ALOHA AMERICA

HULA CIRCUITS THROUGH THE U.S. EMPIREBy Adria L. Imada

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5196-2

Contents

NOTE ON LANGUAGE…………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………1INTRODUCTION Aloha America………………………………………………………………………………………….29CHAPTER 1 Lady Jane at the Boathouse: The Intercultural World of Hula…………………………………………………..59Chapter 2 Modern Desires and Counter-Colonial Tactics: Gender, Performance, and the Erotics of Empire………………………103CHAPTER 3 Impresarios on the Midway: World’s Fairs and Colonial Politics………………………………………………..153CHAPTER 4 “Hula Queens” and “Cinderellas”: Imagined Intimacy in the Empire………………………………………………213CHAPTER 5 The Troupes Meet the Troops: Imperial Hospitality and Military Photography in the Pacific Theater…………………255EPILOGUE New Hula Movements………………………………………………………………………………………..269CHRONOLOGY Hawai’i Exhibits at International Expositions, 1894–1915……………………………………………….271ABBREVIATIONS OF COLLECTIONS, LIBRARIES, AND ARCHIVES………………………………………………………………….273NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….337GLOSSARY………………………………………………………………………………………………………….339BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………………………357

Chapter One

LADY JANE AT THE BOATHOUSE

The Intercultural World of Hula

One afternoon in 1889, eight young Hawaiian women dressed in long white holoku (gowns) and pinned up their long hair. They were to dance hula that afternoon at King David Kalakaua’s boathouse, Healani, a few blocks from the royal palace. Due to the vigilant inter cessions of Congregationalist missionaries who had arrived in Hawai’i from New England in 1820, po’e hula (hula practitioners) did not dare perform hula outdoors for their own enjoyment. During his reign from 1874 to 1891, Kalakaua famously defied abstemious missionaries and revived Hawaiian religious and cultural practices. With his support, hula began to make its way out of the shadows. The king’s coronation and fiftieth-birthday jubilee celebrations showcased hula on the palace grounds in 1883 and 1886, much to the chagrin of missionary descendants. One found the performances so obscene that he pressed charges against the printers of the coronation program. The women who were to dance at the king’s boathouse did not perform at those events, but belonged to another group of court hula dancers called Hui Lei Mamo. According to one of its members, Kini Kapahukulaokamamalu, Hui Lei Mamo was a “glee club” that Kalakaua had assembled in 1886. Hui Lei Mamo performed hybrid forms of hula as well as choral music. All eight members were Hawaiian girls and women under the age of twenty.

At least once a week, from the hours of 2 PM to 5 PM, Hui Lei Mamo performed for the king’s friends and foreign guests at Healani, his royal boathouse. On this occasion, they gathered to welcome the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who had sailed his yacht into Honolulu two days prior. The performers draped Stevenson and his stepson with leis and entertained them with hula performances. The girls danced to mele (songs) in Hawaiian accompanied by Western instrumentation. After the hula, the women excused themselves while the men played a game of whist and the champagne flowed.

Only three years later, three of the young women of Hui Lei Mamo found themselves performing on North American and European stages. Shortly before the U.S.-backed overthrow of the kingdom in 1893, they joined a hula troupe that made the first extensive tour of the United States and Europe. From 1892 to 1896, their circuits took them to an international exposition, vaudeville theaters, dime museums, and European royal courts. This group was the first of many other hula troupes to perform during the American colonization of the islands. Instead of wearing long gowns and mingling with foreign ambassadors, the women stood outside a theater at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition’s Midway Plaisance, beckoning audiences into a five-cent show of the “naughty naughty hula dance.” Hula became an eroticized commodity in the global colonial marketplace, and the women who were trained protectors of this art traveled widely along these performance circuits.

The cosmopolitan boathouse in Honolulu where this group began its royal sponsorship is emblematic of the contradictions and opportunities during this transnational period in Hawaiian history, as the nation experienced extreme scrutiny and economic and political pressure prior to its formal colonization by the United States. It also prefigures the political and cultural stages on which hula would be exposed while on tour. Affording commoner Hawaiian women cultural training and advancement within a national institution, the boathouse also opened Hawaiians up to foreign criticism. It became notorious in Hawai’i and beyond as a space of irresponsible indulgence. Haole (white) settlers affiliated with the pro-American missionary party condemned hula and other boathouse entertainment as Hawaiian debauchery.

Culture was the terrain on which politics were argued, for Americans sympathetic to the U.S. annexationist cause treated Hawaiian cultural practices as indisputable empirical evidence of the political failures and inherent deficiency of Hawaiians. Sensational reports about the monarchy circulated on the continent for at least a decade after the king’s death in 1891. Lucien Young, a lieutenant of the USS Boston, the warship that helped to overthrow the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, wrote in his nationally published memoir that Kalakaua built the boathouse to accommodate “gambling, lewd practices, immoral exhibitions, drunken carousals, and the abominations of the hula dance.” Young protested that the “scenes enacted there beggar description.” American writers of travelogues like Hawaiian America (1899) argued that the profligacy of the king justified the Anglo-Saxon takeover of islands: Kalakaua had squandered his birthright and government revenues, displayed “loose morals,” and gave white people little choice but to intercede and manage the islands’ bountiful resources.

