 so this was already common they would go to china they would go to the east coast and so we're really not sure of how henry a puka haya this teenager ends up in cornwall connecticut but he does and eventually he will write his own book after he converts to christianity so that in itself is a primary source that needs to be read against the grain because he's going to tell us why he's telling these missionaries to
• 17:00 - 17:30 go and what he writes about and starts going on a speaking tour about is that you need to go speak to my people my people are lost um they're throwing babies into volcanoes which was not a common practice so he's really kind of taking a western view of traditional hawaiian religious practices or taboo like things that were off limits um particular foods and gender and he writes this book and goes on a speaking
• 17:30 - 18:00 tour well it's when he dies he becomes a martyr for the cause and now the missionaries under this new organization called i just tend to call it for students abc fm because they didn't think about marketing back then so it's a really long name so it's the american board of commissioners for foreign missions and so this missionary board had been created as an auxiliary of local church culture women were
• 18:00 - 18:30 actually really key in fundraising to send missionaries right this was part of like a deeper spiritual um understanding from the bible that according to matthew 28 you are supposed to go out unto the world and to spread the gospel so that that's coming from a religious prostilization background but actually the abc fm the very first place they decide to send missionaries is hawaii because of henry of pukahaya they had talked about india and china and later they will send
• 18:30 - 19:00 missionaries there but their very first missionary expedition is to what was called the sandwich islands because it was discovered that should be in quotes you can't see me in quotes by captain uh cook and so right they send these missionaries they leave if you like the bachelor it's the best story ever because these missionaries the men are the missionaries and they're told you have to find a wife because you have to remember too like there are already primary sources that have come
• 19:00 - 19:30 out of hawaii and different parts of polynesia uh whalers traitors sailors talking about oh yes there's you know naked hawaiian women this kind of wantonness that was associated with darker skin um chiefs had given their daughters as kind of um parting gifts or ways to kind of make treaties in a sense to white sailors traitors and whalers who'd been there so the missionary board's like we're gonna send some male missionaries
• 19:30 - 20:00 but you need a wife so they're literally just going like hey do you have a cousin do you have a friend and so there was like a mass marriage ceremony on the dock right before they step on the boat to go overseas so you're like wait what the heck that sounds what's going on so i think that's important to remember as we talk about missionary wives that they are going to be doing all of the work the same types of work in many cases as missionary men but they are
• 20:00 - 20:30 not the official missionaries they are the plus one so to become a missionary you have to become a wife if you're a woman at this stage so they leave boston they're east coasters october 1819 they spend 164 days on average at sea which sounds like pure hell to me um many of them uh go as newlyweds and by the time they arrive on the shore in march 1820 to the big island
• 20:30 - 21:00 they will be pregnant we will know from their sources that they are pregnant because they'll talk about being seasick and you can kind of count that you count back in their diary and realize when they started to talk about being seasick they were actually having morning sickness um and over the time of the mission they the abc fm will send 12 different groups known as companies so 12 different companies of missionaries um so that's kind of the story the official mission abc fm run mission in hawaii last from when
• 21:00 - 21:30 they arrived in 1820 until when they relinquished local control in 1863. so in 1863 they'll turn over the missionary work to native hawaiians who had been first or even second generation family converts um so really the influence of the mission is that 1820 to 1863 period i know that sounds like a lot of specific context and you're like wait is this going to be on the test but if you
• 21:30 - 22:00 pull back a little bit what you really see is this is something that's happening within the context of the second great awakening right the religious um prostitutization christian evangelical proserization movement that's sweeping over the east coast right those burned over districts and interim preachers these young people who are going to sign up as missionaries would have been living and swimming in that kind of culture this kind of culture of like hell and brimstone and you better go you only have so much time and i'm also
• 22:00 - 22:30 part of moral reform movements for women right women had very limited um social opportunities to kind of clean up the domestic sphere outside of the home right the home is where they have influence but outside of it so we start to see women right in the decades to come you know opening kindergartens eventually or you know fighting against um alcoholism and what we would call domestic abuse but this is the first
• 22:30 - 23:00 kind of movement of like wait if we're christian in our home and we can quote civilize our husbands and they would even say quote as a protection among savages right like bringing your plus one a wife is gonna make sure that you don't sin then women start to realize hey i have this niche role where i can go i've graduated from a female seminary school that had a religious background where all the male preachers and missionaries went i can be the plus one and maybe that
• 23:00 - 23:30 will give me a platform even though i'm simply as clarissa armstrong would say a common piece of household furniture here right like i'm just something that he needed to bring along um it's also pretty one of the lives she is a can i cuss she is a badass yeah clarissa armstrong is probably in our language one of the most liberal progressive missionary women that went um right there's a whole spectrum of behavior
