Ty P. Kāwika Tengan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa.

NATIVE MEN REMADE

Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai’iBy Ty P. Kawika Tengan

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4338-7

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………ixPreface……………………………………………………………..xiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………xvIntroduction: Lele i Ka Po…………………………………………….11. Engagements with Modernity………………………………………….332. Re-membering Nationhood and Koa at the Temple of State…………………653. Pu’ukohola: At the Mound of the Whale………………………………..934. Ka i Mua-Cast into the Men’s House…………………………………..1255. Narrating Kanaka: Talk Story, Place, and Identity……………………..163Conclusion: The Journeys of Hawaiian Men………………………………..199Appendix: ‘Awa Talk Story at Pani, 2005…………………………………219Notes……………………………………………………………….229Glossary of Hawaiian Words…………………………………………….239References…………………………………………………………..247Index……………………………………………………………….267

Chapter One

ENGAGEMENTS WITH MODERNITY

In the twentieth century, the institutions of work and the military have been particularly important in the production of ideologies and practices of Hawaiian masculinities, and indeed, these prove to be some of the major themes that emerge in the life stories of the men of the Hale Mua (see chapter 5). In this chapter, I situate changes in men’s status and understandings of self in a larger history of nation making, which includes the establishment of lahui, or people, nation, international recognition of the Kingdom, territorial occupation by the United States, admission as the fiftieth state, and reassertions of cultural and political identities of Hawaiian sovereignty. In the context of the present cultural nationalist movement, men’s experiences with modernity have produced in some a feeling of acute alienation from indigenous history, culture, and community, and thus the Hale Mua has been constructed as a means of pushing men forward into a new understanding and experience of community that attempts to bridge the gap between modernity and tradition.

Masculinities, Nation, and Empire

Following Connell, I see masculinities, femininities, and trans- or third genders as social practices “organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by bodily structures and processes of human reproduction” (Connell 2005b, 71). Ortner (1996, 12-13) argues that gender is just one of the many “serious games” of social life played out in numerous arenas and by unevenly matched individuals and teams: “The effort to understand the making and unmaking of gender, as well as what gender makes, involves understanding the workings of these games as games, with their inclusions and exclusions, multiple positions, complex rules, forms of bodily activity, structures of feeling and desire, and stakes of winning, losing, or simply playing. It involves as well the question of how gender games themselves collide with, encompass, or are bent to the service of, other games, for gender is never, as they say, the only game in town” (19).

Hegemonic norms of gender, especially those of masculinity, work to naturalize inequalities and oppressions that are tied to the other “games” of race, class, nation, age, and sexuality, to name a few. Recognizing this, we must also attend to the ways that men and women access different points of privilege and subordination based on their positioning, engage in both hegemonic and marginalized practices in different contexts, and articulate new social and cultural forms over time. Gendered social actors are situated within larger sociocultural systems and structures of knowledge and power, which both shape and constrain the possibilities for action, as well as provide resources which individuals use to reproduce, negotiate, and transform those very systems (Lamphere et al. 1997; Ortner 1996).

Empire building (and dismantling) involves a reshaping of both local and global gender orders, which leads to a resituating of men and women in their relationships between and among each other (Connell 2005a; Lamphere et al. 1997). Nationalisms, whether colonial or anticolonial, tend to be structured by heteropatriarchy, configuring woman as the embodiment of tradition and mother of the nation that needs to be protected by militarized masculine men (a construction which also has no place for gay men) (Enloe 1990; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). As Jolly has pointed out in Vanuatu, though, this does not preclude women from also being subjects of nationalism, though as objects and icons they are often represented as lying between tradition and modernity, albeit in different ways from men (Jolly 1997). Here, I am particularly focused on the ways in which men, as subjects and objects of the Hawaiian nation, localize macrosocial processes and discourses in their own lives and understandings of self. To do that, however, one needs some sense of what these processes are.

A New Era: Nation, Religion, and People

In 1810, with the peaceful cession of Kaua’i, the Hawai’i Island chief Kamehameha ended his twenty-eight-year campaign of conquest and became the first chief to bring the entire archipelago under control. Kamehameha established a monarchy and the lahui of Hawai’i. The ritual system that enabled and legitimated his ascent was called the ‘aikapu, a religiopolitical set of laws that separated men and women during eating periods. More important, it separated the classes of ali’i (chiefs) from maka’ainana (commoners) and imbued the class of specialists known as kahuna with powerful ritual authority that could direct the political and spiritual course of events in the islands (Kame’eleihiwa 1992, 39). Within this system, a junior male chief endowed with the family god could usurp a higher-ranking ali’i, which is precisely what Kamehameha did through war, marriage, and spiritual petition (guided by kahuna) to the heavens on large-scale sacrificial heiau (temples).

