Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857–70

Abstract

This article presents two parallel narratives of mid-nineteenth-century guano extraction in the Pacific Islands, one from the perspective of nesting seabirds and the other from the perspective of migrant Hawaiian guano workers. In utilizing a parallel narrative approach, this article contends that Pacific seabirds and Hawaiian laborers were both active participants in the making and remaking of guano island environments. Yet these processes occurred within radically different frameworks of space and time for each group. This article builds on historiography at the intersections of work, body, and environment to investigate ways in which seabirds and Hawaiian migrant laborers both interacted with and altered their surrounding environments through processes of work and through the medium of their bodies. By reading against the grain of Anglophone documentary sources that have too long silenced the voices of both native Hawaiian and nonhuman actors, as well as making use of neglected Hawaiian-language writings by the guano laborers themselves, this article resurrects an untold history of guano work from the mid-nineteenth century.

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