‘Unfamiliar Fishes’ by Sarah Vowell resurrects Hawaiian histories
By Lani Kwon
HONOLULU—Bestselling author Sarah Vowell’s latest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, achieves what most overviews of historical events do not: an incredibly well-researched and surprisingly balanced account of the past that also makes you laugh out loud.
Vowell attributes cause and effect and not just blame for what she so wittily describes as a “four-month orgy of imperialism” (3) in 1898, in which the United States went to war against Spain and invaded the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, and then illegally annexed the independent Kingdom of Hawai`i.
No one escapes Vowell’s insightful appraisal without taking responsibility for their part in history, including Captain Cook, whalers, sailors and other explorers, traders, workers and merchants, U.S. presidents and other world leaders, Protestant missionaries and their offspring, Native Hawaiian commoners and even ali‘i, such as King David Kalākaua, with his penchant for gambling, trusting the wrong people and scandal which, in part, eventually led to his downfall (200).
Vowell looks at this period in our collective history and its impact up to the present day with a storyteller’s ability to bring to life the human beings involved and a political scientist’s ability to dissect and lay bare previous assumptions, manipulations, and outright lies about what really happened when America first became an international superpower.
She begins the book with a description of a typical experience in the Islands: “A banyan tree in Waikiki is a fine spot for a sunburned tourist from New York City to sit beneath and ponder the historical implications of a lukewarm box of takeout. Because none of us belong here—not me, not the macaroni, not the chicken soaked in soy sauce, not even the tree. Like a lot of people and things in these islands, banyans are imports from somewhere else” (1).
This personal vignette aptly symbolizes the unique multicultural influences in Hawai‘i by contrasting the oddity of finding different foods from different parts of the world on the same plate being eaten by an American writer from New York City under a tree that is originally from India. This cultural diversity is, of course, a result of the sugar and pineapple plantations and the importation of cheap labor from all over the world in the 18th and 19th centuries; but rather than simply list the numbers and countries and impact each group had on our island chain, as past historical accounts tend to do. Vowell describes this blending of foreign cultures, people and traditions in a fresh and humorous way.
As a fellow writer, I admire Vowell’s adeptness with language, her detailed research and her ability to tell a cohesive story about Hawai‘i with its many seemingly disparate threads. She adroitly sums up two centuries of exponential change by tapping into original source material, which she researched at the Bishop Museum Archives, Hawai‘i State Archives, Hawaiian Historical Society, Judiciary History Center, ‘Iolani Palace, Mission Houses Museum, and elsewhere.
Furthermore, Vowell interviews numerous contemporary sources, such as Noelle Kahanu at the Bishop Museum, Hawaiian historian Keanu Sai, and other local people, including bus drivers in Honolulu, who each in their own way hold keys to better understanding the complex and diverse story of Hawai‘i.
Without flinching she critiques the political, social, and economic implications of the illegal annexation of an independent kingdom by another nation, as well as the religious influence of a sect of Christianity over Native Hawaiian traditions.
Vowell also states, however, that many of the ancient traditions and kapu system were already in the process of transformation, due to contact with other outsiders and internal Hawai‘ian political and social changes, such as when King Kamehameha’s widows, Queen Ka‘ahumanu and Queen Keōpūolani, broke the kapu against men and women eating together in public prior to the landing of the American missionaries in 1820 (54-56).
The early-1800s were a time of swift and lasting transformation brought about, first, by the introduction of foreign sailors, whalers and traders, and, later, American missionaries and their customs to Hawai‘i. She wryly points out the conflicting tensions and interests that have brought (and still bring) visitors to Hawai‘i’s shores:
“The Hawaiian people, with their ancient balance between spiritual beliefs and earthly pleasure, were suddenly freed of or in need of an official religion, depending on one’s point of view, and about to entertain swarms of haole gate-crashers representing opposing sides of America’s schizophrenic divide—Bible-thumping prudes and sailors on leave. Imagine if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted the Values Voter Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years” (103).
With her snarky observations about missionary zeal and horny seamen, she elevates what would otherwise be dry and boring historical commentary into satire. She comments not only on the history of conflicting interests, but also on contemporary commerce. Add to that the obvious strategic military value of a set of habitable islands in the middle of the Pacific and the desire for a staging ground for conflicts in Asia, and there’s a recipe for colonialism and exploitation, along with capitalism and cultural exchange.
Yet, while she has a fondness for the absurdity and foibles of human nature, she does not take lightly the impact all of this had on the Native Hawaiian inhabitants. She discusses the impact of multiple diseases imported by sailors, traders, and immigrants alike, which caused illness, infertility, and death:
“The Hawaiian population in 1778 when Captain Cook landed in Kauai has been estimated at over 300,000. The 1890 census recorded 34,436 pure Hawaiians. As with natives of the Americas after European contact, the runaway death rate can be attributed to outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, influenza, typhoid, measles, and venereal disease” (123).
