Eastman's Maternal Ancestry
Letter from Charles Alexander Eastman to H. M. Hitchcock, September
8, 1927
A. LAVONNE BROWN RUOFF
The H. M. (Hiram M.) Hitchcock papers in the Edward E. Ayer Collection contain four
letters from Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa; Santee Dakota,
1858-1939) to Hitchcock, dated from 1927 to 1935.1 The most interesting of
these letters is that of September 8, 1927, transcribed below.2 Here Eastman
proudly describes his parents' lineages and poignantly expresses his deep sorrow at the death of
his mother when he was an infant.
Little is known about Hitchcock, a
businessman and historian from Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1930 he published several articles
about early Minnesota
history and in 1931 wrote one on Eastman, "An Indian Returns Home."3 During
the early twentieth century, Eastman became one of the most prolific authors
and speakers on Sioux ethnohistory and American Indian affairs. Among his most acclaimed and
widely read books are Indian Boyhood (1902), Old Indian
Days (1907), Soul of the Indian (1911), From the Deep Woods to
Civilization (1916), and Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918). In
Charles A. Eastman
(Ohiyesa), Raymond Wilson describes him as "the first major Indian author to write
Indian history from the Indian perspective."4 Eastman's mother, named
Winona at birth and later Wakantankawin and Mary Nancy Eastman (1830-58), was the daughter
of Seth Eastman (1809-75) and Wak inajin win
(Mdewakanton Dakota). In 1830 Seth Eastman and Wak inajin win married at Fort Snelling in
present-day Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born in New Hampshire,
Seth Eastman was a West Point graduate who became a topographical engineer and celebrated
painter. {11} In 1833 he left his family behind after the
War
Department ordered him to Louisiana. He returned to Fort Snelling as commander in 1841,
bringing with him a white wife, Mary Henderson Eastman (b.
1818).5 The maternal grandfather of Wakantankawin (Mary Nancy Eastman) was
Mahpiya Wicasta, sometimes given as Wichasta (Cloud Man, b. 1780). A
Christian convert, Cloud Man was a Mdewakanton Dakota chief who had a French father and
Mdewakanton mother. Wahkan- tanawin and Ite Wakanhdi Ota
(Many Lightnings), a Wahpeton Dakota, married in 1847. She bore three sons and a daughter
before Charles was born near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. After he
converted to Christianity, Many Lightnings took the name Jacob Eastman.
The transcription of the signed,
autograph letter below retains as much of Eastman's personal style as can be discerned. His
divisions and omissions of
words, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been retained.6
Deleted words are indicated thus: mother. Distinguished anthropologist Beatrice
Medicine (Lakota) provided invaluable assistance in the transcription of Dakota names. I am
deeply grateful for her help.
Reserve, Wis.
Sept. 8, 1927
Mr.
H. M. Hitchcock
Minneapolis, Minn.
My dear friend,
I received your letter and the copies of
the picture my beloved mother. I found Mr. Mayer's picture of my mother three years ago in the
collection of
Mr. Ayers, which was placed in the first floor of the Newberry Library in Chicago, and I had
copies made for me by "Underwood and Underwood."7
However, I am grateful and thank you just the same as if I hadn't the pictures already. Further
more I thank you for your kind interest in our family history.
I certainly will do what I can toward getting your article in proper and authentic form. I know Mr.
Samuel Pond of Minnesota personally and historically,
for the family were closely associated with my mother's family in their early missionary efforts
among the Sioux.8 My great grandfather and my mother's
grand-{12}father was instrumental in establishing the
first Protestant missionary work among the Sioux and at Minneapolis. My great grandfather's
village was located between Harriet and Calhoun Lakes, facing perhaps more toward the
latter.9 But, my mother was born on the shore of Lake Harriet,
while camping there, sugar making and fishing, not far from where the old pavilion used to stand,
north of the old schoolhouse, where there is, I think
then a tablet is now marks it. I do not know the month of her birth, but I think, it was in the early
summer of 1830. She married my father in 1847. She
only seventeen 17 [sic]. The the picture was made of her in
1851. Therefore, she must have been just twenty one or approaching it. She died sometime in
September July, in 1858, from what I learned, of acute Tonsilitis and
weekness from my birth. At any rate, it was a throat trouble and not of long duration.
The entire Mde wakan towan tribe mourn for her loss because she was generous and kind and a
friend to every body, young and old. Every nursing
mother came to my rescue, her child; consequently I was nursed by many mothers, until my
paternal grandmother was able to feed me.
From my sister's account is my
different from this account and also that of my grand mother's. I was born in Feb, which was
recorded by one of my
mother's half breed friends, and mother died early in the spring. I consider the latter is likely--but
it is true she died in the summer of 1858. When I was
four weeks to three four mother months old. So there is confusion in the exact time of her death,
a difference of four or five month. She was about
twenty-eight -- (28) when she died. She was buried about 20 rods south west from the farm house
situated about a mile or so east of the old agency stone
house, on a knoll, where the or near the brick building of her grand father
Chief Cloud Man had stood. She was the daughter of the third daughter of Chief
Mahpiya wicasta (Cloud Man) and Captain Seth Eastman U.S. Army, a New Hampshire young
man and a graduate of West Point Military Academy. The
latter also was an artist. Two of his paintings are exhibited in Washington, D.C. One was a
master piece painting of a great inter-tribal lacross game,
played on the {13} plain just north of Fort Snelling. That
hangs, among the masterpiece, in the Cochrane's gallery in Washington.10 The
other, a painting
of the Santee Sioux women gathering or harvesting wild rice. That hangs in the rooms of the
House Committee on Indian Affairs. It was not very long
after her birth Capt. Seth East-man was ordered from Fort Snelling to the Seminole War in
Florida. It appears that he did not see her again until 1848. She
was then married and had one child (my sister Mary).11 Traditions
exac existed in the Cloud Man family, that Seth was very tender toward
his child, and
when on his last visit to his child, he pressed it to heart while tears ran down his noble young
face. He had ordered all her needs from Henry Sibley's store
and when he went away to war, he told my grand mother, when ever she needs anything for the
child go to "Wasicun hanska" or "Wapeton hanska" and
ask for it and she would have it.12 That was Gen. Sibleys Sioux name.
Mother's [beauty?] beautiful face,
body, soul was easy explained when one know the line of her forebear, humblest line is her
pPuritan father, but
again he was unusually gifted.
Chief Cloud Man was the son of a french noble man, but
was the son of one a woman, a daughter of a most noted Mdewakan
towan chief whose
received father, also great chief, of the same tribe, receive the noted
Jesuit Priest Hennepin and entertained him nearly three years.13
As I remember him, small as I was. Chief Cloud Man was
very fine looking old. His hair was pure white, silky and wavy, altho he must have close to
hundred years in 1862, he was active. He comes to my paternal grand mother's sugar camp, "to
see little Hak a dah" that was childhood name. He had
three daughters and two sons. Anpetu inajinwin ("The Day Sets" or "The Day Finishes"), Hanye
tu kihn ayewin (Hushes-still-the-night) and Wakan inajin
win (Stands Sacred, or Stands Holy, or Stands Mysteriously) but it was meant the first
translation. The last is my grand mother. The[y] were all unusually
beautiful and spirited one all of them married officers. The oldest left
children. The second left one child, namely Mrs. Jennie Titus {14} what who
married a white man by the name Titus. She had three sons, Harry, Samuel, and
Moses.14 The two latter were in banking business at Grand Forks, N.D. in
early days. The other was farmer at Tracy, Minn. I do not know whether they are
living.15 It appears that my mother had inherited french noble blood as
she was also descended from the noblest blood America. She had the best cultural blood of both
as well physical and mental gifts. As I said her humblest
blood was the puritan from her father, but it was gifted and cultured.
On the other line -- my father was also descended both sides
long lines chiefs and great leaders. The happiest compliments that I ever received from
any was Gen. Sibley and Gov. Alexander Ramsey, both said to me, "You have done well but you
have nothing on your ancestors. We knew them for three
generations a long line of great leaders and honor. You inherited some thing from
them."16
These lines are hastily written but essential and authentic
account of the genealogy of my beloved mother whose spirited [sic] inspired in all
endeavors, may assist you preparing your prose article on my mother. I assure you again my
appreciation of your interest bringing the life of my mother
before people. Her Indian name was Goddess, viz. Wakantankanwin, and her child hood or birth
name was Winona. No other Sioux Woman ever was
given that name, as far as tradition can tell, Because of her beauty of and
body and soul.
I shall be here until this month, then I intend go back East.
In fact, I am waiting for letters from the Brooks-Bryce Foundation of New York City, an
organization for writing all the English speaking people for peace.17 They
engaged me to speak for them in England and Scotland in all colleges and
schools. If my health will permit I will go.
My warm regards--
Yours truly,
Charles Alexander Eastman
(Ohiyesa)
{15}
On the back of the last page, Louise Stegner's penciled note reads:
"original --
family history
Eastman"
F. B. Mayer, Winona (also know as Wakantankawin
or Mary Nancy Eastman, mother of Charles Eastman). Sketchbook #41, July 28, 1851.
Newberry Library, Edward E. Ayer Art Collection.
NOTES
This article is
a substantially revised version of a draft previously published in The Meeting
Ground, 41, 42, 43.
{16}
1. The letters are in Ayer Box MS 3064. Louise Stegner,
niece of Hitchcock, sold the letters to the Newberry Library. She also sold to Yale University
additional letters and papers of H. M.
Hitchcock that pertain to Elaine Goodale Eastman, dated June 10 to November 17, 1935. They
are in the Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Stegner's
descriptive manuscript notes in pencil appear on both sets of letters and papers.
2. A version of this essay was published as "Exploring the
Newberry's American Indian Collections: Charles Alexander Eastman's Letter to HM. Hitchcock,
8 September 1927," The Meeting
Ground, 42, 42, 43 (Fall 1999, Spring 2000, Fall/Winter 2000-01): 3-5. The editor
inadvertently published an early and incomplete draft, rather than the final version. Both my
name and my
acknowledgement of the assistance of Professor Beatrice Medicine (Lakota) were omitted as
well.
3. Hitchcock published in the St. Anthony
Review an article on the Minnesota fur trade and another on "Minnesota's first farmers" at
the missions on Lake Calhoun and Lac qui Parle. These
appeared in two numbers of the December issue. The Review was a journal of the
St. Anthony Commercial Club. Hitchcock also published an account of Father Hennepin and
George Catlin in the
February issue of the Review (Minnesota History 11 [1930]: 216).
Hitchcock's article on the career of Charles Alexander Eastman, "An Indian Returns Home,"
appeared in the Minneapolis Journal on
September 28, 1931 (Minnesota History 12 [1931]: 97). It was written in honor of
Eastman's visit to Minneapolis during the celebration on October 12, 1930 of the 250th
anniversary of Father Louis
Hennepin's "discovery" of the Falls of St. Anthony (Raymond Wilson, Ohiyesa, Charles
Eastman, Santee Sioux [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983] 186).