• 23:30 - 24:00 by missionary women and she is probably the most liberal one um when her husband left kawaii how church maybe you've even been there because it's right on king street by a lot of the historical landmarks in honolulu a kauai church was where these missionaries would have been and when her husband who was the preacher there went to another island to preach he left her in charge which was totally taboo and so she is preaching on sunday mornings uh they'll let her get away with that for a small period of time because she's
• 24:00 - 24:30 only doing it in his absence but when he comes back and says you're doing a great job and sits in the front row all heck breaks loose and so other missionary women actually start a campaign with a petition to get her to resign they send it back to boston they get word back from boston that she is not only to step down but she is to apologize and she does so she is probably the most progressive in terms of gender role and really kind
• 24:30 - 25:00 of running with that negotiated space that she have has and this is also part of something that you might already teach manifest destiny the idea of like a foreign frontier right and what will happen to the american ingenuity and spirit if there's not a frontier to quote conquer and so hawaii has looked at that in this view at this time and also something called benevolent empire right benevolent kind of that religious um understanding of like i'm doing this for
• 25:00 - 25:30 you this is you know in the same way that white men were talking about kill the indians save the man this is was the idea of like this is religion and this is bringing our cultural culture over all in the same suitcase you may not like it at first but it's for your benefit like we're talking about eternal reward here so just sit down and so it's really part of these like broader movements even though it is kind of this religious history it's colonization imperialization
• 25:30 - 26:00 gender roles um what to do in cross cultural contact and really kind of the very negative influence of this missionary work although that was not their intention when they first went that's fascinating yeah it's also yeah it's intere like there's a lot of i love that you're bringing in manifest destiny and um even like you know this is industrialization and um you know i think about
• 26:00 - 26:30 the need to find more people to buy our stuff that we're making and like you know like there's a lot of things to connect to there for lesson plan ideas and how to teach women's history go to our website www.remedialhearstry.com you can also follow us on instagram or facebook if you think what we're doing is needed please consider joining our patreon community
• 26:30 - 27:00 through patreon you can sponsor a podcast with a small donation patrons get access to behind the scenes information gear and bonus episodes but more importantly patrons are putting their money where their mouth is and making a financial commitment to getting women's history into the k-12 curriculum we are so grateful to our patrons who sponsored this episode our herstory makers jeffrey our herstory heroes brooke and barbara our historians jamie
• 27:00 - 27:30 and ken and our allies nicole mark sarah leah thank you you guys make this show possible and to fast forward a little bit i mean the descendants of these missionaries the children and grandchildren of these original missionaries that went they're the ones that are going to buy
• 27:30 - 28:00 land going to start businesses gonna infiltrate the hawaiian government into uh different consulting positions and right it's the uh tariff on sugar right that later queen leolani is going to say like you can't come in this port anymore like for sugar even though you all want it because you're bringing small pox like my job's to protect my people and that's viewed as an act of aggression by foreign business owners including the united states and so although i want to be really
• 28:00 - 28:30 clear that these original missionaries there's no evidence that i've seen to date that they ever thought of their work as being this monumental they're not thinking you know in a couple decades this will be another star on the american flag they really do have what they think are pure intentions in terms of a religious motive and in terms of quote civilizing presence like americanization blending together like huzzah america right buy our goods dress our way
• 28:30 - 29:00 right they're going to teach missionary wives teach hawaiian women to sew if you go to hawaii and you see all the beautiful quilts in the bishop museum that those skills for quilting were taught by these missionary women but the kind of um the negative outcome the unintended consequence of this kind of infiltration without cultural sensitivity really did erode and eradicate very important parts
• 29:00 - 29:30 of hawaiian civilization and that is one reason this is very controversial to study it is not a popular topic with most um because really missionaries have been these particular missionaries abc fm missionaries have been very vilified because fast forward and it's literally those same last names overthrowing queenly leo kalani you know maybe you've read about lauren a thurston um lauren a thurston
• 29:30 - 30:00 was the grandson of the very first one of the very first missionary couples that landed in 1820 in fact lucy thurston is the one that started that uh campaign to get clarissa armstrong to sit down so right like you just see all these different personalities and different interpretations of religion different interpretations of what they would call scripture but um yeah this is is not something that's always um
• 30:00 - 30:30 looked at in a positive view it's really hard and i definitely understand and agree it's really hard to separate when your culture has been taken over and your country's been annexed by force looking back and going well i'm so glad they came right i do think it's like it's just incredible that these women were brave enough to sign like you live in boston and you're going to go to like i flew i flew to hawaii yeah it took me forever
