Transnational<i>Hula</i>as Colonial Culture

Abstract During what was perhaps the first transnational hula tour of North America and Europe between 1892 and 1896, hula performers received sustained attention during a critical period when Hawai‘i's political status and proposed annexation by the US was a topic of national and international debate. Given Hawai‘i's subordinate economic and political status even prior to formal colonisation in 1898, hula operated as a form of colonial culture that became a part of mass, racialised entertainment on the rise in Europe and the US. While little known today, hula dancers who were previously members of the royal Hawaiian court circulated through international expositions, vaudeville theatres, dime museums and café-concerts. This gendered and sexualised colonial exhibition of hula associated Hawai‘i with the eroticised bodies and movements of women. However, late-19th-century Euro-American circuits also systematised opportunities for non-chiefly Hawaiian women to perform gendered cultural knowledge, travel and work. To illuminate the ambivalent character of transnational hula, as both colonial culture and opportunity for women performers, this paper traces the experiences of one member of the troupe: Kini Kapahu (also known as ‘Jennie Wilson’), previously a court dancer and later known as Hawai‘i's ‘first lady’. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Executive Editor Vicki Luker, anonymous readers, and editors of The Journal of Pacific History for their insightful and productive comments. Notes 1 Queen Lili‘uokalani yielded her crown while appealing to the US Executive in 1893. She abdicated in 1895 after she was arrested and threatened with the execution of her supporters. However, she renounced that abdication upon her release. Liliuokalani, Hawai‘i's Story by Hawai‘i's Queen (Tokyo 1964 [1898]). Note on language: Following modern Hawaiian orthography, I use diacritical marks — the ‘okina (glottal stop) and the kahakō (macron indicating long vowel) — for Hawaiian terms (e.g., Hawai‘i). Words such as ‘Hawaiian’ are English words and therefore do not require diacritical marks. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language sources did not employ diacritical marks, therefore I have preserved the original spelling of names and words in these documents with the exception of prominent names that follow contemporary spelling conventions (e.g., Lili‘uokalani; Kapahukulaokamāmalu). 2 Daily Inter Ocean, 14 August 1893. 3 Daily Inter Ocean, 30 July 1893. 4 James Revell Carr discusses these early performances in ‘In The wake of John Kanaka: musical interactions between Euro-American sailors and Pacific Islanders, 1600–1900’, PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara 2006). Some scholars have maintained that the first hula on the US continent was performed at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. For example, see Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku, ‘A court dancer disagrees with Emerson's classic book on the hula’, Ethnomusicology, 8 (1964), 161–4, and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ‘Acculturation in Hawaiian dance’, Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, 25th Anniversary Issue 4 (1972), 38–46. Kini Kapahu claimed that she was the ‘first girl to leave Hawai‘i to go as a dancer in the mainland’, ‘Interview with Jenny [sic] Wilson and Joann Kealiinohomoku’, 1962 July, Tape HAW 59.13.3, Bishop Museum (hereinafter Tape, BM). 5 David A. Chappell, ‘Shipboard relations between Pacific Island women and Euroamerican men, 1767–1887’, Journal of Pacific History, 27 (1992), 144. 6 Ibid., 144–5. Examples of this gendered tourism and venturing include the Raiatean wife of a trader experiencing Valparaiso and a Marquesan woman travelling to Salem, Massachusetts. 7 Noel J. Kent, Hawaii: islands under the influence (Honolulu 1993) discusses these hegemonic economic structures, while Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio provides careful analysis of Western interventions in ali‘i and monarchical autonomy in Dismembering Lāhui: a history of the Hawaiian nation to 1887 (Honolulu 2002). In 1887, a secret organisation called the ‘Hawaiian League’, composed of missionary descendants, sugar planters and businessmen, used the threat of an all-White militia to force Kalākaua to appoint a new cabinet comprised of its members and accept a new constitution. This 1887 constitution — nicknamed the ‘Bayonet Constitution’ because of the coercive circumstances of its adoption — reduced the king to a constitutional monarch