4. Native American Writers of the United States.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Kenneth M. Roemer (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark
Layman, Gale Research, 1997) 175:83.
5. Henderson wrote Dakotah: Or, Life and Legends of
the Sioux around Fort Snelling (1849).
6. An earlier transcription of this letter appeared in
"Additional Genealogical Notes Regarding the Ancestry of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, a Minnesota
Mdewakanton Dakota," Minnesota
Archaeologist 12.1 (January 1946): 7-11. This version inaccurately transcribes the Dakota
names of some of Eastman's relatives; alters Eastman's paragraphing; supplies words for those
Eastman
omitted; and changes the author's sentence structure, capitalization, and spelling.
7. Frank Blackwell Mayer (1827-1899), a painter born in
Baltimore, made a pencil drawing of "Winona" (Wakantawin or Mary Nancy Eastman).
{17}
8. Samuel Pond (1808-91) and his brother Gideon (1810-78)
moved in 1834 from Connecticut to the Upper Mississippi, where they worked to convert the
Sioux. They established missions at Lake
Calhoun, Lake Harriet (both in present-day Minneapolis), and Lac qui Parle. The brothers
labored to translate oral Dakota into a written language.
9. Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet are located west of the
Mississippi in western Minneapolis, Minnesota.
10. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
11. Stegner's marginal note identifies "She" as "his
daughter."
12. Henry Hastings Sibley (1811-91) was a trader whose
headquarters were at Mendota, Minnesota, across the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling. He
became governor of Minnesota in 1857. During
the 1862 Minnesota Uprising, he commanded the state militia, which defeated the Santee Dakota
in the battle of Wood Lake on September 23. For this service, Abraham Lincoln made him a
brigadier general.
13 Father Louis Hennepin (1640-after c.1701) was a
Belgian-born, Franciscan missionary and explorer. Captured by the Mdewankanton Dakota on
April 23, 1680, he was taken to their camp near
Mille Lac in present-day Minnesota. He accompanied them on several hunting expeditions. After
his rescue in July 1680, Father Hennepin published an account of his adventures in
Description de la
Louisian (Paris, 1683). John Gilmary Shea translated the book into English: A
Description of Louisiana by Father Louis Hennepin. (New York: John Gilmary Shea,
1880).
14. In a note above the names, Stegner identifies "Harry" as
"Harlan" and "Samuel" as "Seymore."
15. Stegner's note in the space above this sentence reads
"Moses & Harlan still living 10/19/35."
16. In 1849, Alexander Ramsey (1815-1903) became the
first governor of the Minnesota Territory. Negotiator for the Sioux land cessions in 1851,
Ramsey was elected governor in 1859. Later he
became a U.S. senator and secretary of war under President Rutherford B. Hayes.
17 Eastman became a director of the Foundation, which
Mrs. Florence Brooks-Aten established to foster good relations between English-speaking people
in American and Great Britain. Among the
other directors were the presidents of Yale University and the University of Virginia and Rear
Admiral William S. Simms, U.S. Navy retired (Wilson 184-85).
{18}
Yellow Women and Leslie Marmon Silko's
Feminism
LOUISE BARNETT
Mary Crow Dog in her memoir Lakota Woman admires in passing the lifestyle
of the Pueblo Indians, who, unlike her own people, the Lakota Sioux, had not
been uprooted and herded onto reservations. She writes, "I could not help noticing the great role
women played in Pueblo society. Women owned the houses
and actually built them. Children often got their mother's last name, not their father's. Some
joined their mothers' clans" (106). This picture of female eminence
is confirmed in Leslie Marmon Silko's essay "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit," where
she describes the building of houses Crow Dog refers to:
One of my most vivid preschool memories is of the crew of Laguna women,
in their forties and fifties, who came to cover our house with adobe plaster.
They handled the ladders with great ease, and while two women ground the mud on stones and
added straw, another woman loaded the hod with mud and
passed it up to the two women on ladders, who were smoothing the plaster on the walls with their
hands. Since women owned the houses, they did the
plastering. (Yellow Woman 66)1
Silko concludes this passage with the assertion that "because the Creator is female, there is
no stigma on being female; gender is not used to control behavior.
No job was a man's job or a woman's job; the most able person did the work" (Yellow
Woman 66). She notes that she never heard the expression "women's
work" until she left her Pueblo com-{19}munity for
college. On the contrary, Silko remembers her Grandma Lily always fixing broken lamps and
appliances.
In Silko's description a liberating
fluidity of identity seems to have characterized the pre-Columbian Pueblo people and to have
continued to some extent
into her own twentieth-century experience. Rigidity of gender categorization arrived with the
Christian missionaries, ending an Edenic era in which "a man
could dress as a woman and work with the women and even marry a man," while "a woman was
free to dress like a man, to hunt and go to war with the men,
and to marry a woman. . . . Marriage did not mean an end to sex with people other than your
spouse" (Yellow Woman 67). Nor did paternity matter since
"children belonged to the mother and her clan, and women owned and bequeathed the houses and
farmland" (Yellow Woman 68).2
Since the clan was a close-knit group,
united by blood and community, children might be redistributed within it from women who had
unplanned
pregnancies to women who were barren. As in European peasant societies, women in Pueblo
cultures were prized more for their ability to cope with a strenuous
life than for physical beauty. But more than this, Pueblo women had always had one of the
freedoms that Euroamerican feminism sought, that of abolishing
gender as a qualification for occupation. The nineteenth-century American feminist Margaret
Fuller proclaimed that "we would have every path laid open to
woman as freely as to man" (260), a goal that remained central to twentieth-century
feminism.
If Silko's own experience growing up
in a twentieth-century pueblo provided an egalitarian view of gender as a matter of course,
Pueblo religion reinforced
the idea of a female creative principle that actively contributed to the well-being of the people
through such female deities as Thought Woman, Spider Woman,
Corn Mother, and others. Not surprisingly, given the shaping attitudes of Pueblo culture toward
gender, the mythic female figure of Kochininako, Yellow
Woman, is Silko's professed favorite.3 Yellow Woman in old Pueblo tales is both
heroic and sexual, that is, she protects the Pueblos with her heroism and also
with her uninhibited sexuality, which affirms the life force of nature. Like Maxine Hong
Kingston's woman warrior, {20} Yellow Woman often
assumes a role
traditionally associated with men, exhibiting courage in the wider world reserved for male action.
At the same time she embodies an aggressive sexuality, also
considered male, but with a traditional object of female desire -- "a strong, sexy man"
(Yellow Woman 70). The Yellow Women tales, which generally have
these two components, are female fantasies in which the wider sphere of male activity and the
admired qualities related to it are appropriated by the woman and
her desire for sexual freedom given voice. In the Yellow Woman tale told in Silko's essay,
Yellow Woman saves the Pueblos from starving and acquires the
"strong, sexy man" as her mate. She becomes the fearless, triumphant woman, an ideal mixture
of male and female qualities. She is also the perfect
representation of feminism in Silko's texts, the union of personal independence, sexual freedom,
and heroic endeavor for the community at large.
Silko admits that as a girl she
identified with Yellow Woman and "depended" on her in moments of discouragement. In the
Pueblo spirit of creating stories
to help oneself (and others) be strong, Silko has written of Yellow Woman again and again.
Many of her positive women characters are recognizable as versions
of Yellow Woman -- a woman courageous in the service of her people and usually achieving
success through sexuality rather than destruction.4 She adopts the
male role of protecting the community but does so through her female nature.
Silko's essay on Yellow Woman may
be considered an after-the-fact summation of ideas about a character who had already received
embodiment in her
fiction and poetry. Early on Silko seems to have tried out different versions of Yellow Woman,
some mythic and others contemporary -- all indicating her
fascination with the permutations of the Yellow Woman role. Storyteller contains
texts openly based on popular Keresan myths and texts in which some germ
of mythic content is transformed into a modern experience.5 The common
denominator of the Yellow Woman retellings seems to be escape from the narrow life
of the feminine domestic world. In "Cottonwood Part One: Story of Sun House,"
the woman who leaves
{21}
walked past white corn
hung in low rows from roof beams
the dry husks rattled in a thin autumn wind. (Storyteller 64)
In the season of winter this crop, so central and symbolic in Pueblo life, seems to press down
on her from the roof, not as an image of abundance and nurturance
but of the very lack of these qualities, inscribed in "dry" and "thin." To rejoin Sun she is willing
to leave everything behind -- home, clan, family. The speaker of
the poem intimates that this is a story "about drastic things which / must be done / for the world /
to continue" (65), yet at the same time the protagonist's choice
does not appear to be a sacrifice: Yellow Woman wants to be with Sun. Satisfying her desire for
someone other than her husband turns out to be beneficial to
the world and to have no negative consequences.
The more complicated narrative of the
companion poem, "Cottonwood Part Two: Buffalo Story," establishes the
conjunction of heroic action,
transgressive sexuality, and death. Instead of experiencing mere seasonal change, the country is
stricken by drought. Yellow Woman begins as the familiar
domestic figure, a wife and mother seeking water for her family -- a quest that carries her far
from home into the land of the buffalos. Here she meets the "very
beautiful" Buffalo Man and, half-willingly, accompanies him back to his people. Her husband's
journey to bring her back and subsequent killing of the Buffalo
People is a story designed to explain how Pueblo hunters first went to the plains to get buffalo
meat. Yellow Woman has made this possible: her affair is a
means of renewing the community through a "liaison with outside forces" (Ruoff 73), but
because she has committed herself to the stranger, her husband kills
her -- in keeping with several Yellow Woman tales. Here and in the poem about Yellow
Woman's encounter with the giant, or Estrucuyu, Silko's narrative
follows a well-known story.6
The first verse of
Storytelling, a series of partial stories on the Yellow Woman theme, begins with a
statement that links past and present, myth and reality:
{22}
You should understand
the way it was
back then,
because it is the same
even now. (94)
This assertion may cast doubt back onto the past as much as it provides a pattern for
present-day action. In each brief example it would seem that the
protagonist is a poor storyteller, unable to successfully link her experience to the high plane of
Yellow Woman. Perhaps at the time they evolved, the Yellow
Women myths had the same suspect origins as the contemporary stories.
Silko is drawn to an exercise of
sexuality on the part of Yellow Woman that plays out as comedy more than tragedy.