• 30:30 - 31:00 to get there from boston like 14 it was like oh and i should add that i was doing it with a baby a baby which is pure madness it was madness fun fact infants don't do time changes oh no no no no nothing that's nothing they can't adjust so now i learned that way going to california it's like 3 2 3 a.m in hawaii and my son is like what's up what are we doing
• 31:00 - 31:30 and breakfast is now and breakfast and bedtime's at five no but these women are do not have the luxuries of modern travel they are going to be taking ships to hawaii and they're like yeah sounds good i'm leaving my family my life my baby's hawaii from boston on the ship oh you go south like you have to go around yeah and i because there's no the panama canal is not a thing is not a thing yet so these women are going down and around
• 31:30 - 32:00 south america oh my god yeah they're going towards like no okay yeah that's a long boat ride that's a long boat ride how many died like there had to be like a seafaring murderous trip i can't imagine so these women are signing up in some cases to marry people that they don't know and granted definitions of like wife and marriage
• 32:00 - 32:30 are very different in this time it's very much like these are this is the man who's gonna provide for you more than anything else and um and you're gonna like serve you know and and bear children and do all the the mothering things um but they're like signing up for that and going and i think that's just fascinating um yeah it is very similar to the virginia colony of like the british sending women over yeah
• 32:30 - 33:00 yeah absolutely so i as i'm listening to her i'm sitting there going okay i need to know what it would be like to be one of these women like is there anything what does it end up oh yeah and so what does it end up being like and and this is what she said so one of the questions you had for me was what was it like to be a missionary wife what it was like to be a missionary wife really varied among women right there is no monolithic woman's experience there's no monolithic
• 33:00 - 33:30 gendered experience just like there's no monolithic missionary women or wife experience but one way i teach it to my students because i'm always a fan of trying to make things easily digestible and memorable is uh the women they were like a mop so mop they're like a mop and i get a little snarky sometimes because it just makes it fun right and personality comes out which is like they're there to shine it all up they're there to clean it all up
• 33:30 - 34:00 they're not the important part they are the cleanup crew and so the m in mop stands for mother so to become a missionary wife almost meant especially in this time in american history but for these religious women in particular it's going to mean becoming a mother and these women came from very big families and they're going to have very big families so if you're a mom like me listening you're probably already gonna be exhausted because these women had on average eight to ten kids it's very normal i
• 34:00 - 34:30 know so basically what you can do and this is pretty common in the middle of the 19th century for uh white um at least middle class women um is they're going to be pregnant or nursing every two and a half years for all of their child bearing years so approximately whenever they get married to about 40 something it's a long freaking time um so clarissa armstrong who i
• 34:30 - 35:00 already mentioned she had 10 children laura fish judd her journal you can get it on amazon if you're interested if you want some good night time reading it's fascinating laura fish judd had eight oh sorry i'm sorry nine children and she will write about like i need help i need a babysitter i can't do all of this and so she actually will hire native hawaiian caretakers to help with her children and that was very controversial at the
• 35:00 - 35:30 time because you have to remember this generation of women believes in blank slate children so why would you in their minds why would you bring a quote heathen around your child in the first five years of life they're going to become that way so to become a wife meant to become a mother lucy thurston who i already mentioned she will be doing a bible study with hawaiian women and want to keep her children away from those hawaiian women so badly
• 35:30 - 36:00 that she within a wall she built a little door and she has hawaiian women on one side doing bible study and her children on the other and she will go back and forth through that door to keep them separated so they're very different ideas about just like now how to be a good mom what children need but also these really racist infused ideas that uh culture and race somehow rub off on your children um so that sounds
• 36:00 - 36:30 funny because as a teacher you want your students to know that you like care and love them and support them and she's literally saying to them like you are so heaviness that i can't bring you around my children yeah she's like brb i'll be right back study that right and so i mean that has to do too right the whole history of science the history of childhood at this time right the history
• 36:30 - 37:00 of psychology and what they understand the concept of um i mean eventually this is a little bit early but like eugenics how your mind works tied to race i mean there's a lot here right even though we're kind of going oh this is so ridiculous a door in between two rooms um and i would call that very racist right and not all women did that but that is the length to which some of these missionary women would go to negotiate these multiple
• 37:00 - 37:30 roles at one time like how do we how do i be a mom and fill in the blank yeah so mop so that's m o would be overlooked and i would say they're overlooked then and they're overlooked now right typically if it's not in our textbook or there's not a podcast about it we're busy teachers and professors we don't have time to go research everything in archives um these women were accomplished in their own right they were not just wives or plus ones they learned the hawaiian language
