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Why were native Hawaiian perspectives left out of this debate over Hawaiian beliefs?

I’ve long been obsessed with the infamous Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate, which tore through the anthropology community back in the 1990s. It's fundamentally a dispute about first contact: in this case, between the Hawaiians and the English.

Here's the story: in 1778, Captain James Cook "discovered" the Hawaiian islands and became allegedly the first European to make formal contact with native Hawaiians. The Hawaiians at first greeted Captain Cook enthusiastically, but after he went away and then returned, the Hawaiians murdered him. 

Conventional wisdom has long insisted that the Hawaiians believed Cook to be a Hawaiian deity named Lono. But a Sri Lankan anthropologist named Gananath Obeyesekere challenged this idea over thirty years ago, touching off a firestorm of academic drama.

To find out more, I spoke to Dr. Umi Perkins, a lecturer in political science at Hawaii Pacific University who also teaches at a prep school for native Hawaiians called Kamehameha Schools. 

What was this debate about?

Marshall Sahlins published a book called Islands of History in 1985, in which he talked about the notion that native Hawaiians had mistaken Captain Cook for Lono. This "was not controversial at the time," says Perkins.  

In response, Obeyesekere published a 1992 book called The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, questioning Sahlins "from a post-colonial perspective," says Perkins. Basically, Obeyesekere drew on his own experience in South Asia that "there had never been any deification of Europeans. And that was more likely a more likely projection of the colonial European mind onto natives." 

Sahlins was furious and responded with a "spicy" book in 1995 called How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, for Example. “He's basically saying, ‘Just because you're a native Sri Lankan doesn't mean you can think like a native Hawaiian,’” Perkins explains.

“I think locally in Hawaii, the sentiment was that there's a little bit of silliness in this debate,” adds Perkins. “The obvious part is (that there were) no Hawaiians involved in a debate over the Hawaiian perspective.”

How native Hawaiians got left out of the argument

One major issue with Obeyesekere's analysis, says Perkins, is that he was too ready to dismiss accounts by native Hawaiian scholars from soon after the event -- who sort of agree that Cook was mistaken for Lono. (Particularly David Malo and Samuel Kamakau.) Obeyesekere believed these scholars were too indoctrinated by Christian missionaries to see their own history clearly. Malo does get in some “digs at his own culture,” according to Perkins, reflecting the zeal of the newly converted to Christianity. This is less true when it comes to Kamakau, however.

“I think it's more nuanced than just brainwashing by missionaries,” says Perkins.

Kamakau's writings were later collected into a book called Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, which includes a section on Cook. And part of the issue is that Kamakau was writing in Hawaiian (using a Hawaiian alphabet created by missionaries). And the people who originally translated Kamakau’s writings into English removed a lot of material and also added their own editorializing. This is covered in a book called Aloha Betrayed by Noenoe K. Silva (who was Perkins' thesis advisor at University of Hawaii Manoa.)

The original English translation of Kamakau's writing, according to Silva’s book, left out some additional context about the term “akua,” which people translate into English as "god," but actually can mean a being of immense power, who could be a spirit or a living person. (Silva also speculates that Cook might've been nicknamed “Lono” because “Cook” was just too hard for Hawaiians to pronounce.) 

Silva writes, “Cook may or may not have been perceived as the akua Lonoikamakahiki, but this fact bears little relation to what English-language speakers of the time meant by ‘god.’”

Kamakau also chose to portray Cook's visit as not the most important thing that was going on in Hawaiian culture at the time, but rather as something that factored into ongoing local politics, according to Silva.

Meanwhile, of course, Captain Cook's journals are pretty definitive that he was received as a god, which serves as effective propaganda for the superiority of the English. There are also accounts by his subordinate, Captain James King, who insists the Hawaiians saw Cook as “a being of a superior nature.” But a third contemporary account, by a surgeon named David Samwell who sailed with Cook, is more critical of Cook's arrogance.

So Perkins says there is a decent amount of evidence on both sides that the Hawaiians may indeed have thought Cook might be the akua known as Lono. But it's more complicated than either Obeyesekere or Sahlins wanted it to be.

Who is Lono?

Lono is associated with the Makahiki season, a period of peace which involves games, “almost like a Hawaiian Olympics,” says Perkins. So Lono is “kind of a peaceful god,” and he's also an ancestor who probably lived 1500 years ago at Kalakikua Bay -- which is where Captain Cook happened to arrive. And Lono had promised to return after 250 years.