Despite denunciations of the boathouse and hula performance, the women of Hui Lei Mamo were able to undertake intensive hula training even after Kalakaua’s death, thanks to state-sponsored support. Kini Kapahukulaokamamalu was one of these dancers. Fourteen years old when Kalakaua handpicked her for the hula troupe in 1886, Kini became his particular favorite. He called her “Lady Jane,” although she was a commoner and not of ali’i (chiefly) birth and rank. As maka’ainana (commoner) women with access to ali’i nui (high-ranking chiefs), foreign residents, and sojourners, hula performers in Kalakaua’s court occupied multiple statuses and unsettled hierarchies based on class, occupation, gender, and rank. Within the Hawaiian court, they negotiated the interface of old and new, tradition and innovation, foreign and Native, propriety and daring—negotiations that anticipated ones they would face during their off-island circuits.

In this chapter, I follow Kini Kapahu and her contemporaries from the margins of Hawaiian life into roles as state-supported performers with ambiguous standing in the intercultural world of Honolulu. Hula was a gendered cultural opportunity structure that opened up for Hawaiian women in the years preceding the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893. Emerging as a national practice in late nineteenth-century Honolulu, hula reinserted sacred and secular genealogical practices into public life and elevated commoner women like Kini. Hula simultaneously advanced and challenged Hawaiian women. It offered them intensive training in Hawaiian history, traditional arts, as well as savoir faire in a transnational court. Hula was an intercultural strategy and a way for women practitioners to navigate between multiple worlds and positions. I discuss hula in late nineteenth-century Hawai’i and the transnational world of the boathouse in order to illuminate the ways dancers were already hybrid, intercultural figures before they embarked on their world tours. They served as the foundation of a modern Hawaiian nation and as reproducers of political and cultural knowledge, while also performing as new kinds of Hawaiian subjects. But their engagement with hula also made them more visible and susceptible to scrutiny and criticism from Native and non-Native quarters, as we shall see.

Colonial suppression and Hula revival

Before examining how hula was received and transformed along its transnational circuits, we must first attend to the meaning of hula and its resurgence in the intercultural milieu of late nineteenth-century Honolulu. A single category of dance did not exist in Hawai’i. According to ethnomusicologist Adrienne L. Kaeppler, prior to Western contact Hawaiians performed ha’a, ritual movements in offerings to a god at a heiau (temple). Ha’a was distinct from hula, dance movements performed for humans in a nonsacred, informal context. Calvinist missionaries discouraged Hawaiian chiefs from allowing public displays of “dancing,” whether for gods or humans. In response to this prohibition, ha’a was adapted into the semisacred form of hula pahu (hula performed with the sharkskin drum).

More than dance, hula can be thought of as an embodied form of history. There is a strong organic connection between historiography, politics, and hula. Within this broad category of sacred and secular performance, bodily movements were less critical than the chanted poetry that communicated the births and achievements of chiefs, recorded the genealogies of high chiefs back to the akua (gods), and relayed Hawaiian epics. In these performances, gesticulation was appreciated, but not necessary. Some po’e hula joined the households of chiefs, with each ali’i sponsoring its own hula retinue. Hawai’i’s most esteemed twentieth-century ethnographer, Mary Kawena Pukui, observes, “A good hula master was always found in the court of his chief.” Enjoying chiefly patronage, po’e hula were historians and the “biographers” of the chiefs. They scripted the ali’i’s political and divine right to rule by venerating them in chant and performing their connections to godly ancestors.

Hula has often been discussed as a “traditional” repository—an archive containing a fixed body of knowledge that is passed down relatively intact from generation to generation. Yet hula is more of a living repertoire than a repository securing official state history. Hula, as a form of embodied and kinesthetic historical knowledge, accommodated flexibility, change, and innovation as its practitioners and political patrons shifted. Dependent on orality, hula chants were not committed to writing until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

While hula communicated serious political scripts, it also provided entertainment and release for chiefs and commoners alike. Pukui contends, “The people loved dancers because they were so much fun and because they gave so much happiness.” Early European visitors observed dancers amusing crowds of people. William Ellis, a missionary from the London Missionary Society, described a particularly joyous performance in Kailua, Hawai’i, in 1823. A large entourage accompanied five “strolling musicians and dancers” as they performed for several hours in front of one of Governor Kuakini’s houses. A male soloist dressed in a magnificent yellow pa’u kapa (bark-cloth skirt) chanted “the achievements of former kings of Hawaii,” much pleasing Kuakini.

Congregationalist missionaries from New England began settling in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1820s. Equipped with a Calvinist work ethic, they associated hula with Hawaiian debauchery, idleness, and sexuality, qualities that made Hawaiians unproductive workers in the emerging capitalist economies of Hawai’i. These missionaries rightly suspected, though did not fully comprehend, the sexual and spiritual potency of hula, and they objected to the practice on those grounds, for hula was indeed embedded in a culture of sexual arousal. The usual conclusion to a formal courtly performance of dances was the athletic hula ma’i, hula honoring the genitals of a chief. Hula ma’i encouraged procreation and the continuation of a chiefly line.