Thus, the Native Hawaiian population is decimated in a little over a century, and this has lasting consequences for the survivors who are disenfranchised in a coup d’état in 1898.
In fact, the title of the book, Unfamiliar Fishes, comes from a reference to David Malo, a 19th century Native Hawaiian historian, minister, and author of the seminal book on ancient Hawaiian culture and traditions, Hawaiian Antiquities. In his letter to his fellow Native friends, near the end of his life, Malo wrote of his despair over what Vowell calls “the rising tide of haoles as the Hawaiians died and kept on dying” (138):
“If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up. The white man’s ships have arrived with clever men from the big countries. They know our people are few in number and our country is small, they will devour us” (138-139).
Malo compares foreign interests in Hawai‘i to big and alien fish that will swallow up the smaller native fishes. He bemoans the State of Hawai‘i’s people, who have been decimated by disease and disenfranchised by cunning interlopers with their own agendas and priorities. He foresees a dangerous and dark time ahead for his people that does, indeed, come to pass.
Vowell is unafraid to tackle these controversial issues, including the matter of “stolen” versus “legally bought and sold” (depending upon one’s point of view) Hawaiian homelands (158-160). She argues that, while technically legal in the sense that the land was offered by the Hawaiian Monarchy to be privatized and sold, the mostly American lawmakers of the time –– many of whom are the children and grandchildren of the original missionaries –– happened to be the very people who had the capital, power, and cultural precedent of the concept of land ownership, which was quite literally foreign to Hawaiian thinking.
These are also many of the individuals who later had a vested interest in the annexation of an independent country. These businessmen used propaganda and smear tactics to claim that the people of Hawai‘i wanted annexation and were oppressed by the monarchy. However, Vowell points out that Native Hawaiian activists of that time had actually gathered more than 20,000 signatures on a petition to prevent annexation in 1897 and that Queen Lili‘oukalani and four Hawaiian delegates carried these petitions to Washington D.C. and U.S. Congress and “were successful in lobbying lawmakers to defeat the treaty” that would have legally annexed Hawai‘i (216-219).
So, instead, President William McKinley –– who supported Hawai‘i’s annexation, and who had written: “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny” (221-222)––introduced a “flimsy, barely legal joint resolution as a way of getting around the fact that President McKinley could not have achieved a proper treaty of annexation because he didn’t have enough votes in Congress ...” (222).
Thus, the annexation of the independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i is still controversial and still being contested today –– in courts of law, in protests and demonstrations, and in written works like Vowell’s book –– by scholars, politicians, and activists alike.
As any good writer would, Vowell admits to her own biases up front, as well as throughout the book, being an American of mixed blood herself, the descendent of not only Mid-Western Swedish stock but also Cherokee blood:
“I suppose the double-sided way I see the history of Hawaii—as a painful tale of native loss combined with an idealistic multiethnic saga symbolized by mixed plates in which soy sauce and mayonnaise peacefully coexist and congeal—tracks with how I see the history of the United States in general. I am the descendant of Cherokees who were marched at gunpoint by the U.S. Army to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears ... I am also, and mostly, the descendants of European immigrants, notably Swedish peasants who left for Kansas for the same reason Asian and Portuguese plantation workers sailed for Hawaii. ... Growing up, I came to know America as two places –– a rapacious country built on the destruction of its original inhabitants and a welcoming land of opportunity and generosity ...” (9).
Like most Americans, Vowell is a hyphenated-American with a rich and varied ethnic heritage. She is simultaneously torn and confused by her allegiances to her family and country, while also personified and unified by them. Similarly, confessing to my own biases here, as a middle-class, hapa girl who grew up on the islands of O‘ahu and Maui, not of Native Hawaiian blood but reared with Hawaiian spirit, I can’t help but wonder at the selective blindness of my own Asian-Caucasian-American ‘ohana.
In several generations, they made their way from their homelands of Korea, Japan, and Spain to Puʻunēnē plantation, Olowalu, Lahaina, and a Haiku general store on Maui on my father’s side, and from England, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Native American Iroquois, and Delaware homelands to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and San Bernardino, California on my mother’s side. My grandparents and parents idealistically taught me to be proud of my multiethnic heritage, and like many other Americans who believe in the ideal of meritocracy, that there was no such thing as racism, sexism, or classicism in Hawai‘i or anywhere else, as long as I always worked hard and did my best. It took me 19+ adult years of living in England, Colorado, California, and Michigan, as well as travelling the world, to open my eyes to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that people still oppress one another in the world and here in Hawai‘i Nei.
