On the morning of November 26, 1778, the 100-foot-long, three-masted ship Resolution, captained by the fifty-year-old Englishman James Cook, sailed into view off the northeast coast of the Hawaiian Island of Maui. The island's Polynesian inhabitants had never seen a European sailing ship before. The sight of the Resolution just beyond the fierce windward surf must have looked as strange to them as a spaceship from another planet. Yet they responded without hesitation. They boarded canoes and paddled to the ship. From atop the rolling swells they offered the sailors food, water, and in the case of the women, themselves.
One can easily imagine the contrast: the European sailors - gaunt, dirty, many bearing the unmistakable signs of venereal disease - and the Polynesians, a people who abided by strict codes of personal hygiene, who washed every day and plucked the hair from their faces and underarms, whose women had bodies "molded into the utmost perfection," in the words of one early admirer. At first Cook forbade his men to bring the women on board the ship "to prevent as much as possible the communicating [of the] fatal disease [gonorrhea] to a set of innocent people." In the weeks and months to come, as the Resolution lingered offshore, Cook was far less resolute. Toward the end of 1779, the first of what today are called Hapa Haole - half European, half Native Hawaiian - were born on the island of Maui.
The nineteenth-century stereotype of the South Pacific as a sexual paradise owes as much to the feverish imagination of repressed Europeans to the actions of the Polynesians. The young women who swam out to the ships in Hawaii, Tahiti, and other South Pacific islands were from the lower classes, not from the royalty, which carefully guarded its legitimacy. Many were training to be dancers in religious festivals. They would rise in status by exchanging their sexual favors for a tool, a piece of cloth, or an iron nail.
The Polynesians paid dearly for their openness. At least 300,000 people, and possibly as many as 800,000, lived on the Hawaiian Islands when Captain Cook first sighted them...Over the course of the next century, disease introduced by Europeans reduced the Native population to fewer than 50,000. By the time the painter Paul Gauguin journeyed to the Pacific in 1891, the innocence that the Europeans had perceived among the Polynesians was gone. "The natives, having nothing, nothing at all to do, think of one thing only, drinking," he wrote. "Day by day the race vanishes, decimated by the European diseases...There is so much prostitution that it does not exist...One only knows a thing by its contrary, and its contrary does not exist." The women in Gauguin's paintings are beautiful yet defeated, without hope, lost in a vision of the past.
Today visitors to Maui land on a runway just downwind from the shore where Captain Cook battled the surf eleven generations ago. Once out of the airport, they encounter what is probably the most genetically mixed population in the world. To the genes of Captain Cook's sailors and the native Polynesians has been added the DNA of European missionaries, Mexican cowboys, African-American soldiers, and plantation workers from throughout Asia and Europe. This intense mixing of DNA has produced a population of strikingly beautiful people. Miss Universe of 1997 and Miss America of 2001 were both from Hawaii. The former, Brooke Mahelani Lee, is a classic Hawaiian blend. Her ancestors are Korean and Hawaiian, Chinese and European.
Bernie Adair - who was selling candles at a swap meet in Kahului, Maui's largest town, when I met her - told me that her family's history was typical. Adair, who ancestors came to Hawaii from the Philippines, married a Portuguese man in the 1960s. In the 1980s their daughter Marlene married a man of mixed Hawaiian, Chinese, and Portuguese descent. Adair's granddaughter Carly, peeking shyly at me from under a folding table, therefore embodies four different ethnicities. "These children have grandparents with so many different nationalities you can't tell what they are," Adair said.
Almost half the people who live in Hawaii today are of "mixed" ancestry. What it means to be mixed is not at all obvious genetically, but for official purposes it means that a person's ancestors fall into more than one than one of the four "racial" categories identified on U.S. census forms: black, white, Native American, and Asian or Pacific Islander. Intermarriage is a cumulative process, so once an individual of mixed ancestry is born, all of the person's descendants also will be mixed. As intermarriage continues in Hawaii - and already almost half of all marriages are between couples of different or mixed ethnicities - the number of people who will be able to call themselves pure Japanese, or pure Hawaiian, or pure white (Haole in Hawaiian) will steadily decline.
Hawaii's high rates of intermarriage have fascinated academics for decades. The University of Hawaii sociologist Romanzo Adams wrote an article titled "Hawaii as a Racial Melting Pot" in 1926, and many scholars since then have extolled Hawaii as a model of ethnic and racial harmony. The researchers have always been a bit vague about the reasons for all this intermarriage; explanations have ranged from the benign climate to the "aloha spirit" of the Native Hawaiians. But their lack of analytical rigor hasn't dampened their enthusiasm. One of the goals of the former Center for Research on Ethnic relations at the University of Hawaii was "to determine why ethnic harmony exists in Hawaii" and "to export principles of ethnic harmony to the mainland and the world."
