The Good Written Word of Life: The Native Hawaiian Appropriation of Textuality

Abstract

Native Hawaiians vigorously embraced the written word: Hawaiian was placed into a standardized written form by American missionaries working with Hawaiian converts in the 1820s, and a few decades later Hawai'i was one of the most literate nations in the world. Why did Native Hawaiians show such enthusiasm for written language? The Hawaiian commitment to texts did not begin with the arrival of missionaries among them; in fact, Hawaiians' appreciation of the uses of textuality gave them incentive to welcome American missionaries as teachers. Chiefs quickly seized upon written language in their attempts to control the encounter with foreigners, to favor their interests and those of their lineages, to express their understanding of the world, and to shape that world to their ends. A close study of early texts in Hawai'i demonstrates that it is essential for scholars of the Hawaiian past to work with Hawaiian-language sources. Furthermore, working with early texts signals how revealing it is to treat Hawaiian-language documents and the Hawaiian language itself as important subjects of historical study in their own right, rather than just as avenues to information.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.