Therefore, most interesting to me in Sarah Vowell’s historical account are the personal stories –- those stories told by people who are normally overlooked in history textbooks –– whom she takes pains to include. These stories of individuals portray a fuller picture of why events unfold as they do and why human nature, both the negative and positive aspects of it, creates areas of tension and conflict, as well as opportunities for cultural interchange. These are stories of the people on the fringes of “His”-story, stories about the commoners who lose a war and the women.
For example, Vowell tells of the tragic and compelling life and early death of Henry Obookiah, whose family was murdered by the warriors of King Kamehameha I. In Vowell’s words:
“Obookiah, the young man who invited the army of Christ to invade his homeland, had witnessed Kamehameha’s men slaying his parents when he was around 10 years old. He tried to escape from their attackers, carrying his infant brother on his back. The pursuers killed the baby with a spear while Henry was still shouldering him” (19).
Thus, Obookiah was largely responsible for inspiring the missionaries to come here in the first place ... and the original blame may well lie upon the shoulders of Kamehameha’s soldiers who killed his kid brother and parents. I had never before heard this side of the story, and it intrigued me. What would have happened if Obookiah’s ‘ohana had been left alone to live in peace? Would another young man have gone on to sail to New York and study in New Haven, Connecticut, and at Yale University with missionaries like Obookiah did? Would someone else have been taken under their proverbial wings to go on to inspire others with religious conversion, fervor, early death, and martyrdom? This is a chicken and the egg kind of theory; what if this had happened and not that? It’s hard to say.
Similarly, what would have happened if the American missionaries who came to Hawai‘i had been single men on their own and had not been married right before their departure from New England? Would they have married Hawaiian women and women of other cultures, as is so often the case historically? Would things have turned out differently if their children and grandchildren had been hapa instead of haole? In regard to the missionary women, Vowell writes:
“I can’t deny the guts of Lucy Thurston and the other brides. Nor do I question their good intentions. Sure, all missionaries are inherently patronizing to the host culture. That’s what a mission is—a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong. But it’s worth remembering that these women, and the men they married so recklessly, believed they were risking their own lives to spare strangers on the other side of the world from an eternity in hell.” (43)
Vowell’s analysis of these women and their “good intentions” is amusing but also compassionate; it displays her willingness to see and depict the wholeness and humanity of the people she portrays. In addition, she credits the missionaries, especially these stalwart women, with introducing a written alphabet, tending to the ill and infirm, and actually helping to prevent further illness and death by introducing sanitary measures and fighting for legislation against prostitution and lewd behavior (113-117).
She contrasts their “xenophobia, condescension, spiritual imperialism, and self-righteous disdain” with the missionaries’ “astonishing aptitude for kinship and public-spirited love” (52). Thus, Vowell gives the reader a more balanced and nuanced portrayal of historical events by including people who normally don’t have a say in what gets printed about them (if it gets printed at all) in a textbook. She encourages us to better understand the people affected by the changing tides of history and the historical context in which they lived.
This is one of those rare books I wanted to rush through, but which I also didn’t want to end. It is a must-read for any student of Hawaiian history and culture, as well as for those of us who care to know the deeper stories and hidden facts behind what we have been taught in school. (I would also argue that “Mainland Americans” and people from overseas, who still think that people from Hawai‘i live in grass shacks, would benefit by knowing a little bit more about the 50th state than what is portrayed by Hollywood, Brady Bunch reruns, Hawaii-5-O, both the original and new series, and even the critically-acclaimed movie Soul Surfer, not withstanding.)
What makes this book particularly poignant, however, is that one cannot help but draw parallels between the outdated and misguided “Manifest Destiny” beliefs of our American forebears –– in which European-Americans believed they had a God-given decree to expand Westward across the country, regardless of Native Americans and other colonizing interests from France and Spain, who were already living there –- and the contemporary nationalist attitudes of many Americans today, the idea that we somehow have the moral obligation and right to protect our interests in the world by influencing and interfering with the policies of and even replacing the leaders in other countries. As Vowell so aptly puts it:
“For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses—an all-purpose ingredient we’ll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.” (81)
As a country that supposedly keeps Church and State separate, we have a knack for continually conflating the two and running roughshod over the political ideals and religious beliefs of other countries when it suits our own interests. A good friend of mine once told me, “You can always tell if something is biased by asking yourself, ‘Does it wash both ways?’” Would Americans tolerate what we have done in other countries being done unto us?
America is an international superpower for better or worse, and in Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell illuminates the origins of our notorious and astonishing rise to this position, as well as the implications of how our past actions continue to impact our current policies regarding people around the world.
Lani Kwon graduated from Pearl City High School in 1987 and from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Phi Beta Kappa and with an Honors BA in 1991. She also earned a Master’s degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995 in English Literature with a Specialization in Creative Writing. Lani has a background in fine arts, teaching and crisis counseling and is a freelance writer, jewelry-maker, photographer, painter, and transitions and transformations life coach in Honolulu.