with severely limited powers. The House of Nobles in the legislature was no longer appointed by the king, but elected, and Kalākaua did not retain the authority to remove his ministers. That same year, Hawaiian independence was further compromised when the king's new ‘reform’ cabinet renewed a reciprocity treaty with the US that allowed sugar planters in Hawai‘i to reap great profits. In exchange for renewal of a treaty that permitted Hawaiian sugar duty-free into the US, the US sought exclusive use of Pearl Harbor, the only natural harbour in the north Pacific, for a naval and commercial port. Kalākaua refused, but weakened by the Bayonet Constitution, he was unable to prevent renewal of the reciprocity treaty. Thus the US secured Pearl Harbor and an official military foothold in Hawai‘i in 1887. 8 Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, 224. Noenoe K. Silva also astutely observes that Kalākaua had the ‘misfortune’ to reign during a period when the sons of haole missionaries came of age; unlike their fathers, they were unsupervised by an outside foreign mission. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian resistance to American colonialism (Durham 2004), 89–90. 9 Elsewhere, I discuss how the consumption of Hawaiian bodies on stage at the turn of the century helped to constitute an imperial relationship between the US and Hawai‘i. This ‘imagined intimacy’ — a benign, mutual, and consensual relationship — masked the violence of the colonial takeover. Adria L. Imada, ‘Hawaiians on tour: hula circuits through the American empire’, American Quarterly, 56:1 (2004), 134–5. 10 Christopher Balme, ‘New compatriots: Samoans on display in Wilhelminian Germany’, Journal of Pacific History, 42:3 (2007), 332. 11 For discussions of North American exhibitions, see Raymond Corbey, ‘Ethnographic showcases, 1870–1930’, Cultural Anthropology, 8:3 (1993), 338–69; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: visions of empire at American international expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago 1984); Robert W. Rydell, John E. Finding, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: world's fairs in the United States (Washington 2000); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America (New York 1992) and ‘Buffalo Bill's “Wild West” and the mythologization of the American empire’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham 1993), 164–81. For analyses of Pacific Islands and Pacific Islander exhibitions in Europe, see Ewan Johnston, ‘Reinventing Fiji at 19th-century and early 20th-century exhibitions’, Journal of Pacific History, 40:1 (2005), 23–44 and Balme, ‘New compatriots’, 331–44. 12 The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History holds guidebooks and travelogues on world's fairs, while the Hawai‘i State Archives (herineafter HSA) and Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawai‘i (hereinafter BM) are important repositories for personal collections, photographs, and manuscripts. The most reliable and extensive primary source is approximately 15 hours of audiotaped oral histories of Kini Kapahu conducted by ethnomusicologist Joann Kealiinohomoku in 1962, when Kini was 89 years old. These interviews are held by the BM. Aeko Sereno used these tapes for ‘Images of the hula dancer and “hula girl”: 1778–1970’, PhD thesis, University of Hawaii (Honolulu 1990), which in turn is a helpful source. I have also relied on mid-20th century articles on Kini in Hawai‘i periodicals and newspapers; Hawaiian and English language newspapers from the late-19th century do not mention Kini Kapahu by name. Bob Krauss's research notes and interviews held at the HSA and his biography of John H. Wilson are also a valuable source on Kini Kapahu. See Bob Krauss, Johnny Wilson: first Hawaiian Democrat (Honolulu 1994). 13 I have chosen to use Kini Kapahu's Hawaiian name, which she and her Hawaiian intimates preferred. The bulk of the biographical material written in English, however, identifies her as ‘Jennie Wilson’, Wilson being her surname after marriage. McColgan was her Irish father's surname. Her Hawaiian name has been listed as ‘Kini Kapahukula-o-Kamamalu Huhu’ and ‘Ana Kini Kuululani’ in Kathleen Dickenson Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, Paradise of the Pacific, 63 (December 1952), 36, and Jerry Hopkins, ‘Kini Wilson’, in Barbara Bennett Peterson (ed.), Notable Women of Hawai‘i (Honolulu 1984), 406–8, respectively. 14 Kini is the Hawaiian transliteration of Jennie. 