The influential American missionary Hiram Bingham surveyed the “heathen song and dance” in Liholiho’s (also known as King Kamehameha II) court in 1820. He wrote, “The whole arrangement and process of their old hulas are designed to promote lasciviousness, and of course the practice could not flourish in modest communities.” Bingham and his contemporaries pressured the Hawaiian government to ban the practice. As early as 1823, some ali’i nui stopped hula performances in their courts. Hula was strictly regulated by civil codes passed by the Hawaiian legislature in 1851 and 1859. In 1859, any public exhibition of hula that charged admission was forbidden without a prohibitive ten-dollar license issued by the ministry of the interior. Those who danced unlicensed risked imprisonment or fines. Furthermore, licenses were only valid for performances in the port city of Honolulu. Although some ali’i continued to support hula, these laws effectively erased hula from urban areas and the public sphere. Pukui observed, “After they [the missionaries] gained control, it was only the small and out-of-the-way areas that dance continued to flourish, for people were sometimes arrested for dancing.”

Missionaries and their descendants were not the only ones who censured the hula; some Christian Hawaiians also objected. One Hawaiian wrote to the Hawaiian newspaper Nupepa Kuokoa to criticize the hula performed during the mourning of ali’i Victoria Kamamalu Ka’ahumanu in 1866. Titled “Pau ole no hoi ka hana kahiko o Hawaii nei” (The old practices of Hawaii are not over), the letter reads, in part:

[Hula was not] the right thing to do because it was done with real joy as though a great benefit would be derived. It was the mourning of a pagan people. It is not wrong to lament, to chant his kahea inoa [name chant] if done as a regret for the separation but to dance to and fro, that is not affectionate mourning. It is like saying there is gladness over the death of the high chief … so let us do things to please the great ruler, that is, the Loving God.

Other reproachful letters from Hawaiians were printed around the same time.

As Hawaiian cultural autonomy was assailed, so, too, was Hawaiian governance undermined by interlocking missionary and sugar-planter interests in the 1880s. These industries were controlled by haole of foreign and Hawaiian birth. Formal colonization by the United States was a decade away, but the kingdom had “a foundering independence” by the middle of King Kalakaua’s reign due to haole assaults on the king and efforts to terminate the monarchy, as Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio contends. Noenoe K. Silva also astutely observes that Kalakaua had the “misfortune” to reign during a period when the sons of haole missionaries came of age; unlike their fathers, they were unsupervised by an outside foreign mission. Thus, even prior to formal colonization in 1898, Hawai’i was a nation subordinated to the interests of the United States and settler-missionary businessmen, and Hawaiians were increasingly subjugated, colonial subjects.

In 1887 a secret organization called the “Hawaiian League,” composed of “mission boys,” sugar planters, and businessmen, used the threat of an all-white militia to force Kalakaua to appoint a new cabinet made up of the militia’s members and to accept a new constitution. The constitution of 1887—nicknamed the “Bayonet Constitution” because of the coercive circumstances of its adoption—reduced the king to a constitutional monarch with severely limited powers. The House of Nobles in the legislature was no longer appointed by the king, but elected, and Kalakaua did not retain the authority to remove his ministers.

That same year, Hawaiian independence was further compromised when the king’s new “reform” cabinet renewed a reciprocity treaty with the United States that allowed sugar planters in Hawai’i to reap great profits. In exchange for renewal of a treaty that permitted Hawaiian sugar duty-free into the United States, the United States sought exclusive use of Pearl Harbor, the only natural harbor in the north Pacific, for a naval and commercial port. Kalakaua had refused, but weakened by the Bayonet Constitution, he was unable to prevent the renewal of the reciprocity treaty. Thus the United States secured Pearl Harbor and an official military foothold in Hawai’i in 1887.

Increasingly constrained by internal and external pressures, the king instituted cultural policies to reinvigorate the Hawaiian nation. Born in 1836, David La’amea Kalakaua believed that the lahui (Hawaiian nation) and his people would prosper with the rebirth of traditional cultural practices (see figure 3). He supported the public performance of hula and established two societies that cultivated Native history and genealogy: Ka Papa Ku’auhau o Na Ali’i (Board of Genealogy of Chiefs) and Hale Naua. Kumulipo, the central genealogical, cosmogonic text linking the ali’i to the gods, which Silva describes as “a narrative of the lahui from the beginning of time.”

At his poni mo’i (coronation) in 1883 and his birthday jubilee in 1886, the king incorporated performances of sacred hula and important historical tableaux into these official state ceremonies (see figure 4). Po’e hula from his court chanted and performed ancient temple hula and composed new mele in Kalakaua’s honor, reinforcing the king’s chiefly genealogy back to the gods. As many as sixty dancers at a time may have performed at the jubilee, with subsequent line changes of similar numbers. Pukui writes of the jubilee, “Dancers and musicians gathered from end to end of the group. Many rare dances were seen then as well as the commoner ones.”

(Continues…)

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