Storytelling is a collection of
narratives on the theme of liberating female sexuality, the first of which might be thought of as a
mythic epigraph establishing the primal scene of encounter
between a woman and a mysterious stranger. It goes no further than Yellow Woman's act of
leaving with Buffalo Man, who uses no coercion on her.7 Her
question to Buffalo Man,"But where shall I put my water jar?" can be construed as asking him
how to extricate herself from her domestic identity. In
abandoning her water jar she willingly renounces her responsibilities as a wife and member of
the community. The decision may seem impulsive, but the
careful placement of the jar manifests a valuing of the identity it symbolizes.
The remaining sections of the poem
are fragments of modern stories that all concern some act of sexual transgression. The strongest
story, the one with the
best chance of satisfying an outraged husband, would require that the woman had been
kidnapped or forced, but this would also deprive her of the agency that
Silko has found so appealing in the Yellow Woman myths. Mothers and husbands want such
stories, stories that minimize deviancy and restore the errant
woman to the community. The media, on the other hand, prefers sensationalism, multiplying the
number of women and casting them as abductors of men. The
woman who says "it's always happening to me" (Silko, Storyteller 97) encourages
the men from Cubero, while the {23} speaker of the final
section makes up a
poor story to explain her absence. If she is the wife of the man who demands a "damn good
story" earlier in the poem, her excuse that the roads were impassable
for the entire ten months she has been gone is not believable -- as she herself knows. The feeble
story may be an intentional act rather than just a clumsy
performance, the threat of the "tall good-looking" Navajo to kill her merely a device to preserve
her husband's pride. The speaker's lack of regret, coupled with
her ineffective story, reveals that she is unwilling to disavow her experience and resume her old
life.
Silko's story "Yellow Woman" is still
another and more elaborate rendering of the mythic figure as primarily a transgressive wife. As
Lavonne Ruoff
observes,"One of the themes of the story is the power which physical sensations and desire have
to blot out thought of home, family, and responsibility" (75).
But however compelling the sensuous texture of the prose, the narrative is curiously different
from the inspiring myths that Silko loved as a child. In Helen
Jaskoski's words, "Yellow Woman has elements of a romantic idyll, yet even
within its erotic escape there may be unpleasant contact, full of misunderstanding
and the potential for violence" ("To Tell a Good Story" 96). The woman has an adventure, but
like the figures in Storytelling she may merely be a wife who
runs off with a stranger, one who may be a thief and a murderer. Her relation to Yellow Woman,
as Silva's to the katsina, is ambiguous.8 During the episode she
is dominated by him, and afterward, she returns to a domestic life that is comforting but
humdrum. Without enthusiasm she will reinsert herself in this world,
but she knows that it could get along without her: her mother and grandmother raising the baby,
her husband finding someone new, her absence satisfactorily
explained by a story. Instead of the Yellow Woman myth, which she embraces, she will
substitute for her family something banal and naturalistic -- Navajo
kidnapping. This false story deprives her of volition and transforms the positive experience of her
time with Silva into an unlooked for ordeal. Yet the world in
which she lived with Silva was problematic, its positive qualities of sexual satisfaction and
freedom undercut by its transience and Silva's strangeness.
Was this, as the woman imagines, a
true Yellow Woman story? The {24} narrative leaves it
unresolved, but one possibility is that, as in the scenarios of
Storytelling, the myth is a convenient label for the woman to impose upon an
otherwise reprehensible adventure. The appeal of Yellow Woman, Silva suggests
to the speaker, is to be a larger-than-life character in a mythic story as opposed to the real
protagonist of a mundane occurrence -- the account of her
disappearance that would be constructed if she failed to return. The most important part of the
mythic Yellow Woman story, the part that Ruoff observes
transformed sexual transgression into heroism (73), has been lost in the modern context. This
may explain the protagonist's desire to give greater meaning to her
adventure by attaching it to the Yellow Woman story. In Almanac of the Dead and
Gardens in the Dunes the mature Silko will condemn this kind of narcissistic
freedom, cut off from larger significance, as characteristic of the dominant culture.
Though diminished to an impulsive
sexual liaison, Yellow Woman has that quality of female independence that Silko extols in
Pueblo culture in contrast
to the mores of middle-class America. The woman is perturbed neither about her sexual
adventure nor about the lie she intends to tell when she returns home.
Here and in the poem Storytelling, the insistence on a link with the past may be the
protagonist's self-serving attempt to ennoble her action, or more generously,
an effort to create meaning.
The cluster of Yellow Woman
narratives in Storyteller reflect Silko's youth as a writer. As she told some
interviewers, her teenage wish was to encounter
unexpectedly "some beautiful man" around a bend of the river near her home: "Later on I realized
that these kinds of things that I was doing when I was fifteen
are exactly the kinds of things out of which stories like the Yellow Woman story [came]. I finally
put the two together: the adolescent longings and the old
stories" (qtd. in Evers and Carr 29). But what she emphasized at first in her contemporary
adaptations of the Yellow Woman myth, as opposed to her retellings
of them as myths, was only a part of the story, the "adolescent longings" embodied in the idea of
sexual freedom.
The Yellow Woman in Silko's 1977
novel Ceremony is the more complex figure of the complete myth, who combines
sexual freedom with heroic action.
Where the protagonist of the story "Yellow Woman" is a {25} passive adjunct to Silva's actions, Ts'eh,
Ceremony's Yellow Woman, plays an active role. She
has corralled Tayo's cattle and will take good care of them while he goes to get a truck to
transport them. But when he returns, she is gone. Tayo will find Ts'eh
again in the summer, and only then does she tell him her name. She claims to have siblings in the
area, but he has never heard of her family. Later, after they
have spent the summer together, immersed in the world of nature in which she collects medicinal
plants, Tayo realizes something about her identity that is not
explicitly stated: "He could feel where she had come from, and he understood where she would
always be" (230).
Ts'eh is in fact not only Yellow
Woman but also the author stepping into the narrative and revealing the general shape of the
novel's conclusion. She alerts
Tayo to the competing forces that are attempting to control the story: "They were coming to end
it their way" (235). She tells him, "They want it to end here, the
way all their stories end, encircling slowly to choke the life away. The violence of the struggle
excites them, and the killing soothes them" (231-32). Emo and
his followers are coming for Tayo, to destroy him, but they are only tools of the white world,
unconscious incarnations of the Indian scouts and police who
chose the white side in the nineteenth century. Ts'eh is given the long speech explaining to Tayo
what has been scripted by the dominant culture: "They would
end this story right here, with you fighting to your death alone in these hills" (232).
Thus, Yellow Woman has not only
physically aided Tayo by saving his cattle and emotionally aided him by breaking down his
isolation with her
passionate lovemaking, her intellectual grasp of things has also saved his life by explaining the
situation he is in, both microcosmic and macrocosmic. She
prepares him for the final confrontation with evil in which, with the understanding she has given
him, he will write a new ending to the story, one of survival
rather than death. Because of Ts'eh's help, Tayo does survive, and with him the hope of his
community's generation of young people. When it was over, Tayo
"thought of her then; she had always loved him, she had never left him; she had always been
there" (255). The reference isn't clear. It seems to be Ts'eh, but he
has just been thinking about nature: "We came out of this land," he thinks, "and we are hers"
(255). Ts'eh and {26} nature have become
indistinguishable.
Living away from any community and in tune with the natural world, she represents the
traditional harmony between human beings and their physical environment.
The Yellow Woman of
Ceremony is a modern reshaping of the mythic figure. It is as if Silko
acknowledges on the more ambitious terrain of the novel that
for our time the heroic woman will use intellectual resources rather than arrows to save her
people. This version of Yellow Woman is more like the powerful
mythic figure than the limited Yellow Woman of "Yellow Woman" and
Storytelling. In those texts sexuality is the major issue, the fantasy of escaping
marital
routine with an attractive stranger.
In her later novels Silko has continued
to create versions of Yellow Woman like Ts'eh that reflect her own concept of feminism -- the
combination of
female strength, independence, and sexuality. Her idea of Yellow Woman as a fictive character
seems to have evolved from the early figures in Storyteller, who
emphasize sexuality, to Ts'eh, who is both mistress and guide, to Tayo and on to those women of
Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes who
foreground heroic action in contrast to the white women in these texts.
Almanac is too large to
discuss comprehensively as part of this spectrum, but since it is the most overtly political of
Silko's novels, it is not surprising that
it contains Indian women committed to revolution who are reminiscent of Yellow Woman.
Angelita, La Escapia, is the most militant, the top graduate of her
class at the Marxist school and utterly devoted to the restoration of Indian ownership of the
Americas. She both affirms her sexual independence and downplays
it: "What about her and that white man, Bartolomeo? To questions about her sexual conduct,
Angelita was quick to laugh and make jokes. Sex with the Cuban
was no big thing" (317). More than "no big thing," it completely lacks the sensuous description
of sex between Ts'eh and Tayo in Ceremony: Angelita
commodifies Bartolomeo both sexually and politically, then willingly condemns him to death for
crimes against tribal histories.
The sexual relationship between the
Indian leader El Feo and Angelita is unique in the novel because his attraction to her is based
{27} on her power. She
openly claims the role of revolutionary leader, a Yellow Woman with a clear sense of communal
purpose. "Luckily," Silko writes,"El Feo had never been
jealous" (523). He can accept Angelita on her own sexual terms. And like Ts'eh, she is also
identified with the earth: "He imagined the warmth of the darkest,
deepest forest in an early-summer rain; he imagined he was burying himself deeper and deeper
into the core of the earth" (522).
Angelita's combination of Yellow
Woman qualities -- untrammeled sexuality, earth-centeredness, and heroic action -- provides an
antitype to the white
women of Almanac, all mired in an artificial, sterile, and narcissistic culture,
corrupted and corrupting.
In Gardens in the Dunes,
Silko extols the same qualities of Indian culture described in her essays. She writes that
the old-time Sand Lizard people believed sex with strangers was
advantageous because it created a happy atmosphere to benefit commerce and exchange
with strangers. . . . Any babies born from these unions were named "friend," "peace," and "unity";
they loved these babies just as fiercely as they loved all
their Sand Lizard babies. (220)
Sister Salt, one of the Sand Lizard Indians, "took her choice of the men willing to pay a dime
for fun in the tall grass along the river." Like El Feo, her African
American boyfriend doesn't mind. Silko describes his rather unlikely attitude in this way: "Her
body belonged to her -- it was none of his business" (220).
Although Sister Salt does not know
who the father of her unborn baby is, in keeping with Silko's representation of Pueblo society,
she is unperturbed.
Regardless of his paternity, the baby will be a Sand Lizard, assimilated into his mother's culture.
It might seem that Sister Salt is merely another version of the
woman in Storytelling whose liberation has been reduced to promiscuity, but she is
actually a more subtle form of Yellow Woman heroine: under the difficult
conditions of life for the Indians, her survival and reproduction are both willed and heroic.