• 37:30 - 38:00 by the way missionaries are the ones who created the written hawaiian language right you go across the ocean uh for 164 days to quote try and save people only to realize that they have an oral tradition how are they going to read your bible so these abc fm missionaries are the ones that create the written language start printing the bible bring over the first printing press on the islands so they learned the hawaiian language they taught the hawaiian language and the bible they opened schools they
• 38:00 - 38:30 taught bible studies often which was controversial at the time because they will teach men and this is a period right of like promiscuous crowds right like women are supposed to be with women and they're gonna teach hawaiian women how to sew how to quilt um going to be graduates of prestigious female schools they're going to help for example example laura fish judd helped her husband who was the doctor with medicine she didn't have a license
• 38:30 - 39:00 at the time she's just helping um and almost like eliza hamilton they're gonna write their husbands records they're gonna write their stories so i think it's important to call them wives to keep in mind of how limited they were at the time and how they were viewed but what they actually did with that role that opportunity on what they would call a foreign frontier was much more expansive than just being a mop so mother overlooked and then last one's pressured
• 39:00 - 39:30 um i don't know if any other mom feels like this during the pandemic but i can relate um one of the quotes that they talk about the way that they talk about heaven is quote mansions of eternal blessedness it almost sounds like a life game like are you going to the mansions of eternal blessedness you're like where is it but they really have this kind of internal perspective that life is all about the eternal it's all about later and so this work that you're doing is
• 39:30 - 40:00 eternal importance right these women will write and many of them will write in their journals many of which have now been published not all um but they'll talk about why would i do the laundry all day when i can go teach someone the gospel why would i do the dishes all day if i can go help a queen and get that kind of influence and spread this word and so really they're trying to balance housework and family and missionary work and gen over all that the umbrella is
• 40:00 - 40:30 gendered ideas about what women are supposed to do so i'll kind of wrap up with this lucy thurston she wrote home once to the abc fm and it almost is like a dorothy moment from wizard of oz of like you're not in kansas anymore she basically says we're not in kansas anymore she's like um off the top of my head she says a northern constitution cannot flourish here this is for you east coasters
• 40:30 - 41:00 she's like how we were back there you wouldn't last a day here it's it won't work how do you fill in the blank how do you not have caretakers in your home like how how would you get the laundry done how would you do these things so she talks a lot about almost in a sense apologizing or trying to appease critics of like you know woe is me i may be this role but you don't know what it's like
• 41:00 - 41:30 and so there's a lot of pressure from all different sides and that's what my research focused on was the double bind that these missionary women felt that simultaneously they could never win they could never fully appease the abc fm board and all the directives of what they were supposed to do and live up to their own aspirations and their own interpretations of what christianity meant to them right if you're reading about a jesus in the bible and this is historical to this time i'm not talking about now but if you're reading in the bible there
• 41:30 - 42:00 like you better go tell people and then you have a missionary board that says you are to be an example a vivifying and um exquisite example of the virtue that christianity imparts on the female character aka stand there look pretty and just look christian i suppose i don't know how that works and so right these these women are constantly trying to negotiate but never fully appeasing one side or the other they live in this limbic space
• 42:00 - 42:30 as a mop as a mother who's overlooked and pressured but also doing missionary work that's a really i like your uh mop you like mops yeah i like the the language like you know bit there that i think that's a really great way um and probably a lot of women in history felt like mops um but especially women on the frontier and even um even in hawaii which is funny you
• 42:30 - 43:00 know like obviously that's the frontier i would i have such a western-centered vision of what frontier means let's be honest right that's a western western-centric way to talk about it right in the same way that uh native and americans indigenous people here were not discovered nor too were hawaiians sitting there going oh great we are our frontier or who will come like they had their own language their own traditions
• 43:00 - 43:30 they had their own monetary systems they had um affiliations of islands where the king had you know created different we would call like nations so they were civilized um right this group is going in and saying basically we're gonna demolish all of it like we will make fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings as if there weren't already those things there so it is a very eurocentric white eurocentric white western view and i want to be clear to
• 43:30 - 44:00 why i keep saying why is because there was only one person of color who served on the entire abc fm mission the official mission um let's be clear native hawaiians came over as like um guides or assistants um but they were known as native hawaiians and they weren't viewed as part of like the congregational or presbyterian church per se that was like bred through these seminaries to become missionaries