15 Although nearly 90 years old at the time, Kini spoke lucidly about her childhood and hula training. Kini and her mother have been erroneously named as the main informants in a foundational ethnography of hula, published by the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: the sacred songs of the hula ([Washington 1909] Honolulu 1997), 28–37. This misstatement, subsequently published in Kealiinohomoku's ‘A court dancer disagrees with Emerson's classic book on the hula’, has become attached to Kini's biography. See, for example, Jennie Wilson's entry in Peterson, Notable Women of Hawai‘i. However, Kini was only one of dozens of laypeople and experts that Emerson interviewed over the course of his research. Emerson's fieldnotes and diaries held by the Huntington Library as well as transcriptions of his fieldnotes in the Theodore Kelsey collection (M-86) at the HSA reveal names of numerous Hawaiian informants. 16 Kini's collection at the HSA, catalogued under the name Jennie Wilson, is modest, whereas a sizable government archive is retained for her husband, John H. Wilson, who served as Honolulu mayor. 17 Ironically, Kini Kapahu and her contemporaries are the ‘native informants’ whose knowledge underwrote ethnography and ethnomusicology of 20th-century Hawai‘i, although remaining largely anonymous or undocumented. See for instance, Emerson's The Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, and anthropologist Helen H. Roberts's audio recordings and manuscript collection of chants and mele held by the BM. Their respective archives remain valuable today for practising po‘e hula. 18 Dorothy B. Barrère, ‘The hula in retrospect’, in Dorothy B. Barrère, Mary Kawena Pukui and Marion Kelly, Hula: historical perspectives (Honolulu 1980), 40. 19 By 1859, all public exhibitions of hula charging admission were forbidden without a prohibitive ten-dollar licence issued by the government's ministry of interior. Licences were only granted in the port cities of Honolulu. Violators were subject to a $500 fine or imprisonment for six months with hard labour. By the 1870s, the legislature reduced these penalties to $100 or three months’ hard labour, and performances were no longer restricted to Honolulu. See Noenoe K. Silva, ‘He kānāwai e ho‘opau i na hula kuolo Hawai‘i: the political economy of banning the hula’, Hawaiian Journal of History, 34 (2000), 29–48, and Barrère, ‘The hula in retrospect’, 41. 20 See, for example, ‘Pau ole no hoi ka hana kahiko o Hawaii nei’ (The old practices of Hawaii are not over), which objected to hula performed during the mourning of the ali‘i Victoria Kamāmalu Ka‘ahumanu in 1866. Nupepa Kuokoa, 7 July 1866. Barrère discusses other examples of Hawaiian critiques of hula in ‘The Hula in retrospect’, 43–6. 21 Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 108. 22 Daws, Shoal of Time, 219; Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 108, 112. See Barrère et al., Hula: historical perspectives, Appendix D, ‘List of hula at the coronation of King Kalākaua’, (‘Papa Kuhikuhi o Na Hula Poni Moi’) a programme for 1883 coronation ceremonies, 133–9, and Stillman, Sacred Hula, especially 22–8, for a detailed analysis of the kinds of mele and hula (e.g., hula ‘āla‘apapa, hula pāipu, hula ‘ōlapa) performed at the coronation. 23 Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 108–9. 24 Barrère, ‘The Hula in retrospect’, 21. 25 The founding date of 1886 was specified by Kini Kapahu in an interview, Tape HAW 59.8.2, BM. 26 Kini referred to the Hui Lei Mamo as a ‘glee club’ of ‘girls’ in interviews conducted by Theodore Kelsey. She also identified ‘Iolani’ as the glee club of all male singers that ‘belonged to King Kalakaua’. Theodore Kelsey Collection, M-86, Folder 397, HSA. 27 Tape HAW 59.12.2, BM. During this interview in 1962, Kini could not remember the other two women's names. Kini also confirmed during this interview that she joined Kalakaua's court at the age of 14; this is corroborated in ‘Last living court dancer’. However, another secondary source offers a slightly different account. Although Kalākaua had asked Kini to join the troupe earlier, Kini's mother Kapahukulaokamāmalu refused. Only when her mother's friend Queen Kapi‘olani intervened after Kini's 16th birthday was she permitted to dance hula with the group. Clarice B. Taylor, ‘Tales about Hawai‘i’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 14 April 1952. 28 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 29 Tape HAW 59.5.1, BM. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., and ‘Court dancer’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 29 May 1960. 