Unlike Angelita, she does not arrive at the truth through
intellectualizing; she acts instinctively in keeping with traditional imperatives. Moreover, when
she steps forward and spits in the face of a {28} white
man, her
action is invested with symbolic meaning. This man's unwitting presence has brought the police
to disrupt a gathering of Indians who are performing the Ghost
Dance. In choosing the inoffensive, liberal Mr. Abbott as the recipient of this gesture of
contempt, rather than some stronger or more negative figure of white
authority, Silko emphasizes that all whites, however beneficent and well intentioned, are
disruptive to the Indian world.
Gardens contrasts the
practical feminism of Sister Salt, who reproduces and returns to her ancestral lands, with the
cerebral and ultimately futile
independence of Hattie, the white protagonist. When she is first introduced, Hattie is studying the
male discipline of theology at Harvard, which she has
scandalized by asserting that Jesus had women disciples and Mary Magdalene wrote a gospel
suppressed by the church. Her thesis is unanimously rejected by
her committee, and in the aftermath of disappointment and aimlessness she marries Edward
Palmer. While Sister Salt and the other Indian women bend their
efforts toward survival and sexual pleasure without depending upon or subordinating themselves
to men, Hattie lives a stifling and sexless existence as
Edward's wife; her husband's energies are devoted to acquisition. Kind and caring as Hattie is,
she is out of place and hence superfluous. After her husband's
death, Hattie wishes to remain near Indigo, the young Sand Lizard girl she has befriended, but
she is robbed and nearly killed. In her desire to help the Indians
she has only made things worse: the white community that has united to protect the real assailant
blames "some Indian" for the attack on Hattie. In a gesture
reminiscent of Henry James exiling his transgressive characters to America, Silko exiles Hattie
from America. Her intellectual feminism, such as it was, is
neither useful nor valuable, to herself or to others.9
Hattie means well, but she lacks a
program to actualize her liberal ideas beyond circumscribed individual initiatives. When her
research on Mary
Magdalene, which might have led to a more overtly feminist stance, is invalidated by the
patriarchal establishment, she is left adrift. Because the dominant
culture has no mythic roots in North America, and the self-indulgence its materialism promotes
deprives sexual behavior of meaning, white women lack the
qualities that have {29} attracted Silko to Yellow Woman
over the course of her career: the strong will and daring imagination that can overcome
convention to
produce a powerful gesture of individual sexual assertion or heroic action for the community.
Yellow Woman as a mythic being is exceptional in these respects,
yet the very name, as Paula Gunn Allen observes,"is in some sense a name that means Woman --
Woman because among the Keres, yellow is the color for
women" (226).10 Yellow Woman, then, represents a female potential that, when
actualized, creates the practical feminist values of personal and societal
achievement.
While Silko is didactic politically in
her novels, she has not been interested in preaching in her fiction about feminism. Nevertheless,
Gardens in the Dunes
illustrates a complete paradigm of Silko's idea of feminism. Although Ceremony
contains a full and thoughtfully evolved figure of Yellow Woman, exemplary
of feminist principles in her behavior, only Gardens systematically poses such an
Indian character against a white woman in order to show the superiority of a
social organization grounded in the female role. This is the same way of life admired so much by
Mary Austin early in the twentieth century, a world that had
"no institutionalized orphans, no mothers of dependent children penalized by their widowhood,
no one pining for a mate, who wished to be married" (244).
Austin concludes,"Over all the inestimable treasure of their culture lie our ignorance and
self-conceit as a gray dust" (244-45). In her last novel Silko has
dramatized this very contrast.
NOTES
1. Babcock reproduces an Edward
S. Curtis photo of women replastering a house at Laguna in 1925 (Parsons, Pueblo
Mothers 68).
2. A number of historical and anthropological sources
generally support Silko's description of Pueblo culture and gender behavior. See in particular
Gutiérrez, who cites early Spanish sources;
Jacobs; and Eggan. With varying attitudes, most observers have been struck by the greater power
of women in the Pueblo culture than in Western patriarchal societies.
3. Kochininako is Silko's spelling of the Keresan name. The
Yellow {30} Woman tales
have been collected in numerous places, notably in Boas and in Parsons, Pueblo Indian
Religion. Allen
(222-44) and Ruoff have illuminating analyses of the genre. My view of Silko's relation to these
tales is the same as Per Seyersted's, namely, that Silko does not rely on anthropological accounts
but on
her own experience of these tales growing up in Laguna. Moreover, "she is an artist who wants to
apply her imagination to the telling of tales" (Seyersted 16).
4. In Almanac of the Dead Angelita
participates in liberated sex and violence, an indication that the warrior dimension
of the myth is necessary to women in the late-twentieth-century world.
5. In her later novels Silko has moved away from the overt
introduction of mythic material into the narrative that occurs in Ceremony.
6. In Boas (127-30), Yellow Woman's opponent is a
giantess. Silko's giant is similar to "the predatory, cannibalistic, cave-dwelling giant . . . [whose]
footprints were left in the rocks" (Parsons,
Pueblo Indian Religion 2: 1122n).
7. Hirsch describes Storytelling as "six brief
vignettes based on the abduction motif of the traditional Yellow Woman stories" (163). But Silko
suggests that abduction is a convenient fiction for her
protagonists rather than the truth.
8. Jaskoski links Silva with the mythic figures of the
"Cottonwood" poems, Sun and Arrow-Boy, but concedes that no identification can be
definitively established -- or ruled out (Leslie Marmon
Silko 35).
9. Other than Hattie, Silko has not created white characters
who are identifiable as feminists.
10. Cf. Boas, who observes that "generically the girl heroes
of all stories are called Yellow-Woman" (259).
WORKS CITED
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Austin, Mary. The Land of Journey's Ending. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
2003.
Boas, Franz. Keresan Texts. Vol. 8, Part 1. New York: American Ethnological
Society, 1928.
Crow Dog, Mary, with Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. New York:
Harper-Collins, 1991.
Eggan, Fred. Social Organization of the Western Pueblos. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1950.
{31}
Evers, Larry, and Denny Carr. "A Conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko," Sun Tracks
3 (1976): 28-33.
Fuller, Margaret. The Essential Margaret Fuller. Ed. Jeffrey Steele. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.
Gutiérrez, Ramon A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away:
Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Palo Alto: Stanford UP,
1991.
Hirsch, Bernard A. "'The Telling Which Continues': Oral Tradition and the Written Word in
Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller." "Yellow Woman": Leslie
Marmon Silko. Ed. Melody Graulich. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993: 151-83.
Jacobs, Margaret D. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures
1879-1934. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.
Jaskoski, Helen. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction. New
York: Twayne, 1995.
>------. "To Tell a Good Story." Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson. Albuquerque: U of New
Mexico P, 1999: 87-100.
Parsons, Elsie Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996.
------. Pueblo Mothers and Children. Ed. Barbara Babcock. Santa Fe: Ancient
City, 1991.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne. "Ritual and Renewal: Keres Traditions in Leslie Silko's 'Yellow
Woman.'" "Yellow Woman": Leslie Marmon Silko. Ed. Melody Graulich.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993: 69-82.
Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise: Boise State University, 1980.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1992.
------. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986.------. Gardens in the
Dunes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.------. Storyteller. New
York: Arcade, 1981.
------. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life
Today. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
{32}
The Queen Writes Back
Lili'uokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen
LYDIA KUALAPAI
Minamina ka leo o ke ali'i i ka ha'ule i ka pweuweu.
A pity to allow the words of the chief to fall among the clumps of grass.
Mary Kawena Pukui, 'Olelo
No'eau
In January 1898, six months prior to the U.S. annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, Queen
Lili'uokalani (1838-1917) published Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's
Queen and thus emerged from the period's turmoil as a remarkable literary figure and a
farsighted political strategist. Through her memoir, the queen writes
back to her critics, to her political enemies, and to the scores of U.S. missionaries and missionary
descendants who had denigrated Native Hawaiians throughout
the nineteenth century. Visually, the book's design challenges the U.S. cultural imagination and
its colonial construction of the Hawaiian nation. Rhetorically,
the narrative opens a discursive space wherein Hawaiian subject formation reflects an ongoing
response to ancestral tradition and contemporary catalysts.
Politically, the text preserves the ancestral link fundamental to Hawaiian identity and denounces
the colonial attempt to appropriate and reconstitute "Hawaiian"
subjectivity. Moreover, the queen's narrative affirms Hawaiian sovereignty, denounces U.S.
colonialism, and condemns annexation as a violent assault on the
principles of self-government. Examined through its own cultural, material, and political frame
of production, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's {33} Queen comes
forward not only as the historical foundation for the 1993 U.S. congressional apology to the
Hawaiian people but as a timely and constructive strategy for a
newly restored Hawaiian nation.
As an ali'i nui (high chief), Lili'u Kamaka'eha Paki's life was shaped by the
political influences of the day. Designated heir apparent in 1877 by her brother,
King David Kalakaua, and renamed "Princess Liliuokalani," the future queen readily assumed the
private and public obligations of office and embraced the
daily responsibilities of court life. She officiated as regent in Kalakaua's absence, directed the
Hawaiian entourage at Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, initiated
programs to improve Native Hawaiian healthcare and education, and served as the king's liaison
with visiting international dignitaries. When Kalakaua died in
January 1891, Lili'uokalani inherited a crown already severely undermined by a select group of
U.S. missionary descendants, denizen industrialists, and sugar
investors. In 1887 this "missionary party," threatened by Kalakaua's popularity and frustrated by
his increasing political influence in the Pacific, staged a violent
legislative coup, forcing the king to accept a constitution diverting power from the crown to the
party-controlled cabinet.1 Moreover, by attaching property
qualifications to voting privileges and reducing the qualifying "resident" definition to three years,
the new constitution shifted political dominance from Native
Hawaiians to U.S., British, and German colonists, a group that amounted to less than 5 percent of
Hawai'i's total population. This "Bayonet Constitution" was
still in place when Lili'uokalani took the oath of office on January 29. Two years later, on
January 17, 1893, having learned that the queen planned to
promulgate a new constitution restoring Native Hawaiian political control, the same anti-royalist
colonials who had earlier crippled Kalakaua's court deposed
the queen, abrogated the monarchy, and proclaimed themselves the "Provisional Government of
the Hawaiian Islands." The singular objective for this interim
administration was U.S. annexation. A detailed look at the overthrow and the subsequent events
leading to the publication of Hawaii's Story is essential in
understanding the queen's political goals in writing and publishing her memoir.
{34}
FEARFUL SYMMETRY: CONTEXTUALIZING THE FRAME OF
PRODUCTION
On January 14, 1893, John L. Stevens, the U.S. foreign minister to Hawai'i -- an outspoken
expansionist and anti-royalist -- conspired with the missionary party
to depose the queen and overthrow the monarchy. Two days later, in a breach of his diplomatic
authority and in violation of international law, he authorized
Capt. Gilbert C. Wiltse, commander of the battleship USS Boston, "to land marines
and sailors . . . to secure the safety of American life and property," that is, to
secure the safety of American citizens in their overthrow of the Hawaiian government (S. Rept.