• 44:00 - 44:30 um harvard graduates princeton graduates um there was one woman and she was a black woman who came over single and her name is betsy stockton and there's a lot of work to do on her if i were in grad school now and had the time this is probably where i would put my effort is to researching her um betsy stockton uh was born in 1798 and she went over as a single woman who was a teacher
• 44:30 - 45:00 but because she was black she had to go as almost i guess the word would be a charge or like a ward of a white man who was the official missionary and his wife and she was to help with the housework and to help with the children but then she could also be this educator on the side she was a formerly enslaved woman who was owned by the president of princeton university asheville greene so it's been really interesting i would say maybe in the
• 45:00 - 45:30 last 10 years princeton's been doing a lot of kind of its own soul-searching and work about its legacy with slavery and here you have this connection right there to like a prominent institution of this woman she never got married on the mission uh some women single women were sent over to be replacements so if a woman of a wife died on the mission field you as a man either had to go back to the mainland find a wife and come back or often what the abc fm did was sent
• 45:30 - 46:00 over single women who wanted to be missionaries and it's like here's your bachelor paradise moment and it's like pick one and but betsy stockton wasn't sent over there right and that's race too she's not sent over to become someone's wife because she's black um and so there's a lot of research to do there about like well how did she get free and how did she feel about her freedom how did she feel about um the way in which she was treated um she was very well respected and ended up becoming
• 46:00 - 46:30 an educator in princeton in philadelphia but she that's why i continuously say right we're really talking about white eastern specific denominations in christianity it's our history needs to be specific right place in time and so that's part of our this location for our studies yeah so i would love to know a little bit about um you know indigenous um perspectives of people that were there
• 46:30 - 47:00 if you came across some of that um you've talked a bit about you know how these people are coming in to um transform this society that's already pretty robust and i would love to know more about what's there i think that's a great way to kind of view this work right even when we're kind of stuck or focusing on a specific group it's always important that we pull back for the broader
• 47:00 - 47:30 view of who was already there how did they relate cross-culturally and and what were reactions of people who had already made as we've talked about a culture had their own religious traditions their own monarchy so on and so forth um the reception really varied and i want to be very honest i think it's important that historians do um that i'm very limited in this area because i don't speak native hawaiian so when i was in grad school many many
• 47:30 - 48:00 years ago um there were no apps to learn language and there was no online school for that um i don't think there was online school so i remember calling i know i remember calling the university of hawaii and asking how do i learn the hawaiian language and they said we'll come here and i said well that's not really possible for me um so what i have read about native hawaiian reaction i want to be clear is from an interpreted standpoint even if it's a primary source it's been
• 48:00 - 48:30 interpreted into english um i don't read or write hawaiian um part of the reception varies um if we think of it as a spectrum uh the king uh king lee hollyho uh also known as kamehameha ii um he is is the k the king at the time when the missionaries land in march of 1820 and i guess we could say he kind of sees the writing on the wall and he's very skeptical when they land
• 48:30 - 49:00 um he places them on probation he monitors them closely he denies their request for land like permanent land um realizing that land is power and it's also once it's given away you can't always get it back easily and so he will give them a very small track of land and say you all have to live together um so if you've been to honolulu or if you're interested it's called the mission houses the mission houses museum the mission houses archive and that is why all the original
• 49:00 - 49:30 families the seven uh white uh couples who went not the four hawaiian young men who went with them but the seven so there's 14 make me do math um there's 14 of them they're all going to live in the same house and they each will have their own room and you can tour that house so right then we already see gendered notions starting to break down like how are you domestic when suddenly you're living in a small room and you're basically living in a co-op right and so the women start negotiating
• 49:30 - 50:00 like who's gonna do laundry and who's gonna watch kids um so lee holy ho really was kind of representative of the hawaiian population that was very skeptical that saw right like 40 some odd years before you have captain cook and his men kidnapping a king and so that's like recent memory so they're like we're not too sure about these white people coming and what they're selling so we're just gonna keep them at arm's length um on the other side i would save like official hawaiian reception would be a queen ka
• 50:00 - 50:30 amanu and she's actually a co-regent we might use the word like co-queen so she is actually ruling at the same time as king liholiho and she was the um favorite wife of kamehameha the first many wives and she had a lot of political power so she's a very powerful influential native hawaiian woman she's i mean if you think about it right here i hadn't really crossed my mind before
• 50:30 - 51:00 this really we're talking about two sides of a coin and it's also like two sides of this particular monarchy uh there are many different chiefs and chief esses um and ali'i which means like powerful influential people but they really are the head and one side's saying oh no no keep them at arm's length and queen kamehameha or i'm sorry queen kahamanu welcomes the missionaries particularly the women as she learns skills from them like sewing uh she talks about enjoying spending her
