How Indigenous Hawaiians Helped Build the Pacific Northwest Economy

"Old Hudson Bay Company's Fort Vancouver—1827" Fort Vancouver, as depicted in Joseph Gaston's Centennial History of Oregon, volume 1, p. 101. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Editor’s Note: This is the seventh post in the “Seeds 2: New Research in Environmental History” series co-sponsored by NiCHE and Edge Effects, publicising the work of early-career environmental historians. This series serves to highlight new work being done in the field of environmental history and connect this research to other fields and contemporary issues.

In the nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli, or Indigenous Hawaiians, were intricately entangled within the lumber and salmon industries at key sites across the Pacific Northwest. They would prove integral to the environmental histories of the region as participants in trans-Pacific networks of commerce and a broader Pacific world of labor that included a maritime fur trade and later a land-based fur trade. Hawaiians in the Columbia District—and, later, in the British Columbia colony—worked in concert with British commercial colonialism in the Pacific Northwest through their involvement in the region’s early extractive and productive industries: timber, fishing and small-scale agriculture.

The trade that would develop between the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian islands from 1829 to 1859 saw native Hawaiians employed on forts and throughout the Pacific Northwest for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In effect, a circular trade that brought lumber cut and salmon caught and cured in the Pacific Northwest to Hawaii also saw the islands provide products for consumers on the coast. The HBC employed Indigenous Hawaiian laborers as part of its growing presence throughout the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century. The existing historical literature on Hawaiian overseas migration often details stories of male servants and migrants, many of whom would ultimately become a part of late-nineteenth-century settler society in early colonies like British Columbia. Still, there was no “straightforward shift” to settler colonialism; if anything, the story of Hawaiians within this longer narrative sat for a long time along the colony’s “ragged” margins.

 

Read the rest of this article at Edge Effects here… 

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Naomi Calnitsky

Naomi Alisa Calnitsky completed a Master of Arts in History as a Commonwealth Scholar in 2008 at the University of Otago and a PhD in Canadian and Mexican History at Carleton University in 2017. She is currently working on a book-length project on seasonal labor migration stories from North America and the Pacific titled Seasonal Lives: Twenty-First Century Approaches and a second book dealing with histories of Mexican farm labour migration to Canada in the 20th and 21st centuries, titled The Fields Are Dressed in the Spring: The Mexican Farm Worker in the Canadian Imagination, forthcoming with UBC Press.

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