2169).2 The following day, January 17, the Boston's battalion
stood by while insurgents proclaimed the establishment of the Provisional Government, deposed
the queen, and began the task of politically dismantling the
kingdom.3 The insurgents, distracted by their immediate need to establish
military control over Honolulu's government buildings, underestimated Lili'uokalani's
political resolve and resourcefulness. Avoiding what she believed would be a futile military
engagement against the Boston's battalion, and averting any
reckless response that might legitimize the overthrow, the queen yielded under protest not to the
counterfeit "Provisional Government" but to the "superior force
of the United States of America." Inasmuch as the United States had recognized Hawai'i's
independence since 1826, Lili'uokalani felt confident that the
kingdom's ally would promptly "undo . . . the action of its representative" and reinstate her "as
the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands" (S. Rept.
1040-41). This first protest, along with subsequent protest letters to both President Benjamin
Harrison and President-elect Grover Cleveland, seriously
undermined the Provisional Government's reception in Washington. More importantly, the
queen's protests checked the momentum of the so-called Hawaiian
Revolution. For Lili'uokalani, discourse thus became a practice in resistance.4
The early months following
the overthrow were pivotal both to the political status of the monarchy and to the frame of
production from which Hawaii's
Story emerged. On January 18, one day after the overthrow, the Provisional Government's
annexation commissioners {35} sailed for San Francisco,
en route to
Washington, DC, aboard the chartered Claudine, a steamer owned by Hawai'i
shipping magnate William C. Wilder. Wilder, along with Lorrin A. Thurston,
William R. Castle, Charles L. Carter, and Joseph Marsden formed the five-member commission.
In his January 19 dispatch to Secretary of State John W.
Foster, Stevens noted with pride that the "commissioners represent a large preponderating
proportion of the property holders and commercial interests of these
islands" (S. Rept. 1028). With the exception of Marsden, they also represent the most powerful
missionary families in Hawai'i. By chartering the Claudine, the
only ship leaving Hawai'i for the next two weeks, and denying passage to the queen's envoys, the
annexation commission reached Washington on February 3,
two weeks earlier than the queen's agents. In those two weeks, the commissioners and U.S.
Secretary of State John W. Foster wrote a treaty of annexation,
signed it, and submitted it to the Senate for ratification on February 15.5 Had everything
proceeded according to the commission's plan, the Senate would have
approved the treaty before the queen's envoys -- and the queen's version of the "revolution" --
reached Washington. But the Senate, despite President Harrison's
urging, was not about to pass the treaty prior to a full investigation of U.S. involvement in the
overthrow. When Lili'uokalani's representatives, attorney Paul
Neumann and Prince David Kawanakakoa, arrived in Washington on February 17, the treaty was
stalled. The arrival of the queen's agents proved pivotal in
generating popular support for the queen's cause and raising critical questions concerning the role
Minister Stevens had played in overthrowing the peaceful
government of a U.S. ally. By the end of February, time had run out on President Harrison's term
in office, and congressional interest in a quick treaty was dead.
President Cleveland was in office less
than a week when he withdrew the annexation treaty from the Senate and, on the advice of
Secretary of State Walter
Q. Gresham, dispatched Georgia Congressman James H. Blount to Honolulu to investigate "the
present status of affairs in that country." More specifically,
Blount's instructions authorized him to investigate three points of U.S. interest: "the causes of the
revolution by which the queen's Government was overthrown,
{36} the sentiment of the people toward existing
authority, and, in general, all that can fully enlighten the President" (S. Rept. 1275). The final
point refers
obliquely to Minister Stevens's role in the overthrow and his unauthorized deployment of U.S.
troops.
Blount arrived in Honolulu on March
29; for the next five months he interviewed both royalists and reformers (that is, supporters of the
Provisional
Government); recorded their testimonies and received their affidavits; researched the social,
political, and economic affairs of the Hawaiian Islands; and
monitored the political climate. He responded to the three points of inquiry in his July 17, 1893,
letter of summation to Gresham (S. Rept. 1375-81). As to the
cause of the revolution, Blount's findings refute the reformers' superficial claims of bad
government and expose the underlying "racial controversy [that] had
reached striking proportions and powerfully acted in the evolution of grave political events
culminating in the present status" (S. Rept. 1381). The reformers'
ambition had for some time, according to Blount, been firmly seated in an emphatic, racist
dictum: "The native is unfit for government and his power must be
curtailed" (S. Rept. 1382). As to the second point of inquiry, Blount's conclusions are
indisputable: if annexation were submitted to a popular vote in the
Hawaiian Islands it would be soundly defeated. He further adds that the "undoubted sentiment of
the people is for the queen, against the Provisional
Government and against annexation.""A majority of the whites," he adds, "are for annexation"
(S. Rept. 1407). As for Minister Stevens, Blount held him
responsible for causing the U.S. to violate the sovereignty of the Hawaiian nation: "The leaders
of the revolutionary movement would not have undertaken it but
for Mr. Stevens's promise to protect them against any danger from the [Hawaiian] Government. .
. . Had the troops not been landed, no measures for the
organization of a new Government would have been taken." He concludes that the "American
minister and the revolutionary leaders had determined on
annexation to the United States, and had agreed on the part each was to act to the very end" (S.
Rept. 1402).
On October 18, in response to
Blount's investigation, Gresham recommended to Cleveland that the "abuse of the authority of
the United States be undone
by restoring the legitimate government." {37} "Anything
short of that," he advised, "will not satisfy the demands of justice" (S. Rept. 1271). The same
day,
Gresham commissioned Albert S. Willis to relieve Blount at Honolulu and to negotiate the
restoration. Two months later, at a critical point in the mission,
Cleveland's message to Congress exposed the administration's dangerously naive understanding
of the situation:
I instructed Minister Willis to advise the Queen and her supporters of my
desire to aid in the restoration of the status existing before the lawless landing of
the United States forces at Honolulu on the 16th of January last, if such restoration could be
effected upon terms providing for . . . general amnesty to
those concerned in setting up the provisional government and a recognition of all its bona
fide acts and obligations. In short, they require that the past
should be buried, and that the restored Government should reassume its authority as if its
continuity had not been interrupted. (S. Rept. 1266)
The past, of course, cannot be buried. The overthrow had changed the social and political
environment in the Islands, and Cleveland's failure to deal effectively
with those changes resulted in a diplomatic disaster at Honolulu.
Unlike Blount, Willis was neither a
skilled nor perceptive diplomat; on the other hand, he was charged with an impossible task. To
remedy the wrong, he
must nullify the Provisional Government and restore the queen without the use of force. More
specifically, he must convince the queen to exempt the traitors
from prosecution, and he must convince the Provisional Government and its supporters to give
up their ruling authority, their international recognition, and all
the honors, appointments, and privileges that their brief tenure had conferred.
In the first case, it was not easy to
persuade Lili'uokalani to accept a general amnesty. She informed Willis during their first meeting
(November 13) that
treason was a capital offense punishable by death and confiscation of property.6
By the end of this meeting, according to Willis's November 16 letter to
Gresham, the queen was willing to consider banishment as an alternative to capital punishment;
more-{38}over, she had made it clear that she had no
legal
authority to issue a "royal proclamation" of general amnesty (S. Rept. 2088). In the month that
followed, rather than cultivating the ground gained, Willis
avoided the queen and her representatives, which, as it turns out, was a crucial lapse in judgment.
Gresham, in the meantime, grew frustrated with Willis's
ineffectiveness and reprimanded the minister for the "brevity and uncertainty" of his
"embarrassing" telegrams. "You will," Gresham admonished him by
telegram dated November 24,"insist upon amnesty and recognition of obligations of the
Provisional Government as essential conditions of restoration. All
interests will be promoted by prompt action" (S. Rept. 1999; emphasis added).
Despite Gresham's censure, which Willis had received by December 5, the
minister did not schedule a second conference with the queen until December 16. At this
meeting, Lili'uokalani rescinded her position on the death penalty but
stood firm on permanent banishment and confiscation of property (S. Rept. 2110). Two days
later, at the queen's behest, not Willis's, the discussion continued at
Washington Place, her private residence. Little was accomplished during this morning session;
the queen remained firm in her judgment that "peace and good
government can not prevail" so long as the conspirators remained in the country. Moreover, she
would not reaccept the Bayonet Constitution but would replace
it with one "more suited to the future" (S. Rept. 2113). Before he left the meeting the minister
repeated his instructions: unless the queen met the president's
nonnegotiable terms, the administration would "cease interference in her behalf " (S. Rept.
2114).7 In the early evening of the same day, Willis received a
formal letter from the queen agreeing to President Cleveland's terms: if restored as the
constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands, she would grant
complete amnesty, reinstate the Bayonet Constitution, and assume the accumulated debt of the
Provisional Government (S. Rept. 2115-16). The first step
toward restoration was thus accomplished, but the minister had taken far too long in securing the
queen's guarantees. His inability to communicate persuasively
the diplomatic objectives to the queen and his unwillingness to mediate her initial -- and
predictable -- response were costly and avoidable mistakes. Willis, for
reasons unknown, was content to operate within {39} the
most narrowly defined limits of his instructions. As such, he failed to follow Gresham's
overriding
paradigm: to be guided largely by his own good judgment.
The next step, convincing the
Provisional Government to resign its authority, was fatally compromised by Willis's failure to
negotiate early and openly
with its leaders. When he arrived in Honolulu on November 4, he was determined to avoid
diplomatic discussion with the Provisional Government until he had
secured the queen's guarantee of amnesty. During the one-month lag between Willis's first and
second meeting with the queen, Gresham's October 18, 1893,
letter to Cleveland advising restoration had appeared in U.S. newspapers; when it reached
Honolulu newspapers on November 24, the reformers realized for the
first time that Willis was working to dissolve their government and to restore the queen. The
Provisional Government and its supporters were outraged. A mass
protest meeting staged the following night in Honolulu was attended by more than twelve
hundred men with "feelings strung up to the highest pitch of
excitement." The meeting's political rhetoric reflects more than simply a visceral response to the
recent news: it lays bare the imperialist ideology fueling the
overthrow and the push for annexation. Francis M. Hatch, president of the Annexation Club and
the opening speaker, reminded his "fellow citizens" that
"Liliuokalani had violated the constitution; had thrown it to the dogs, and had put herself beyond
the pale and protection of the law" (S. Rept. 2095); William R.