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The rapid growth of interracial marriages in the United States and elsewhere marks a new phase in the genetic history of humanity. Since the appearance of modern humans in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, human groups have differentiated in appearance as they have expanded across the globe and have undergone some measure of reproductive isolation. This differentiation has always been limited by the recentness of our common ancestry and by the powerful tendency of groups to mix over time. Still, many human populations have remained sufficiently separate to develop and retain the distinctive physical characteristics we recognize today.
In Hawaii the process is occurring in reverse. It's as if a videotape of our species' history were being played backward at a fantastically rapid speed. Physical distinctions that took thousands of generations to produce are being wiped clean with a few generations of intermarriage.
The vision of the future conjured up by intermarriage in Hawaii can be seductive. When everyone is marrying everyone else, when the ethnic affiliation of most people can no longer be ascertained at a glance, one imagines that ethnic and racial tensions would diminish. But spending some time in Hawaii shows that the future will not be that simple. Despite the high rate of intermarriage here, ethnic and racial tensions haven't really disappeared. They have changed into something else, something less threatening, perhaps, but still divisive. Hawaii may well be a harbinger of a racially mixed future. But it won't be the future many people expect.
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The Polynesians first reached the Hawaiian Islands around A.D. 400, probably in a migration from the Marquesas Islands. A subsequent wave of people migrated to Hawaii from Tahiti between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. Then the islands saw no more newcomers until Captain Cook's arrival four centuries later.
The discovery of Hawaii by Europeans did not result in an immediate influx of colonists. The early decades of the nineteenth century brought just a trickle of settlers to the islands - washed-up sailors, retired captains, British and Russian traders, missionaries. Large-scale migration began only after the first sugar plantations were established around the middle of the century. In 1852, three hundred Chinese men arrived to work the plantations. Over the next century nearly half a million more workers followed. They came from China, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, Spain, Poland, Austria, Germany, Norway, and Russia. Some of these groups have long since disappeared, blending into the genetic background. Others still have a significant ethnic presence on the islands.
A few miles from the Honolulu airport is a vivid reminder of those times. Hawaii's Plantation Village is one of the few tourist attractions designed as much for locals as for mainlanders. It meticulously recreates a camp town of the type that once dotted the islands, housing the workers who toiled each day in the sugar and pineapple fields. Each house along the main avenue reflects the ethnicity of the workers who lived there: a large bread oven sits next to the Portuguese house, rice cookers dominate the kitchen of the Chinese house, crucifixes adorn the walls of the Puerto Rican house. A Japanese shrine is a few doors away from the Chinese society building. Down the hill by the taro fields is a dohyo, a sumo ring, where the workers wrestled every Sunday afternoon.
Mike Hama showed me around the day I was there. The descendant of Japanese, German, Hawaiian, and Irish grandparents, Hama grew up on a plantation camp in the 1940s. "Kids of different nationalities played together in these camps," he told me. "We didn't know we were different." They communicated using a pidgin that combined words from many languages. The German kids taught the other kids to polka in the camp social halls. The Japanese kids taught their friends sumo wrestling. When the Japanese emperor visited Hawaii after World War II, according to a widely told if hard-to-verify story, he was so impressed to see wrestlers of all different nationalities in the dohyo that when he returned to Japan he opened the country's sumo rings to foreigners.
When Hama was eighteen, he joined the military and was stationed in California. "That was a real awakening for me," he recalls. "For the first time I saw the bigotry that was going on outside Hawaii." He moved back to Hawaii as soon as he could and married a woman of mixed ancestry. His four daughters think of themselves as nothing other than local Hawaiians.
The camp towns disappeared decades ago in Hawaii, yet they have left a remarkable legacy. Large-scale segregation in housing remains rare on the islands. People of all ethnic backgrounds live side by side, just as they did in the camp towns. The only people who live in ghettos are the soldiers on military bases and wealthy haoles who wall themselves off in gated communities. Because neighborhoods are integrated in Hawaii, so are most of the schools. Children of different ethnicities continue to grow up together and marry, just as they did in the camps.
Integrated neighborhoods, integrated schools, high rates of intermarriage - the islands sound as if they'd be a racial paradise. But there's actually a fair amount of prejudice here. It pops up in novels, politics, the spiels of standup comics. And its especially prominent in everyday conversation - "talk stink" is the pidgin term for disrespecting another group.