• 51:00 - 51:30 time with them like socializing um and she according to laura fish judd's uh journal laura fish judd wrote she treated us like pet children and she'll write about how she was uh quote always in her lap that this um kind of assuming very large hawaiian woman was constantly kind of picking up these psych frail uh white missionary wives who are up to
• 51:30 - 52:00 their necks in victorian clothing and kind of just you know moving them around and um but i think that's within that spectrum there's lots of different reactions in between um and to my knowledge um and from my own research right people follow along that spectrum there of how they feel about the missionaries coming that's a really cool i have enjoyed learning about the monarchy and i do think it's really
• 52:00 - 52:30 neat that women ruled do you know why she was co-regent with her husband like why like so if we kind of backtrack a little bit right before and this is really context for when the missionaries arrive in march of 1820 uh kamehameha the first who had solidified power over um all of the hawaiian islands and became like the king we would probably use that term right but he's he's the head chief but king kamehameha
• 52:30 - 53:00 the first um he died a couple months before they arrived and so his heir is liholiho his son who then is called kamehameha ii well queen ka manu was very powerful in her own right but she was also a really big advocate for abolishing the kapu system and kapu is just a hawaiian word for taboo so there was a lot of under kamehameha the first there was a lot of religious practice
• 53:00 - 53:30 and social practice that had to do with keeping the gender separate so there were many things that women could not do there were foods that women could not eat like coconut or banana or certain kinds of pig um and it was thought it was those foods were associated with the gods so the thought of a woman eating them somehow made her more powerful so it was really a way to kind of create this we would like a feudal society or a hierarchy um and uh queen ka amanu
• 53:30 - 54:00 as his favorite wife when he passed away kind of just let it rip and was like we need to get rid of all of this like he died there's new position in power and really by abolishing the kapu system when it ends it leaves a religious void so it creates space for native hawaiian women it creates space for something a new religious understanding to come in and then here comes this like shipful of like overly eager seminary graduates right who are like hey we we have the
• 54:00 - 54:30 answer for you um as to why she was his favorite i haven't done that research um he had many wives which was very common and she will actually rule with two of them so she will rule with kamehameha the second who is liholiho and kamehameha the third um and then she passes away so she really kind of makes a space for herself and i think one of the questions you had asked of you are familiar with queen lee leo kalani from the end of the 19th century but
• 54:30 - 55:00 she was the only one who's like a polynesian woman in many state standards and i really think queen ka amanu would be a really great look to kind of look at the 19th century as two different bookends of like where women kind of start and where they kind of go um she really had a lot of power at a time in which it was just coming into its own for native hawaiian women to be viewed as godlike to be viewed as like so for
• 55:00 - 55:30 example one of the things she would do right we call this like civil disobedience now is like she would just go around eating a banana now i don't know about you but i don't really look at banana like eating a banana is like a work of social activism but that's what she did to break that particular cup and i kind of my interpretation of it would be the more she started to do these things after her husband died it was like wait she ate the banana and nothing happened right and so just eat the banana
• 55:30 - 56:00 i think that could be on our bumper stickers also like if you were in hawaii i feel like being denied bananas and coconut would be like the worst thing and taro taro is like um a traditional hawaiian food and it's grown there right and and made many dishes are made from it and they were not allowed to eat that so i i kind of support just like eating things as an act of social resistance and probably should host that zoom
• 56:00 - 56:30 for us now right like what are we not having because society tells us not to um and so yeah she she kind of not only warmly received them but she would be a really great further study there are sketches of her there are secondary sources of her and there are primary sources primarily written by missionary women that's fascinating yeah i'm really grateful to like add another person to to know um to my to my list
• 56:30 - 57:00 and of course the names of these missionary wives i'm jotting them all down over here so and i would say too and maybe just a little bit of encouragement i remember when i first started writing in grad school and i would go to conferences and i was really and i think rightfully so insecure about saying some of these names because i've always struggled learning language i was made fun of in high school for not speaking language correctly when i was learning
• 57:00 - 57:30 and i don't speak native hawaiian and it's a very you know linguistically challenging at least to me um language and without formal training it really felt like colonizing language and so one of the things i did i mean now we have videos but back then we didn't is do the research and listen to someone pronounce it or what i would do is i called the bishop museum many times and whatever that is for you with what you're teaching i called the bishop museum i asked for a docent right a volunteer someone who's very