On all levels, the responsibility for feeding both the family and the gods fell on the shoulders of men. They prepared food in separate imu (underground ovens) and built separate eating houses: the hale mua (front or first house) for the men and the hale ‘aina (eating house) for the women and children. Certain foods (e.g., pig, coconuts, bananas, red fish) that represented the sexual power of the four major male akua (deities)-Ku, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa-were kapu (forbidden) to women. For the commoner men, who were primarily subsistence farmers and fishers, the hale mua served as the domestic temple, and family gods were fed along with the major deities.

The hale mua was an important site for the sustenance of life and the production of masculinities in the learning of skills and stories related to fishing, farming, cooking, canoe and house building, fighting, sailing, lovemaking, fathering, and providing for the family (Handy et al. 1972, 297, 301-2; Handy and Pukui 1972, 9; Malo 1951, 27-30; 1987, 20-23). Boys between the ages of five and seven were kai mua, or “cast into the mua,” and given their first malo in a ceremony that dedicated them to Lono, akua of fertility; from that day on, they would begin their growth into manhood (Handy et al. 1972, 316-18; Handy and Pukui 1972, 95-97; Malo 1951, 87-93; 1987, 64-66). Women too had their own separate work houses for beating tapa (hale kuku) and temple sites (Hale o Papa), where their own gender practices and ideologies were learned and enacted (Kame’eleihiwa 1999; Linnekin 1990). The duality and complementarity of male/female (KuHina), ali’i/maka’ainana, and Po/Ao (realm of dead/realm of living) structured much of Hawaiian thought, and the balance of both created, at least ideologically, a state of pono, or well-being and balance.

In practice, though, throughout the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth this balance was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Since the arrival of James Cook in 1778, haole (foreigners) had been openly disregarding the ‘aikapu without penalty, spiritual or legal. The threat they posed militarily had also been established from the start, when Cook attempted to abduct Kamehameha’s uncle and the ruling chief of Hawai’i Island, Kalani’opu’u, an event that led to the British captain’s (in)famous death. Finally, the venereal diseases and epidemics brought by his and others’ crews were beginning to take their toll on the population; in 1804 alone, half the population died from a massive epidemic called ma’i ‘oku’u, which was either bubonic plague or cholera (McGregor 2007, 30).

When Kamehameha died in 1819, Ka’ahumanu, his most powerful wife and the prime minister after his death, orchestrated the overthrow of the ‘aikapu by convincing Kamehameha II Liholiho to ‘ainoa (eat freely) with herself and his mother, Keopuolani, at his installation as successor to the Kingdom. In large part this was done to prevent the rebellion of traditional rival chiefs. McGregor (2007, 31) explains, “By abolishing the traditional chiefly religion under which rivals could claim rank, prestige, and position, the Kamehameha chiefs consolidated political power under the control of their monarchy.” The single effort to defy this move ended in the defeat at Kuamo’o (Hawai’i Island) of Kekuaokalani, Liholiho’s cousin entrusted with the dynastic god Kuka’ilimoku. While this did not immediately put an end to the old religion, which carried on outside the reach of the new state for years, it did bring to a close the era in which junior male warrior chiefs could usurp status through battle. Ironically, this groundwork was laid in part by Kamehameha when he brought peace to the islands and subordinated all other ali’i below him (Boggs, personal communication, 1/2/07).

Jocelyn Linnekin (1990, 72) argues that the ‘aikapu was already internally unstable owing to the fact that the ideological devaluation of women in the male sacrificial religion was at odds with their status as points of access to rank, land, and political power. “With the defeat of Kekuaokalani and the political strategy he symbolized, women became more important than ever” in this regard (ibid.). These same female chiefs subsequently embraced the American Calvinist missionaries, who arrived in 1820, as the new kahuna and Christianity as the new set of kapu. Linnekin notes, “In the aftermath of the kapu abolition women replaced men as the active, focal figures in the state religion. And perhaps correlatively, with the demise of the sacrificial cult that legitimated conquest, male Hawaiian ali’i seem to have lost some of their mana, their efficacy and directedness. In the nineteenth-century monarchy one sees fewer personally powerful and effective male chiefs, at least in the ruling line, and more of a tendency to psychological conflict, depression, and dissipation” (ibid., 73).

Linnekin rightly cautions that the ‘ainoa was only one of many factors contributing to the “demoralization of male chiefs” (ibid.). Kame’eleihiwa argues that the attempt to “live as white men” and find a new path of life came about as a result of the inability of the older set of kapu and ritual to achieve the pono of the people and the society. Most profoundly, this was evidenced in the catastrophic loss of life (as high as 80 percent population loss in the forty-five years after contact) due to foreign diseases (Kame’eleihiwa 1992, 81-82).