Castle, annexation commissioner, first-generation missionary descendant, and member of the
Provisional Government's advisory council, spoke of a distant
future when "the native population of Hawaii . . . will thank God that there were people willing
to risk their lives, their property, their all to establish in Hawaii
true liberty" (S. Rept. 2095); Col. Zephaniah S. Spalding, former U.S. consul to Honolulu and a
leading sugar planter, proclaimed that the United States, by the
"precepts of her missionaries [and] the rainfall of her financial benefits . . . has enabled us to
change the barren hillsides into productive fields" (S. Rept. 2098);
and Albert F. Judd, chief justice of the Supreme Court and first-generation missionary
descendant, staked a deep colonial claim: "I am a Hawaiian. . . . I was
born in this country. I love this country. It is my {40}
country, and it is the 'garden of the gods'" (S. Rept. 2099). Before the evening was over, William
G.
Smith, editor of the annexationist Honolulu Star newspaper and a self-professed
"newcomer" to the Islands, advocated militant resistance: "if we are
dispossessed, . . . it must be by the armed forces of the United States" (S. Rept. 2100); and Peter
Cushman Jones, an executive council member, settled any
doubt as to the government's position: "Grover Cleveland stands impeached before the American
colony of Hawaii . . ." (S. Rept. 2101).
Privately, the executive council was
split on just how far the government should go in resisting the United States in its attempt to
restore the queen. The
conservative members advocated increased fortifications but would not authorize an armed
engagement against U.S. troops; the radicals, including the Citizen
Guards militia, clamored for a full-scale military engagement (Russ 240-42). Cleveland and
Gresham had seriously misjudged the temperament of the
Provisional Government. Their plan to restore the queen through peaceful negotiation was
doomed to failure.
Three weeks later, on the afternoon of
December 19, Willis finally delivered to Sanford Dole and the Provisional Government ministers
a memorandum
summarizing President Cleveland's expectation that they would "promptly relinquish to
[Lili'uokalani] her constitutional authority" (S. Rept. 2121). At
midnight, December 23, Willis received Dole's lengthy response declaring that "the Provisional
Government of the Hawaiian Islands respectfully and
unhesitatingly declines to entertain the proposition of the President of the United States. . . . We
can not betray the sacred trust . . . of Christian civilization" (S.
Rept. 2128). Under no circumstances would the new regime voluntarily relinquish its illegitimate
administration. As far as Willis was concerned, the response
marked both the beginning and the end of his diplomatic negotiations with the Provisional
Government.
Notably, colonial, white, paradigmatic
history has since attributed the Willis fiasco to Lili'uokalani's personal failure, rather than to
Willis's dithering or the
intransigent ambition of the Provisional Government. Charles H. Hunter, who wrote the final
fifty pages of Ralph S. Kuykendall's The Hawaiian Kingdom,
charges that the queen "lost whatever hope she might have had to be restored to the throne"
{41} through her "unyielding attitude" with Willis during
their
initial meeting (641). In 1984 A. Grove Day recorded in History Makers of Hawaii
that Willis's diplomatic mission ended when he "failed to get [Lili'uokalani]
to allow clemency for those who had accomplished the bloodless revolution" (129). By
constructing Lili'uokalani as a despot, these historians absolve Willis
and the Provisional Government of any responsibility for the failed mission and, in the process,
vindicate the overthrow as a necessary stand against tyranny.
Cleveland and Gresham, sensing
disaster early on, had already begun to distance themselves from diplomatic responsibility. On
December 18, Cleveland
put Blount's report, Willis's instructions, and the entire affair into the hands of Congress. At that
point Senator John T. Morgan, an ardent annexationist and
chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, took up the Provisional Government's
cause. For the next two months, his committee investigated Blount's
findings, interviewed Provisional Government supporters, and received the affidavits of those
supporters unable to appear at Washington in person.8 The result,
an 809-page manifesto for the annexation of Hawai'i, does nothing to unseat the conclusions of
Blount's report. On May 31, 1894, the Senate voted
unanimously to pass the Turpie Resolution, a "hands-off" measure ruling out any further attempts
either to restore the queen or to move toward annexation.9
Having failed to convince Congress to annex Hawai'i, the Provisional Government determined to
wait for a change in White House administration. In the
meantime, the regime devised a new constitution and on July 4, 1894 declared itself the
"Republic of Hawaii." The oligarchy, embracing the principles of
Social Darwinism and modeling its code of law on Mississippi's 1891 constitution, precluded
both Native Hawaiian and Asian immigrant participation in the
political process (Coffman 156, 161). Remarkably, the Republic of Hawaii was created and
controlled by a select circle drawn principally from the Islands' U.S.
colony -- a group representing less than 3 percent of the total population of the Islands.10
In response to the Republic's
constitution, royalists staged an armed counterrevolution in January 1895. The abortive rebellion
resulted in 355 arrests,
including that of Lili'uokalani, who was charged {42}
with misprision of treason against the Republic. Tried and convicted, the queen received the
maximum
sentence of five years imprisonment at hard labor and a $5,000 fine; two weeks later the sentence
was reduced to five years imprisonment. After serving eight
months in a sparsely furnished apartment on the second floor of 'Iolani Palace, her former center
of administration, Lili'uokalani was removed to Washington
Place, where she remained under house arrest until February 6, 1896, at which time she was
granted restricted movement within the island of O'ahu. Eight
months later, having served twenty-one months of the five-year sentence, Lili'uokalani received a
full pardon from the Republic's executive council. By January
1897 the queen had surreptitiously moved to Washington, DC, where she launched a significant
anti-annexation campaign. Her strategy was two-fold. Publicly,
she worked vigorously against annexation; privately, she authored Hawaii's Story by
Hawaii's Queen.
THE QUEEN'S COUNTER-DISCOURSE STRATEGY:
RECLAIMING RHETORICAL CONTROL
Published in February 1898, at the height of renewed annexation debate, Hawaii's
Story is the only Native Hawaiian chronicle of the overthrow published in the
United States during the period and one of the few histories of the Hawaiian monarchy written
from a Native Hawaiian perspective. Its singularity in this
respect was not lost on contemporary reviewers. The Book Buyer noted that the
queen presents the reader with political and historical information "not likely to
be accessible elsewhere" ("Hawaii's Story" 437); the Overland Monthly review
endorsed the memoir as "the most important contribution to the history of the
Hawaiian Revolution and the causes leading up to it, which has been presented to the American
people" (285); and Public Opinion commended the timeliness
of the publication as a "valuable contribution to a subject . . . much befogged by the efforts of
those whose interests would be best subserved by misleading
public opinion" ("Hawaii's Story" 216). But not all the reviews were supportive. Charles Kofoid,
writing for the Dial, concluded that Hawaii's Story, "owing to
its warped and partial statements," has little value as {43}
reliable history (229). Instead, Kofoid endorses Hawai'i's canon of colonial historians, William
Ellis,
James J. Jarves, and William DeWitt Alexander.11 The endorsement reflects the
fundamental power of colonial discourse to usurp the (Native) historical
narrative. Kofoid maintains that
by reason of [Lili'uokalani's] deep personal interest in the events narrated, the
book cannot be trusted to give a complete and impartial account of . . . the
long struggle between . . . the reactionary influences of the recent dynasty and the progressive
tendencies of Anglo-Saxon civilization represented by the
element variously known as the American, missionary, and reform party." (229)
Nonetheless, he defers to Alexander -- an annexation commissioner, a key political advisor
to both the Provisional Government and subsequent Republic, a
brother-in-law to Provisional and Republic advisory counsel member Samuel M. Damon, and a
first-generation missionary son married to a first-generation
missionary daughter. Kofoid's deferral to Alexander is not based on Alexander's disinterestedness
but on his reputation as an "eloquent orator," a colonial figure
defined by Eric Cheyfitz as the prime agent in the imperial mission to translate the "other" into
the terms of empire (112). In January 1894, "Professor
Alexander," as he was generally known, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations that Hawaiians were "not quite the equal of the white
race" in terms of physical stature, strength, and development (S. Rept. 268); as for character, he
declared, they are improvident, unstable, fickle, duplicitous,
indolent, and utterly incapable of succeeding in business. Accordingly,"[t]hey need to be cared
for like children" (311).
In his review, Kofoid discredits
Lili'uokalani by comparing her description of the Hale Naua, a "Temple of Science" devoted to
ancient Hawaiian history
and Polynesian research, with Alexander's charge that the organization was founded by Kalakaua
"partly as an agency for the revival of heathenism, partly to
pander to vice, and indirectly to serve as a political machine" (229).12 In referring
to "civilized" hallmarks such as science, history, and research to describe a
purely "na-{44}tive" institution, Lili'uokalani had
manipulated language and concepts that the colonial usurpers claimed as theirs alone. As such,
she had
violated colonial rules of decorum. Conversely, Alexander's discourse links Natives with
heathenism and deceit and thus coincides with Kofoid's colonial
expectations. Accordingly, the reviewer retranslates the Hale Naua as "a secret
organization of Kahunas or medicine men, whose ritual is a travesty of Masonry
mingled with pagan rites" (229). Regardless of her status within Hawaiian cultural norms,
Lili'uokalani, a Native woman, cannot, from Kofoid's perspective, be
allowed to use language that the reviewer concedes only to the distinguished, Yale-educated
professor. In this instance, the reviewer introduced the eloquent
orator into the text as the Native writer's foil, but as the next review demonstrates, the eloquent
orator is as much an idea as it is a person.
Appearing in Boston's Literary
World on April 2, 1898, a brief review of Hawaii's Story introduced the
charge that Lili'uokalani did not write her memoir:
If Queen Liliuokalani were really the author of her Hawaii's
Story, she would deserve a high mark of literary credit; for it is a well-written and
interesting
narrative. . . . Of course between the lines upon the title-page we are to read the name of some
dexterous secretary and man of letters, who is really
responsible for what by courtesy is the ex-Queen's performance." ("Queen Liliuokalani's Story"
103)
The charge that Hawaii's Story was ghost-written by Boston journalist Julius A.
Palmer Jr. was further cultivated in 1936 by the former annexation
commissioner and strategist Lorrin A. Thurston. Citing the queen's cryptic diary entries, Thurston
declared that "Liliuokalani personally was incapable of using
such clear-cut English" as demonstrated in Hawaii's Story (180). In this case, the
specter of the "eloquent orator" is raised not to refute the book's argument but
to reassign authorship from the Native woman writer to the white "man of letters." The transfer
of ownership is accommodated by the colonial politics of
language and its rules of decorum, as well as a long European and American tradition of
devaluing women's authorship. {45} Lili'uokalani
authored what both
the reviewer and Thurston acknowledged as a well-written narrative, but as Cheyfitz points
out,"mastery of the master's language does not allow the native
speaker to assume the position of the eloquent orator" (126). In this case, where eloquence is
obviously evident, Native ownership is accordingly repudiated.