Some of the prejudice is directed towards haoles, who continue to occupy many of the positions of social and economic prominence on the islands (though their days as plantation overlords are long gone). Nonwhites label haoles as cold, self-serving, arrogant, meddling, loud, and even that old stereotype - smelly (because, it is held, they still do not bathe every day). White kids say they'll get beat up if they venture onto certain nonwhite beaches. Occasionally, a rumor sweeps through a school about an upcoming "Kill a Haole" day. The rumors are a joke meant to shock the prevailing sensibilities. But one would not expect such a joke where racial tensions are low.
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Other groups come in for similarly rough treatment. The Japanese are derided as clannish and power-hungry, the Filipinos as ignorant and underhanded, the Hawaiians as fat, lazy, and fun-loving. And, as is true of stereotypes everywhere, the objects of them have a tendency to reinforce them, either by too vigorously denying or too easily repeating them.
"Intermarriage may indicate tolerance," says Jonathan Okamura, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, "but it doesn't mean we have an egalitarian society on a larger scale." Though he calls his viewpoint a "minority position," Okamura holds that racial and ethnic prejudice is deeply ingrained in the institutional structures of everyday life in Hawaii. For example, the integration of the public schools is deceptive, he says. "Well-off haoles, Chinese, and Japanese send their children to private schools, and the public schools are underfunded. "We've created a two-tiered system that makes inequality increasingly worse rather than better," says Okamura. Meanwhile the rapid growth of the tourism industry in Hawaii has shut off many traditional routes to economic betterment. Tourism produces mostly low-paying jobs in sales, service, and construction, Okamura points out, so people have few opportunities to move up career ladders.
Of course, talented and lucky individuals will get ahead. "Students with parents who didn't go to college come to the university and do well - that happens all the time," Okamura says. "But it doesn't happen enough to advance socioeconomically disadvantaged groups in society."
Several ethnic groups occupy the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, but one in particular stands out: the people descended from the island's original inhabitants. Native Hawaiians have the lowest incomes and the highest unemployment rates of any ethnic group. They have the most health problems and the shortest life expectancy. They are the least likely to go to college and the most likely to be incarcerated.
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Native Hawaiians should not be seen as simply another ethnic group, the leaders of the community point out. Other cultures have roots elsewhere; people of Japanese, German, or Samoan ancestry can draw from the traditions of an ancestral homeland to sustain an ethnic heritage. If the culture of the Native Hawaiians disappears, it will be gone forever. Greater recognition of the value and fragility of his culture has led to a resurgence of interest in the Hawaiian past. Schools with Hawaiian language immersion programs have sprung up around the islands to supplement the English that children speak at home. Traditional forms of Hawaiian dance, music, canoeing, and religion all have undergone revivals.
This Hawaiian Renaissance also has had a political dimension. For the past several decades a sovereignty movement has been building among the Native Hawaiians that seeks some measure of political autonomy and control over the lands that the U.S. government seized from the Hawaiian monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century. Reflecting the diversity of the native population, several sovereignty organizations have carried out a sometimes unseemly struggle over strategies and goals. One radical faction advocates the complete independence of the islands from the United States. More moderate groups have called for the establishment of a Native Hawaiian nation modeled on the Indian tribes on the mainland. Native Hawaiians would have their own government, but it would operate within existing federal and state frameworks, and its citizens would remain American.
Native Hawaiian sovereignty faces many hurdles, and it is premature to harp on exactly how it would work. But whenever the topic comes up in discussion, a question quickly surfaces: exactly who is a Native Hawaiian? "Pure" Hawaiians with no non-Hawaiian ancestors probably number just a few thousand. Many Native Hawaiian undoubtedly have a preponderance of Hawaiian ancestors, but no clear line separates natives from nonnatives. Some people who call themselves Native Hawaiian probably have little DNA from Polynesian ancestors.
Past legislation has waffled on this issue. Some laws define Native Hawaiians as people who can trace at least half of their ancestry to people living in Hawaii before the arrival of Captain Cook. Others define as Hawaiian anyone who has even a single precontact Hawaiian ancestor. These distinctions are highly contentious for political and economic as well as cultural reasons. Many state laws restrict housing subsidies, scholarships, economic development grants, and other benefits specifically to Native Hawaiians.
As the study of genetics and history has progressed, an obvious idea has arisen. Maybe science could resolve the issue. Maybe a genetic marker could be found that occurs only in people descended from the aboriginal inhabitants of Hawaii. Then anyone with that marker could be considered Native Hawaiian.
Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes. Olson, p. 223-226, 229-233.
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