“All those things about the return of Lono came together” with Cook's arrival, says Perkins. He arrived during the season of Lono, “looking like Lono in the sense that his sails resembled the banner that's carried around during the season of Lono,” a cross pole with white cloth draped on top. “Cook's ship was thought to be an island -- a floating island with Lono banners all over it, because it was so large, they didn't think of it as a vessel,” Perkins adds.

To this day, says Perkins, “the word for ship is ‘moku,’ which means island.”

How did native Hawaiians respond?

Native Hawaiians “had this opinion that [Cook] might be Lono,” says Perkins. But rather than taking it on faith, they took “almost a scientific approach” of seeing how Cook responded to different situations. 

They wanted to see if he would “open the netted gourd,” which literally referred to a plant that was hollowed out and covered with a net, to make a container for ancestral remains such as bones. “You're never supposed to open it,” Perkins said. “You're not supposed to expose your genealogy to the elements, or to strangers.”

Cook violated this custom by having sex with low-ranking Hawaiian women, says Perkins, polluting his bloodline. This was something that a high chief would not do. He failed a second test by groaning in an undignified fashioned during sex, and also combat. And then he failed a third test by behaving in an even more undignified fashion during the confrontation that ultimately killed him. 

There's also the fact that according to Samwell, there was a morai, a sacred area enclosed by a fence. Cook needed some wood, so he started dismantling the fence around this religious site. The Hawaiians were horrified and thought Cook had lost his senses, but Cook paid no attention and kept taking the wood.

Also, says Perkins, some Hawaiians early on speculated that Cook was from the land of “Ka’eka’e.” This was most likely the name of a Spanish sailor who’d been shipwrecked in Hawaii many years earlier, and had assimilated into Hawaiian culture. “So they're saying Cook is one of those foreigners.” The Spanish have an account of Captain Juan Gaetano visiting Hawaii over two hundred years before Cook arrived. 

Even Cook himself didn't think he was the first European to visit the Hawaiians, says Perkins, because he noticed some Hawaiians with red hair and fair skin, along with some cases of syphilis, “which is the sign of foreign sailors.”

So it wasn’t as simple as Hawaiians viewing Cook as the return of their god, and unquestioningly prostrating themselves before him. They were skeptical from early on, and quickly started to notice that some things were off about this guy.

As Perkins points out, the trope of natives worshipping a visitor as a god is everywhere in pop culture. In Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, for instance, the Ewoks believe the droid C-3PO to be a god:

But it’s a super common trope, usually about a white character being greeted as a god by native peoples. "I show my students a lot of examples," Perkins says.

Perkins also makes a point of teaching his high school students about the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate -- because a lot of his students go to college on the mainland, including at Ivy League schools. There, they will find themselves dealing with professors for whom that debate is the only thing they know about Hawaii. "So I try to prepare them for that."

"And I try to explain. Like, imagine you're the second son of some lord in England, so you go off to the colonies. And everything about you is now raised up, right? Your nation is worth more. Your culturedness is worth more. Your skills are worth more in a colonial administration. You start to feel a little bit more godlike." So it’s a short leap to believing that natives are treating you as an actual god.

Even now, says Perkins, Hawaii remains culturally colonized. "We have positions that no locals can fill, and then somebody from far away comes in with the right degree, and then they're just in. If it's a good salary, they can sort of leapfrog over locals who've been trying to make it for generations."

Music I Love Right Now

The 420 Funk Mob are a side project of the P-Funk All Stars, featuring some of the best musicians from the touring line-up of George Clinton’s long-running band. For nearly thirty years, they’ve played their own gigs, as immortalized in live albums like Live on the Off Days. But they’ve never released their own studio album… until now.

The Emperor Has No Clones came out as a digital download last week, and it’s just amazing. Some of the tracks sound just like a long lost Parliament-Funkadelic release from the late 1970s. There’s some classic guitar shredding from Michael “Kidd Funkadelic” Hampton, some jazzy horn arrangements, and basically a dense wall of sound that keeps rocking me back on my heels. Plus George Clinton himself is in the mix, along with the late Garry Shider. What I’ve caught so far of the lyrics have that P-Funk blend of mysticism, Afrofuturism, snark and soul, too. I’m still soaking in it, but it’s the album I desperately needed right now.