Lōkela Alexander Minami, Step Aboard. Oil on canvas. 2023. Image courtesy the artist.
With a history of seafaring and celestial navigation traditions spanning more than 5,000 years and originating with Austronesian cultures in Southeast Asia, these early ancestors laid the foundation for a worldview based in resilience, resourcefulness, and determination that defines Pacific Islander heritage to this day. As generations of Austronesian voyagers continuously set sail and established new cultures on islands dotted throughout the Pacific, some stayed behind, and others carried on to find new lands, guided only by the stars, seabirds, and subtle shifts in the wind, waves, and cloud formations.
Etching of Chief Kaʻiana. c. 1787-1789. Image in public domain.
Moving forward through time, the idea of seeing the ocean as a bridge was kept alive in Native Hawaiian ideologies despite the rapid cultural shifts that arrived in the late 18th century with the first Western sailors in the islands. With many of these early British and American ships working along expansive trans-Pacific trade routes, some Hawaiians saw them as opportunities to forge diplomatic relations with foreign powers, find work in burgeoning industries, or set foot on new shores.
Though Native Hawaiians had been canoe voyaging to other continents for at least 2,000 years prior, the first Hawaiians to leave their ancestral home on Western ships in modern history are documented as Kaʻiana, a chief of Kauaʻi, and Winee, a woman from the island of Hawaiʻi.
Accompanying their respective crews to present-day China, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the Philippines, these two individuals began (or perhaps, continued) a movement of Native Hawaiians into places far from their homelands.
Relocation — temporary or permanent — of Native Hawaiians began in larger numbers in the early 1800s, primarily with young men seeking employment in the rapidly expanding Pacific Northwest fur trade, timber, and salmon canning industries. As their labor contracts expired and new Hawaiian workers arrived, some returned home to Hawaiʻi, and others remained in the region, establishing homes, families, and communities that stretched along the American West Coast from Southern California and up north to British Columbia and Alaska.
Portrait of William Naukana, one of the first Native Hawaiians to establish new settlements on Salt Spring Island in the 1800s. c. 1870s. Image courtesy Rosemary Tahouney Unger.