The missionaries saw the drinking and prostitution associated with the sailors and merchants as clear evidence of the need of God’s law, and thus they worked tirelessly to instill the Christian morality that would save the Hawaiians from both the heathen darkness of their past as well as the depravity of the docks. The Calvinists offered new life as the answer to the “great dying” they associated with the old heathen, pagan, barbaric, and savage ways. As Wende Marshall (1999, 110-11) argues, discourses of sin and tropes of ignorance and susceptibility to disease, criminality, and deviance worked to “narrate the myth of Hawaiian dissipation and extinction-a myth which worked to justify the encroachment on Hawaiian resources and the usurpation of Hawaiian power by an elite group of (mainly) American men.” Kanaka ‘Oiwi were well aware of this. Writing in 1867, Samuel Kamakau noted “The reason for this misfortune and the decimation of the lahui, it is understood, is that the haole are people who kill other peoples; and the desire for glory and riches, those are the companions of the devastating diseases” (quoted in Silva 2004a, 26; translation Silva’s).

Capitalism, Law, and Gender in the Kingdom

In the early nineteenth century, Hawaiian society was undergoing widespread political and economic transformations brought on by an established mercantile capitalist economy, which at the time was fully engaged in the sandalwood trade. Relations between ali’i and maka’ainana, characterized by reciprocity and aloha in the past, were strained as growing debts to haole businessmen led to an ever-increasing pace of sandalwood extraction, always through the labor of the commoners and at the neglect of the taro patches and older subsistence economy (Linnekin 1990, 164-67). Linnekin notes that as new class relations began to displace the now distorted ones between chief and commoner, the mana and authority of the male chiefs were further undermined (1990, 170; see also Osorio 2002). The ‘ainoa contributed to this state of affairs as men who were freed from household labor that women could now perform (e.g., cooking) gradually but progressively took jobs outside of the local extended family and increasingly in workplaces owned by foreigners (McGregor, personal communication, 4/14/07). Maka’ainana began to exercise their own autonomy from chiefs in this new economy, especially in the port towns, where fur traders, sandalwood merchants, and whalers purchased the labor and commodities of Kanaka men and women (Kame’eleihiwa 1992, 140; Ralston 1984). According to one source, there were four thousand Kanaka men on whaling ships in 1849, approximately 5 percent of the total population and 17 percent of males between the ages of eighteen and fifty-three (Linnekin 1990, 185). The Hawaiian foreign minister Wyllie went as far as to say it was “one of the causes of the depopulation of the islands” (Linnekin 1990, 184).

Amidst all this, the Hawaiian Kingdom was struggling to maintain its sovereignty against predatory imperial powers in the Pacific; Kamehameha III Kauikeaouli was keenly aware that the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) made New Zealand a British possession and that the French had claimed Marquesas and made Tahiti a protectorate (1842). As Merry (2000) and Silva (2004a) note, Hawai’i’s acceptance by the world powers as an independent nation, which came in 1843 (Sai 2004; Silva 2004a, 37), required a display of properly masculine, modern civilization. Merry (2000) argues that laws creating new forms of marriage and new restrictions on sexuality were central to the civilizing process in nineteenth-century Hawai’i. The bourgeois family was constructed as the model to be emulated and was enforced by law. Masculinity was now defined by ownership and control of property, which included land, women, and children. This new regime was in stark contrast to precolonial practices, in which men were stewards of the land, women exercised autonomy in conjugal relationships, and the family unit was an extended rather than a nuclear one (Merry 2000, 230).

Another gendered contrast emerges in relation to the most significant and lasting transformations of property, namely, the privatization of land in the form of the Mahele, a legal process that spanned the years 1846-55. Linnekin (1990, 9) notes that for those commoners who did come to control land, inheritance patterns favored women (53 percent) in 1855, a significant break from precedent. This she attributes to an understanding that women were more stable on the land, a product of both the increased mobility of young men, who emigrated en masse to port towns and whaling ships to meet increased demands for taxes, as well as an already present symbolic association of women with the ‘aina and their high status in families as mothers and sisters (Linnekin 1990, 212-26). Thus even as an ideology of male dominance came to characterize the laws and representations of the monarchy, women’s local status and authority increased in relation to men’s.

At the level of public discourse, a need to present a masculinized image of the nation led to a celebration of the masculine heroism of the Kanaka past. As the biggest threat to the stability of the government and the king came from the cadre of elite American expatriate men living in the islands, Hawaiian men used nationalist newspapers to critique rising haole influence and, after 1887, dominance. The newspapermen published both political speeches and stories of male heroes like Kaweloleimakua. Kawelo was a legendary chief from Kaua’i who embodied the exemplar of ‘Oiwi masculinity. A devout worshiper of his gods and generous leader, he was unparalleled in his prowess in fighting, farming, and dancing the hula. Importantly, he was also a chief from a junior line who defeated and usurped the power of his oppressive cousin who was ruler of the island; the allegorical parallels to the colonial situation were well understood by readers (Silva 2004a, 75, 83). They also published stories (especially around the turn of the twentieth century and early Territorial period) of powerful female deities such as Pele and Hi’iaka, an indication that they did not feel threatened by women’s mana and efficacy (Silva 2004b).

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