32 Tape HAW 59.8.1, BM. 33 Tape HAW 59.8.2, BM. 34 Stillman, Sacred Hula, 16. Hula āla‘apapa is also more closely associated with hula kuahu, hula ‘bound by the observance of altar rituals honoring [the goddess] Laka’ (23). Kini, however, tended to gloss over the difference between these genres; she claimed that ‘ōlapa and āla‘apapa were the same, with ‘ōlapa being a shortened version of āla‘apapa. Tape HAW 59.8.1, BM. 35 Tape HAW 59.12.2, BM. 36 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. A search for Nakai in Hawaiian and English-language newspapers has not yielded any information. 37 For more on traditional hula training, see Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, 28–37, and Mary Kawena Pukui, ‘The hula, Hawai‘i's own dance’, in Dorothy B. Barrère, Mary Kawena Pukui and Marion Kelly, Hula: historical perspectives, 70–3. 38 Stillman, Sacred Hula, 23. Barrère in ‘The Hula in retrospect’, 63, however, does not interpret hula in 19th-century ‘Christianised’ Hawai‘i as a sacred or religious performance; rather, that it retained a spiritual aspect. 39 Mary Kawena Pukui, ‘The Hula’, unpublished manuscript in Henry Kekahuna papers, MS 445, Folder 51, HSA, 8. 40 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 41 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 42 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 43 ‘Jennie Wilson,’ Typescript Manuscript. Bob Krauss Workbook 3 (Sept 1891–June 1893), U-163, John H. Wilson Research Papers of Bob Krauss, HSA. 44 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. A similar account was published in Betty Patterson, ‘Aunt Jennie at 90 recalls her teens’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 4 March 1962. 45 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 46 Tapes HAW 59.8.2 and 59.12.2, BM. 47 ‘Ōlapa was the dancer, distinct from the ho‘opa‘a (chanter). See Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Hula Pahu: Hawaiian drum dances (Honolulu 1993). 48 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. I have found no American or Canadian newspaper coverage of the troupe prior to its arrival at the Chicago Columbian World's Exposition. 49 ‘Last living court dancer’. Since this photograph was in Kini's collection at the time the article was written, she would have been the most likely source of this information. 50 According to ‘Hula hula dancer is in hard luck’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 August 1895, at the time of his death, Kalākaua had been preparing 12 dancers to represent the country at the Chicago Fair. 51 Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 52 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. I have found no specific North American newspaper coverage of the troupe during this period. 53 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 4. See also Rydell et al., Fair America, 9. 54 Paul Nasaw, Going Out: the rise and fall of public amusements (Cambridge MA 1999), 71. Though exposition attendance figures were inflated, Nasaw suggests that even dividing these figures in half would mean Chicago had nearly 14 million fairgoers, still a huge audience for a nation of 62 million. 55 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the expositions universelles, great exhibitions and world's fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester 1988), 82. 56 Ibid., 42. 57 The organiser of the Chicago Midway, Sol Broom, had been influenced by living villages of French colonies on display at the 1899 Paris World's Fair. 58 The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 introduced the ethnographic model of ‘human showcases’, as described by Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 82. Raymond Corbey has also analysed the Midway sections of imperial fairs as ‘ethnographic showcases’, in ‘Ethnographic showcases, 1870–1930’. 59 Rand McNally & Co.'s A Week at the Fair, Illustrating Exhibits and Wonders of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago 1893), 232, 239. Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Collection 60, Chicago World's Fair, Box 4, National Museum of American History, Archives Center. 60 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 61 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. However, in another interview on Tape HAW 59.8.2, Kini said they performed hula ‘āla‘apapa instead of hula ‘ōlapa. She tended to use these terms interchangeably, although Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman makes a clear argument for their structural and spiritual differences in Sacred Hula, 16. 62 Tapes HAW 59.8.2 and 59.5.1, BM. 63 For example, during Kalākaua's coronation and jubilee, hula performances proceeded for about two weeks. 