• 57:30 - 58:00 eager to tell what they know and i said hi i'm writing a paper on this could i practice saying this name with you and i remember having to say ka amanu like 20 times and i probably still don't say it correctly but that knowledge is out there but i think if we as educators are honest and what our limitations are and tell our students then that gives them the permission to start practicing and trying new things too none of us know it all or pronounce everything correctly and we're kind of gatekeeping when we go around correcting everyone so yeah these native hawaiian
• 58:00 - 58:30 words and their spellings can be very challenging um but practice makes better yeah i think that's a really great message yes i mean i can't tell you how many times in class i've come across a name and i've been like um you know and even even names that you would think are are sort of like white european or something i still struggle with oh okay so um
• 58:30 - 59:00 what would you say is like the most important takeaway that you have from your research i really appreciate that question about the most important takeaway because i think in anything we're learning about even if it's just to make our own curriculum or to write a dissertation or a book or even just something you're posting on social media there's always immediate implications and then broader
• 59:00 - 59:30 implications so i think the immediate implications uh is understanding that women have always found subversive ways to negotiate prescribed gender roles although their success and impact of doing so has varied widely so i think you can kind of take that and and look across the board at these different women who came in the 12 companies there wasn't one way to be a missionary wife they weren't all rooting for clarissa armstrong or building doors like lucy thurston um and this is why i think as history
• 59:30 - 60:00 educators we often tell our students that's oversimplified right it's complicated um but i think a broader implication is thinking about how gender now and has always been a cultural and social construct like what it means during this period of time what it means for these particular um christian women what it means to be masculine or feminine is very much rooted in their own religiosity and the time period and they're they're
• 60:00 - 60:30 standing as white women from america um right it's not that long ago that women were put in jail for wearing bathing suits that showed shoulders or not allowed to come in court in pants and so i think this is kind of if you have the luxury of teaching that like i do in college is trying to open students eyes that gender in many ways is a cultural construct so what is it now like how can you eat that banana now and really kind of thinking about harmful
• 60:30 - 61:00 ways in which ngos like non-government organizations including missionaries like how that work should be done so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past right we don't go in like these abc fm missionaries and change the laws in these villages and say you can't come to church unless you are dressed like this and it was victorian clothing in the humidity of hawaii right or you can't go surfing
• 61:00 - 61:30 because you're lazy so you're gonna take your surfboard break it in half and come to our schools i think there's like broader implications to really think through how do we serve in a world that needs service right there's still people in our our world that don't have fresh water but how do we do that in a way that is culturally sensitive and mutually beneficial and an example that comes to mind in fact i was just listening to another podcast is father gregory boyle who is a
• 61:30 - 62:00 catholic priest and he started service in bolivia and he's the founder of maybe you've heard of homeboy industries they have salsa and foods and they're right here in la where i am and he talks about that when you enter a culture you should go to in you don't go to change other people you go to blend in to where no you go to live just go to
• 62:00 - 62:30 live among them and help them how you can right and so i think this gives us a broader framework to talk about how do we do service because it's not black or white of like oh well we shouldn't help anyone because we're colonizing i don't think that's true because we are in a very affluent country we have a lot of wealth even some of the poorest among us if we have a lot to share but how do we do that in a way that doesn't colonize and erase and subjugate and diminish what already
• 62:30 - 63:00 exists somewhere else because that's beautiful too so as she was talking i was starting to realize that some of the chronology was blurring a little bit there for me okay so i asked her to put it in order because there are also and this is something that i i imagine a lot of us history teachers would would teach about um there are pineapple plantations there which is where the united states actually gets a lot of our pineapple and our sugar and
• 63:00 - 63:30 those plantations in some cases were being run by american businesses and um and then of course these missionaries are coming over for christian purposes and um and then of course the united states is interested in hawaii for like military purposes yeah and so so timeline yeah put all those things in order for me and anyway so this is what she said okay so the order i love this i feel like it's like on a final exam
• 63:30 - 64:00 right though or if you're talking about eurocentric white influence it would start with captain cook and the british yeah and then it would be whalers traders and merchants right kind of that economic but that's coming and going by the way that's like killing the whale getting the sandalwood and leaving it's not permanent settlement and then it's missionaries uh the first missionaries there were actually catholic
• 64:00 - 64:30 the next group of missionaries are the ones we're talking about which are evangelical christian so specifically uh presbyterian congregationalist dutch reform and then the lds the latter-day saint missionaries come after and right around that time so if you think um smack dab in the middle of the 19th century so about 1850 1860 as this mission is kind of ramping down that's when you have the second generation of missionary