Notably, authorship remained in doubt -- from a colonial perspective -- until 1995 when Miriam
Fuchs's close study of the queen's extant diaries demonstrated
that Lili'uokalani "not only wrote her own book but also was someone for whom writing was
imperative" (40). The fact that authorship was questioned for
nearly a century speaks to the lingering influence of colonial discourse and the double bind it
places on the Native writer. The colonized Native may be elevated
in status according to how well she or he wields the master's language, but mastery of the
master's language will necessarily be disavowed (Cheyfitz 125-26).
Motivated by political necessity,
Lili'uokalani was by no means naive regarding the risks she undertook in writing Hawaii's
Story. Following the 1893
overthrow, she had been largely disparaged by the U.S. press as, among other things, "a study in
superstition" (Nichols 526) and "a portly, chocolate-colored
lady" ("People Talked About" 3). A rare and notable exception is Harriet Prescott Spofford's
Harper's Bazar article wherein she declares that Lili'uokalani "has
lived a spotless life as child, woman, and wife; it was not till she was fifty years old that scandal
assailed her, and then only in furtherance of the plans for the
overthrow" (401). The most vicious public attack came from Rev. Sereno E. Bishop, a
first-generation missionary son and a regular correspondent to the
Independent. In his July 6, 1893, article, "A Royal Palace Democratized," Bishop
alluded to "disgusting orgies that [had] polluted ['Iolani] palace" since the
days of Kalakaua's reign. He further declared that Kalakaua and "ex-queen" Lili'uokalani had no
"real hereditary royalty"but were instead the illegitimate
children of a mulatto shoemaker, which, he said, explains the "slight African trace in the
hair."This being the case,"white Hawaii loathes them, and native
Hawaii has no respect for them" (905). Designed to attract the political sympathy of his (white)
U.S. readers, Bishop's charge and its unstated ideological
assumptions inadvertently reveal a fundamen-{46}tal
distinction between "white Hawaii" and "native Hawaii" regarding race at the end of the
nineteenth
century."Loathing" surfaces as a racist response reflecting the white colony's horror of being
subject to a "Negro" monarchy. Diminished respect, on the other
hand, speaks to the Hawaiian intellectual perspective on genealogies and the importance of
maintaining an accurate genealogical history. For Hawaiians,
genealogy is not a race-based discipline but a narrative account of ancestral experiences and
exploits. Historian Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa points out that
genealogies, as the history of the Hawaiian people, offer "historical answers for present-day
dilemmas" (21-22). Bishop's gossip mongering backfires in that it
reveals far more about "white Hawaii" than it does about Native Hawaiians. Notably, this is the
same man who just two years earlier wrote an article for the
Review of Reviews praising the queen's "noble and becoming" manner and
remarking on her "having deeply at heart the moral welfare of her people"
("Hawaiian Queen" 147-48).
When Lili'uokalani wrote
Hawaii's Story, she was writing back not only to her critics in the U.S. press but
also to the witnesses and affidavit writers who
had maligned her and the Hawaiian nation in Senate Report 227. She was, in fact, reading the
report in the winter of 1897 while she was in Washington, DC,
writing Hawaii's Story. In response to the report, she rebukes Senator Morgan for
failing to consider her early protest to President Harrison, for ignoring the
pro-monarchy petitions sent to Washington by the Native Hawaiian patriotic leagues, and for
excluding witnesses and affidavits in her support (Hawaii's Story
257). Yet her comments denote more than well-deserved criticism of Morgan's methods
and findings. She in fact uses Senate Report 227 and the evidence
therein to launch a public education campaign against the illegitimate Republic of Hawaii. "All
the evidence," she tells her readers,"can be reviewed by any
person who may wish to do so, and a judgment formed of the men who caused this revolution, as
it has been bound in volumes, and can be seen at the Library
of Congress in the Capitol at Washington" (236). By referring her readers to the congressional
record, Lili'uokalani invites active participation in Hawai'i's
political crisis. Furthermore, by directing her readers to the source of the evidence rather than to
the popular partisan {47} press, she facilitates
independent
analysis and political praxis. Considering how the queen has subsequently been constructed in
U.S. histories of Hawai'i as both the cause of the overthrow and
the obstruction to restoration, and considering how the overthrow and annexation have been
constructed ideologically as the triumph of good government,
revisiting the source is an indispensable counter-discursive strategy for modern readers.
In writing Hawaii's
Story, the queen was challenged rhetorically to construct an anti-imperialist argument that
would not compromise her Hawaiian
identity. Secondly, presenting a counter-discursive argument to a generally uninformed audience
meant risking the reinscription of the arguments against which
she was working. The queen mitigated both risks by structuring her book as a memoir, a familiar
genre that would appeal to her U.S. audience and,
significantly, would allow her to filter the political events of the day through her own (Hawaiian)
experience and worldview. In the process she could construct
a first-person, counter-discursive challenge to annexation and recoup rhetorical control over
Native Hawaiian constructions. The overall success of the project
would depend in large part on how well she controlled the means of publication and how
effectively she manipulated the genre.
An examination of the 1898 first
edition reveals a provocative correlation between Lili'uokalani's rhetorical goals and the book's
graphic design, suggesting
that she played a large role in the publication plan.13 In his article "On the
Importance of Judging Books by Their Covers," Gregg Camfield points out that a
book's physical presentation often reflects authorial intention as well as the social and economic
conditions that gave rise to the material artifact; presentation,
moreover, can disclose how the text is intended to be read (44-45). This is clearly the case with
Hawaii's Story. Here, the cover's symbols and carefully
constructed design reflect an unmistakably Hawaiian monarchial perspective (see fig. 1). The two
kahili (plumed staff of state) flanking the title and the queen's
name signify Hawaiian royalty. To prevent the foreign reader from missing the political
significance, the queen defines the kahili in the annotated List of
Illustrations as "emblems of royalty and nobility," a definition repeated in
{48}
Cover. Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898).
various forms throughout the book (viii). The presence of the kahili thus marks
the book as the queen's textual surrogate.
The most compelling mark of personal input is the queen's birth name, "Liliu," encircled by
the crowned flower lei above the title. The motif, an adaptation of
her royal insignia, speaks back to the U.S. press and its common use of the diminutive "Queen
Lil" -- an appellation she despised. Furthermore, it is significant
that the queen in-{49}corporates "Liliu" in the cover
design, rather than "Lydia," the more familiar baptismal name given to her by U.S. missionaries.
The fact
that the name "Lydia" appears nowhere in the memoir signifies a calculated rejection of the
missionary renaming. Altogether, the cover fuses the personal and
the political into an interpretive restoration of monarchy, focuses the reader rhetorically into a
particular mode of interpretation, and gives notice that the author
is not the "ex-queen" but "Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani." Unfortunately, redesigned modern
facsimile editions of Hawaii's Story have erased the historical and
political significance of the original cover layout.
Lili'uokalani's personal input is also
evident in the selection of twenty-one full-page half-tone illustrations. Whereas nearly every
book published about
Hawai'i at the end of the nineteenth century depicts "hula-hula girls,""grass huts," and seminude
Natives pounding poi, the queen's illustrations offer a
considerably more complex construction of Hawai'i. Here, stock iconographic depictions are
replaced by Lunalilo's Home for the Poor, Washington Place,
'Iolani Palace, modern streets, and contemporary architecture. Furthermore, the queen stresses the
continuity and dignity of modern Hawaiian monarchy through
formal portraits of the late King Kalakaua, dowager Queen Kapi'olani, and the heir apparent,
Princess Ka'iulani. Notably, the frontispiece, a full-length portrait
of "Her Majesty Queen Liliuokalani" stands in stark contrast to popular lampooned depictions of
"Queen Lil" (see fig. 2).14 By focusing the visual elements of
the text on the nation's civic concerns and the ruling family, the queen presents the Hawaiian
monarchy as a stable, autonomous government capably managing
the affairs and problems of a flourishing nation. Under such conditions, the reader should realize,
annexation becomes politically indefensible.
Appropriating the western memoir
and forcing it to accommodate Hawaiian culture and experience is central to the queen's
rhetorical strategy. In this
respect, Hawaii's Story draws on what theorists newly define as "postcolonial
strategies" but what for the queen were also language constructions and
manipulations she had practiced since childhood. Kame'eleihiwa writes that in traditional times,
"the telling of any Hawaiian history began properly with
traditional be-
{50}
Frontispiece. Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's
Queen (1898).
ginnings"; together, place of birth and genealogy become "a map that guides each Hawaiian's
relationship with the world" (1-2). Accordingly, the queen uses
the narrative's opening paragraph to mark her distinct genealogical relationship with the earth.
First, she locates her physical connection to the land: "The
extinct crater or mountain which forms the background to the city of Honolulu is known as the
{51} Punch-Bowl. . . . Very near to its site, on Sept. 2,
1838, I
was born" (1). She then briefly delineates her ancestry and refers the reader to the volume's
appendices where she provides detailed genealogies documenting
her descent "from the highest chiefs of ancient days" (2). While she structures her book on
Hawaiian concepts, she also engages issues of cultural translation. In
explaining her family organization, she is keenly aware that the deepest Hawaiian cultural
concepts and practices -- in this case, the traditional practice of hanai
-- cannot be carried by English language:
I was destined to grow up away from the house of my parents. Immediately
after my birth I was wrapped in the finest soft tapa cloth, and taken to the
house of another chief, by whom I was adopted. Konia, my foster-mother, was a granddaughter
of Kamehameha I., and was married to Paki, also a high
chief . . . . In speaking of our [family] relationship, I have adopted the term customarily used in
the English language, but there was no such modification
recognized in my native land. I knew no other father or mother than my foster-parents. . . . This
was, and indeed is, in accordance with Hawaiian customs.
It is not easy to explain its origin to those alien to our national life, but it seems perfectly natural
to us. As intelligible a reason as can be given is that this
alliance by adoption cemented the ties of friendship between the chiefs. (4)
Lili'uokalani thus establishes a complex rhetorical relationship with her audience. First, she
makes it clear that the memoir will be narrated through a Hawaiian
point of view; second, she marks a rhetorical gap separating her "alien" audience from the
possessive Hawaiian narrator signified in "our national life"; third,
she establishes the fact that culturally she knows her audience far better than her audience knows
her; last, she acknowledges that her aim as a transcultural
writer is to render cultural differences as "intelligible" as possible, knowing of course that some
concepts will defy translation. The effectiveness of the memoir
ultimately rests on how carefully the queen manages the cultural gap, how well she predicts
audience response, and how skillfully she conveys the untranslatable.