64 Bob Krauss, Transcribed Interview with Napua Stevens, 3 June 1989, Bob Krauss Workbook, ‘Wilson Tapes Transcribed’, U-163, John H. Wilson Research Papers of Bob Krauss, HSA. 65 Tape HAW 59.1.1, BM. 66 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 67 Krauss, Interview with Napua Stevens. 68 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 69 Tape HAW 59.14.1, BM. 70 Belly dance refers to all solo dance forms with origins in North Africa, the Middle East, and Although the dance was as at the Chicago Exposition and Kini referred to her as the women have from North or the Middle and Barbara (eds), Belly and For example, the Chicago Midway was by a dancer from women performers and the of the modern (Durham Patterson, ‘Aunt Pacific 7 April 1893. The this exhibition when the government an to the Chicago Although this was to called exposition guidebooks to it as a and of Samoans were published in guidebooks and such as the but of Hawaiian Ibid. Tape HAW 59.14.1, BM. Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. Nakai and to Honolulu. The of the Rydell, All the World's a Fair, is that Pacific Islander performers exhibitions for their own and cultural with their Pacific Ewan has described how Islander and performers and at the International of and held in Johnston, ‘Reinventing David and in American (New York 1997), The from to Daily 23 July 1893. is one by the Honolulu newspaper Daily 24 May 1893. women and two Honolulu by for the Chicago Fair in May 1893. this was a but the of dancers Kini's troupe the Daily have about Kini's troupe that Hawai‘i in Daily 20 August 1893. 8 in and John the Island at the turn of the century (New York See, for example, York 30 1893 and 2 Chicago Daily 29 and 31 1893. See 13 April 1893 and Daily 7 Daily 30 July 1893. dance Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 August 1893. 89 dance at Chicago World's Fair, is for 25 1893. 90 Kini's with from April to August in She that they for one year, but it is also that she to the US after six months and joined the vaudeville Daws, A of of in the (New York 1980), Chappell, on Euroamerican ‘Court dancer’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 29 May and Hopkins, Notable Women of Hawaii, Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. Patterson, ‘Aunt and Hopkins, Notable Women of Hawaii, and Bob Krauss provides a detailed of Kini's in Krauss Workbook 3 (Sept 1891–June 1893), U-163, HSA. Krauss the 1989, it was in the of of Hawaiian Islands and Honolulu, Hawai‘i. The these and April May June June and August Napua a friend of also that she Kini the Krauss, Interview with Napua Stevens. of the entertainment and in (New and in Journal of History, and and the of American Robert W. Rydell and in the of the (Chicago Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 6 April Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. North 27 North 18 and the dime in America (New York 1997), the display of the at the Fair and and the of as from the and the American cultural (Chicago Nasaw, Going A. over the and Museum in and 42. Robert (ed.), in (New York 108. North 26 March Ibid. ‘Hula hula dancer is in hard ‘Hula in hard luck’, Hawaiian 13 August Pacific of Honolulu also a similar on 13 August 1895 with the ‘Hula in ‘Hula hula dancer is in hard hula Hawaiian 6 4, 1895 is on the Hawaiian 17 March 30 March 6 April 15 April Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. Tape HAW 59.8.2, BM. Kini said the dancer to was an who about this have been name. Kini also to have her Lei Mamo dancers as who did not go on in August Hawaiian 18 June Tape HAW BM. Ibid. Tape HAW 59.1.1, BM. Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, In the Hui Aloha and women's James with and documents that that the was the of Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio the political of hula, ‘Hula was the of an and was political because of the mele were of the and their to the Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, David A. for more analyses of resistance and that of and in or Pacific, Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 28 one of the Hui Lei Mamo members and the of the dancer were two members of this mourning group. Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, the who the history in the of modern Hawaiian hula’, ‘Last living court tourism of Aloha Week Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 22 and of Aloha Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 21 Tape HAW 59.1.1, BM.

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