• 64:30 - 65:00 children and foreign influence staying right so they've grown up and now they're gonna stay and go get a little plot of land and they're gonna decide to grow fill in the blank you also have other um business people and farmers coming in at this time right the japanese are going to come in later but right it's the descendants of these missionaries who stay and kind of start influencing laws to say foreigners can own land right foreigners can own land okay that gets
• 65:00 - 65:30 passed great now foreigners can own land uh foreigners don't have to pay like foreign taxes right like we can just we're native hawaiians we're going to sell it as if we're native hawaiians so just starting to recreate the hawaiian government in their own image and making it beneficial for them and yes sand sanford sanford b dole maybe that sounds familiar the cousin um right of eventually what becomes the dole empire they're gonna have a lot of land
• 65:30 - 66:00 in power and sanford b dole helps to overthrow the hawaiian government under queen lilo kalani right so i have been to hawaii a couple times i have not done the pineapple tour yet i will probably be a total bummer to go with because it's sad it's sad to me you're like whoa dole whip i'm like whoa colonization and erratic eradication of a a native culture right like the idea of
• 66:00 - 66:30 what it means to be hawaiian now is so politicized and wrapped up because hawaii has become a state right and so there's a lot of different influences at the end of the 19th century you have the spanish-american war the united states was very happy that they had pearl harbor not thinking fast forward ahead to world war ii so that idea of like foreign english influence coming but going like trading and leaving then permanent settlement
• 66:30 - 67:00 through missionaries um and then right around the end of that is like we're gonna stay and we're gonna like build it how we want and then fast forward yeah we're gonna get this queen out of here like she's a problem she's closing ports and right after that it's oh well this is really convenient because with imperialization the spanish-american war right um trick question hawaii is the only acquisition at the end of the 19th century that wasn't through war it's not a spoil of the spanish-american
• 67:00 - 67:30 war it was taken under the cloak of the spanish-american war a huge distraction that's fascinating thank you for like talking me through that chronology because i i feel like it's like fragments in in my understanding rather than like a clear storyline and that's that bit to the beginning because i imagine there's others that are similar and that's where you can start to think about well how would i how would i do this in my class i have so much to teach
• 67:30 - 68:00 um but maybe if you're teaching the spanish-american war you throw in a little activity about uh the pineapple plantations and who's working on the pineapple plantations at the end of the 19th century and where are they getting their water and how are the japanese treated and you know who's selling it and profiting off of what were indigenous native hawaiian lands and so those things will kind of open up bigger broader conversations which you could even relate to today
• 68:00 - 68:30 about climate change about the stealing of water like happens here in california water's stolen from central california and comes right here to los angeles so you could start to bring in those more thinking project based questions by introducing a very brief conversation and i'm sure there are videos online or a very quick tutorial about like what would you have done how do you think this should be happen what do we do now that there's an um hawaiian sovereignty movement there has
• 68:30 - 69:00 been since hawaii uh was taken over and so what do we do do we give hawaii back do we right like what is that conversation and it's really nuanced and i'm glad i don't have to figure it out but i work with my students and we explore those conversations of what does it mean to write american history not to rewrite it it is what it is but how do we make it right and how do we harm the least amount of people in making it right again
• 69:00 - 69:30 but um the un flag is flown there in hawaii if you've been there maybe you've seen like howie's go home on someone's bumper sticker or billboard or you see the american flag flying upside down which is a sign of a nation in distress do you see the un flag flying what they're saying is we were illegally taken over the u.s government already admitted it in 1993 so what's going on so as we sit here as a nation and we
• 69:30 - 70:00 talk about democracy and freedom this very moment we are still holding a people right we can go to the uh queen kahamanu shopping center which is a real thing but many of us don't even know this history and we don't think twice when we decide to fly over so we're going to put a lesson up on our website though that gets at this history all right the women who ventured off into sort of this unknown and had
• 70:00 - 70:30 really rich interactions with native hawaiian women prior to us you know military interests in this area yeah and it gives you know like i said at the beginning it gives that context to the hawaiian people before the us is really there and there is you know because there is so much to know about hawaii prior to the united states and like most
• 70:30 - 71:00 indigenous people you know that sort of gets erased in usa until we white people come up against that right right and granted these are missionaries but in a lot of cases they're helping to to make records of yeah that real that that hawaiian history and so um and so i think that's that's really important absolutely very interesting to read about yeah cool well thanks kelsey this is a good one oh
• 71:00 - 71:30 thanks bro i'm brooke sullivan i'm kelsey eckert see you next time thanks so much for listening to remedial her story the other 50 please subscribe rate and review wherever you listen to your podcast to bring more voices to the conversation we really appreciate that effort until next time
• 71:30 - 72:00 you