{52}
In negotiating cultural distance, the
queen displaces static colonial constructions of Native Hawaiians and constructs instead a
national Hawaiian identity
incorporating the historical changes that impel ongoing identity formation. As a result, she is
equally comfortable describing both the luxury of her family's
Honolulu mansion and the practical comfort and spaciousness of "grass house" accommodations
in Hilo. On the other hand, her effort to balance traditional
Hawaiian spiritual beliefs with seventy years of Christian influence is precarious at best. At the
beginning of the memoir, for instance, she notes that it was her
great-grandaunt, Queen Kapi'olani (c. 1781- 1841), an early Christian convert, who
ceremoniously defied the volcano goddess at Kilauea and thus "broke
forever the power of Pele . . . over the hearts of her people" (1-2). Lili'uokalani revises her
declaration in a subsequent chapter wherein she notes that Pele
continues to be "reverenced by the Hawaiian people" with acts of propitiation that should be
understood not as worship but as "harmless sport .. . much like the
custom of hurling old shoes at the bride's carriage, or sending off the newly wedded couple with
showers of rice; usages which form a pleasant diversion in the
most highly cultivated and educated communities" (72). A politically motivated strategy to
neutralize what might otherwise be perceived by her U.S. audience
as pagan ritual, the queen's construction falls short of accounting for Pele's ongoing influence in
the newly Christianized nation. Nonetheless, she succeeds
overall in presenting Hawai'i's richly complex social organization and avoiding an overt
hierarchical valuation of its seemingly disparate parts. At the same
time, she readily critiques certain elements of cultural change. She criticizes, for instance, the
blatant disrespect for sacred antiquities evident in the removal of
stones from the ancient altar of 'Umi; and she laments the fact that her childhood home had been
converted into a tourist hotel (40, 110). Above all, the fact that
the narrative is written -- and written in English -- reveals a recognition of
historical interchange and political necessity. Lili'uokalani had been educated in the
"proper use" of English since age three when she was sent to the High Chiefs' Children's School,
a missionary boarding school designed to anglicize Hawai'i's
future leaders through both formal education in English and forced separation {53} from their adult families. Nevertheless, the queen's first
language, both
privately and publicly, remained Hawaiian. In using English to write Hawaii's
Story, the queen not only recognized the impact of historical and cultural
interchange, she manipulated it to devise wholly new applications for her second language.
As tempting as it might be to analyze
the queen's English as a strategy abrogating and appropriating the language of the colonial center,
the application is
limited or at least redefined by the fact that English, as the privileged colonial language, had not
(yet) superceded Hawaiian, at least not in practical terms. Still,
because the queen is ostensibly writing to a colonial center prepared to eclipse Hawaiian
nationalism through annexation, certain principles of abrogation and
appropriation apply. On the surface, Lili'uokalani's frequent use of Hawaiian vocabulary creates a
partially hybridized "english," although the general
applications of glossing and italicizing limit any vital abrogation of English. But on those few
occasions when she leaves Hawaiian words undefined, she
sometimes creates a second level of meaning discernable only by readers familiar with Hawaiian
language, that is, her readers in Hawai'i. The following
passage, for instance, would mean very little to U.S. readers:
I remember that when G. P. Judd, W. Richards, and R. Armstrong were
cabinet ministers, a deficiency so inexplicable occurred that the cabinet was
required to resign immediately, and to one of the retiring members the popular appellation
"kaukakope-kala" subsequently adhered pretty tenaciously. I
refrain from translating, as the title is not one of honor; but it still clings to the family as an
heirloom. (233)
Depending on their political persuasion, readers in Hawai'i would be either amused or abused
by the passage. In a private letter to her editor, William Lee, dated
January 2, 1898, the queen explained the allusion: "It means 'the doctor who scraped all the
money in the Treasury.' Doctor Judd -- the father of chief Justice
[Albert F.] Judd -- and Richard Armstrong were sent out from Park Street Church as missionaries
to Hawaii. Every body in Honolulu knows of that instance --."
Lili'uokalani indicts Dr. Gerrit Judd as both a thief and a {54} missionary, and by recording the allusion in her memoir she
does in fact create an "heirloom."15
She no doubt enjoyed directing a bit of rhetorical retaliation at the Judd dynasty, but the passage
also speaks to her keen appreciation for the printed word and
its historical and political usefulness. Unlike her shortsighted enemies who would put anything
into print to further their short-term goals, the queen understood
that nothing adheres more tenaciously than the published word. The significance of this strategy
is underscored by the fact that while she was completing
Hawaii's Story Lili'uokalani placed her English translation of the
Kumulipo (the two-thousand-line chant of Hawaiian cosmogonic genealogy) and a
specially
prepared volume of her musical compositions in the Congressional Library for historical
safeguarding. Furthermore, the passage forces a reconsideration of the
queen's audience and her rhetorical goals: in addition to her primary U.S. audience and her
secondary audience in Hawai'i, Lili'uokalani was consciously aware
of the generational audience to come.
Finally, the queen creates a third level
of meaning wherein she manipulates English into the Hawaiian language practice known as
kaona. Used extensively
in Hawaiian poetry and song, including the queen's compositions, kaona denotes
veiled or indirect meaning. Hawaiian historian and linguist Mary Kawena
Pukui explains that there are but two meanings in Hawaiian composition: the literal, which is like
the body, and the kaona, which is like the spirit ("Songs"
247). In the following passage, for instance, Lili'uokalani, having been released from house arrest
but confined to the island of O'ahu, celebrates her conditional
freedom with friends at her Waialua country house. The "body" meaning is transparent:
Some days later, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Helehule, I took a
drive out to my residence at Waialua, where we spent two very delightful
weeks. . . . We had a quiet little celebration all to ourselves, fishing and riding, and the time sped
by so pleasantly that we forgot to count the hours. While
there we received a visit from Hon. Samuel Parker; Mr. Boyd, Secretary of American Legation;
Mr. [Lane?] . . . Mr. J. S. Walker, the {55} younger; and
others, -- who spent a pleasant day with us on the beach. We caught fish, and placed them
immediately on hot coals, supplementing our picnic with bread
and butter, and our native poi. Then, a week or so later, I went to my residence at
Waikiki; and in this, my ocean retreat, I lived until my recent visit to the
United States, only now and then, for a change, making a trip to my estates at Kahala. (298-99)
Critiqued at the literal level, the names and details in this passage might seem gratuitous,
even a bit self-indulgent. But at the kaona level, the passage suggests a
veiled description of an anti-annexation strategy session. The guests at Waialua are in fact
political activists, in some cases radically so. Moreover, Joseph
Helehule did accompany the queen to Washington. The detail of the cooked fish suggests a
precept conveyed by the Hawaiian proverb "Ua ahu ka imu, e lawalu
ka i'a" ("The oven is ready, let the fish wrapped in ti leaves be cooked"), that is, "All preparations
have been made; let us proceed with the work" (Pukui, 'Olelo
No'eau no. 2768). The passage suggests that plans for Lili'uokalani's trip to Washington
were underway months before she received the full pardon. If that is the
case, the names and details in this passage suggest new inferences and advance new questions.
Textual interpretation at the kaona level is necessarily
conjectural. Unlike western figurative language that rests on specific tropic and literal
correspondences, the Hawaiian kaona speaks to textual operations
beyond the literal. The point here is to raise the probability that Hawaii's Story
registers on a politically significant level as yet unexplored.
While the queen's political design is
rarely transparent, her political tenacity is unmistakable in her response to white colonists who
called themselves
"Hawaiian." One of the earliest public attempts to appropriate and recast Hawaiian identity was
made by Dr. Judd's son, Associate Justice Albert F. Judd. On
September 27, 1880, a mass meeting was held to protest the controversial appointment of an
all-white cabinet; when a resolution was introduced to appoint
"true Hawaiians" (that is, Native Hawaiians) to the king's ministry, Judd retaliated with a new
(colonial) definition of "true Hawaiian":
{56}
A wrong impression has obtained that only those born here of the aboriginal
Hawaiian stock are true Hawaiians. A man born here of white parents who
spends his talents and energies for the benefit of Hawaii is as true a Hawaiian as if his parents
were all red, or one red and the other white. Those who
benefit this country by their good character and example and life are the true Hawaiians. (qtd. in
Kuykendall 224)16
Judd, the same man noted previously for his "garden of the gods" allusion, is not alone in his
attempt to recast "Hawaiian" identity. The rhetoric of Senate
Report 227 reveals that by 1893, if not sooner, the term "Hawaiian" had been appropriated and
redefined among white colonists, missionary descendants, and
annexationists to mean "Hawaiians of American descent."17 Such a radical and
pervasive shift would be impossible without first redefining "Native
Hawaiian."After all, the new (white) "Hawaiians" were not appropriating an ethnic group or a
culture: they were claiming a geographical territory, that is, a
nation, and they expected to make an unencumbered claim. They were assisted in that purpose by
Senator Morgan, who, through reiteration in Senate Report
227, redefined Native Hawaiians as "Kanakas."18 Within the congressional
setting, the designation was legitimized. By the time the Committee on Foreign
Relations ended its hearings, the Senators had absorbed the discourse and recast the word
"Hawaiian" in geographical, rather than cultural, terms. The term
"kanaka" subsequently became so pervasive in the colonial discourse that historian William
Adam Russ Jr., writing in 1959, could still use it to the exclusion of
all other possible terms in referring to Native Hawaiians. Russ legitimizes his language by noting
that "Kanaka" is "the native word for people" and then adding
that "Kanaka," "native," and "Royalist," are "practically synonymous" (3). The displacement
might be that simple from Russ's point of view, but from a
Hawaiian perspective, the white appropriation of the term created a derisive racial marker
comparable to the sociocultural violence in the word "nigger"
(Blaisdell 182). Notably, despite its general usage among white colonists at the turn of the
century, the word "kanaka" does not appear in Hawaii's Story.
Furthermore, the queen {57} denounces the "aliens" who
call themselves "Hawaiians": "They are not and never were Hawaiians." When she speaks of
"Hawaiian people" she refers to "the children of the soil, -- the native inhabitants of the Hawaiian
islands and their descendants" (325). Throughout her memoir,
Lili'uokalani makes it clear that "Hawaiian" is neither a racial marker nor a geographical locator
but a word signifying a particular ancestry. When colonial
appropriation and redefinition threatened the terms of self-identification, Lili'uokalani stood firm
both publicly and rhetorically.
The fact that the United States
annexed Hawai'i must not overshadow the political effectiveness of Hawaii's Story.
The threat of annexation shaped the
memoir's frame of production, but when the legal maneuvers were done, the momentary frame
dissolved. At that point time became the overriding factor. A
century later it is clear that Lili'uokalani managed the cultural gap extremely well. She educated
her primary readers, she invited their political participation, and
she did so without compromising her identity as a Hawaiian monarch. In projecting audience
response, she no doubt underestimated the U.S. republic's
intolerance fo
