A Traveler’s History of Hawaii
From Agile Guidebooks
“The Hawaiian people had suffered huge population losses in the few years between Captain Cook’s discovery and the mid-19th century. From a 1770s population of at least 300,000 (some estimates are as high as 1,000,000), their numbers had dwindled to 70,000 by 1850 due to disease, poverty, and a falling birth rate. The trend toward depopulation continued during the last half of the 19th century. In 1860 the number of Hawaiians stood at 65,000, but by 1890 there were only 35,000 native people remaining in the Islands. The full-blooded Hawaiian population was in serious decline, but the part-Hawaiian population that had come into being during the early 19th century was on the incline. In 1850 there were about 1,000 part-Hawaiians in Hawaii, but by 1890 their numbers had grown to 6,000.”
–excerpted from essay #1, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Kingdom of Hawaii
“Hawaiian society was already a kaleidoscope of races by the 1930s. The second wave of immigrant plantation workers, which was critical to the growth of the sugar industry, had also included Koreans, Puerto Ricans, and scattered groups of Caucasians. But it was the advent of Asian mixes that made Hawaii a melting pot. In fact, the advent of Asian mixes is probably the most interesting and complicated development in Hawaii’s two hundred year social history. Asian mixes are inextricably linked to the rise in population of part-Hawaiians, because some Asians intermarried with full-blooded Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians, and they are inextricably linked to the rise in population of Hawaiian look-alikes, because some Asians intermarried with whites or other Asians and produced Asian mixes that looked very Polynesian. The whole scenario makes for a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, and something of a nightmare for statisticians.”
-excerpted from essay #2, U.S Annexation and the Territory of Hawaii
“Meanwhile, chroniclers were sounding the alarm about the falling numbers of full-blooded Hawaiians. The part-Hawaiian population was rising due to interracial marriages, and the mixed-Asian population of Hawaiian look-alikes was also rising due to intermarriage, but the native people themselves were disappearing. Between 1940 and 1960, the part-Hawaiian population grew from nearly 50,000 to over 90,000, and by the mid-60s their numbers included almost 120,000 people. Asian mixes, moreover, tripled their numbers from the beginning of the 50s to the end of the 60s, from about 20,000 to about 60,000. By the mid-1960s, there were over 50,000 Asian mixes living in Hawaii, most of them in Honolulu. Simultaneously, however, the native population had fallen from 14,000 at most in 1940 to about 11,000 in 1960. By the mid-60s, there were reported to be only about 7,500 of them surviving in Hawaii. Interestingly, the movement from an original homogeneous Island society to a modern heterogeneous society had by this time become so complicated that few statisticians even tried to subdivide the part-Hawaiian population or the mixed Asian population into ethnic groupings. The situation became even more complicated with the appearance of Samoans in the 50s and 60s. There weren’t many of them, but Samoans and Samoan mixes looked a lot like their Hawaiian cousins.”
–excerpted from essay #3, World War II and the State of Hawaii
“At the conclusion of the Vietnam War in the early-70s, refugees from Southeast Asia immigrated to Hawaii, adding to the state’s already diverse Asian population. By then, however, Hawaii’s vast Asian and mixed-Asian population was part and parcel of a grand camouflage of non-whites that further concealed the impending extinction of full-blooded Hawaiians. The celebration of diversity continued into the 1990s, when there were about twenty languages spoken in Island households. English-only was spoken in 75 percent of households, but other languages spoken at home included, in descending order of usage, Japanese, Tagalog (Filipino), Ilocano (Filipino), Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Samoan, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, German, French, Thai/Laotian, Tongan, Bisayan (Filipino), and Portuguese. Interestingly, Hawaii’s Portagee population had become almost exclusively English speaking by the 1990s. By then, too, Tongans from southern Polynesia had joined their Samoan cousins in Hawaii, and were part of a small but very visible population of Hawaiian look-alikes. Behind the Asian camouflage and the Polynesian camouflage, full-blooded Hawaiians were all but forgotten.”
–excerpted from essay #4, The 1970 Census and the Future of Hawaii