LEAVING “HEWA HAWAI’I”:

In the Spring of 1849, Reverend Timothy Dwight Hunt, pastor of the First Congregational Church of San Francisco and former missionary of Hawai’i under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), penned a letter to the Rev. Dwight Baldwin, then a Congregational minister and medical missionary on the Island of Maui. The letter described a lecture Hunt had recently delivered to a group of Native Hawaiian men, all Protestant Christians, and former parishioners of Baldwin’s, on a beach overlooking the San Francisco Bay. In his lecture, he cautioned the men against the “corrupting influences of the place, particularly intemperance, Sabbath-breaking, and gambling.” He assured Baldwin, “they will not be much tempted to the ‘hewa Hawaii’ . . . their good conduct [will] redeem their national and Christian name.”1 Later, he would write, “Of course, what I can do for them in consistency with any white (!) duties I do cheerfully. Poor creatures! They are here ‘as sheep without a shepherd.’”2 Despite their loyalties to the Church, Native Hawaiian Christians would never be viewed by Hunt on equal terms as Anglo-Americans. Yet his and other missionaries’ concerns over their moral integrity would inadvertently support Native Hawaiian efforts to establish communities throughout the state.

Like many other American foreign missionaries of his time, Hunt subscribed to a racial and cultural discourse that promoted the superiority of white Americans over all others. Historian and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar David A. Chang writes that American Protestant missionaries believed in a “tiered hierarchy of civilization and races that placed Kanaka at an intermediary stage between supposedly na’aupo (ignorant) Indians and na’auao (enlightened) Americans and Europeans.”3 Key to this hierarchy was the association of Hawai’i’s past or Ka Wā ‘Ōiwi Wale with practices American missionaries considered hewa (sinful), including the hula, polygamy, and polytheism.4 Historian and Kānaka Maoli scholar Kealani Cook defines Ka Wā ‘Ōiwi Wale as “the time before settlement of the Hawaiian Islands and sustained European contact, literally the time that was exclusively native.”5 American missionaries in the nineteenth century, Cook writes, “were only too happy to encourage the Kanaka to believe that the stain of Ka Wā ‘Ōiwi Wale was so strong that Lāhui Hawai’i [Hawai’i’s people], a less capable race, would require white American guidance for the foreseeable future.”6 This paper examines how such attitudes were expressed through American missionary paternalism in the Hawaiian diaspora to Gold Rush California. Though underpinned by racial ideology, I argue that American missionary paternalism ironically served to benefit Native Hawaiian diasporic communities by providing access to religious and secular literature as well as access to Native pastors by the late 1860s. Relying on previously neglected missionary correspondence and Hawaiian-language newspaper material as primary sources, this analysis fills a gap in the historiographic literature and situates American history within a “Pacific Worlds” lens.

While encounters between Spanish missionaries and Native peoples in Alta California have been closely examined, few historians have paid attention to relations between American Protestant missionaries and Asian/Pacific Islander immigrants in California in the nineteenth century. Additionally, with the exception of works by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Steven Avella, little has been written about the religious climate of California during the Gold Rush Era.7 In “Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing the Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” historian Wesley Woo traces early Presbyterian work among the Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area, writing that missionaries “judged the Chinese to be pagan and inferior to Americans in all ways. . . .they were seen as falling short of American standards.”8 In American Heathens, historian Joshua Paddison examines Protestant missionary attempts to convert Chinese as part of a postbellum national reform movement of the early 1870s. According to Paddison, American missionaries viewed the Chinese “not as racially inferior but as spiritually misguided.”9 American Heathens can be counted among a number of recent works of religio-racial discourse in American history that, as Paddison writes, “approaches religion and race not as discrete, static, unexamined categories but as co-constitutive ideologies constantly in flux.”10 This paper attempts to contribute to that discourse, looking specifically at to what degree American Protestant missionaries like the Reverend Hunt equated Protestant Christianity with whiteness and how missionary paternalism underscored by this racial ideology impacted Native Hawaiian communities in California.

American missionary paternalism in the Hawaiian diaspora had direct ties to the philosophies of the ABCFM, the New England-based American Protestant foreign mission agency primarily responsible for initiating the Sandwich Islands Mission Project in the Kingdom of Hawai’i beginning in 1819. The goal of ABCFM’s Sandwich Island Mission Project revolved around the idea of "three selfs": self-support, self-governance, and self-propagation.11 In his 1845 The Theory of the Missions to the Heathen, Dr. Rufus Anderson, the Boston-based secretary of the ABCFM from 1832 to 1866, dictated that once a Christian model was introduced to society, those who made the model available were to withdraw and allow churches and peoples to be self-governing.12 Historian William R. Hutchison explains this rationale “bespoke no appreciable sympathy for foreign peoples or cultures; it rested on the insistence that Gospel, once implanted, can be relied upon to foster true religion, sound learning, and a complete Christian civilization.”13 Yet many white elderly ministers on the Islands were heavily influenced by the words of Hiram Bingham, who wrote in his 1848 treatise A residence of twenty-one years in the Sandwich Islands:

Looking back into the obscurity of Hawaiian history, to inquire respecting the character of the unknown islanders who have passed over the stage of earthly existence in preceding generations, we may estimate their corruption and debasement by the principles and religious practices in which they trained and left their children, and by the vile songs, and sports, the creeds and usages prevailing among the, and by the received narrative of the lives of their leaders. Their religion, their politics, their amusements, and the examples of rulers, priests, and parents, all tended to sanction and to foster lust and malevolence. The national history, so far as it was preserved and known by the people, must have continued, without the counteracting influence of a better religion than was known to them, to be debasing, instead of producing or promoting virtue.14

That this so-called “debasing” national history had continued up until 1819 meant that thirty years later, the Hawaiian people’s conversion to Christianity was still incomplete. In an article in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Elele Hawai’i, published on July 14, 1849, one missionary wrote:

The Hawaiian people have a weakness, they are on shaky grounds since they abandoned paganism. They have not yet embraced Christianity solidly. They are somewhere in between. The pain of those who worship the gods has been increased . . . They are incredibly clumsy and ignorant. They are people who experience trouble and sorrow.15

In 1848, American foreign missionaries observed many Native Hawaiians holding onto vestiges of pre-Christian Hawaiian spirituality, practices such as hula performances for example, that missionaries considered not only hewa (wrong or sinful) but also distracting to their work on plantations (many of them owned by American missionaries). In her examination of missionary attempts to ban the hula in the 1850s, historian and Kānaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva explains, “Puritan work ethic and disdain for traditional Kanaka Hawai’i practices dovetailed seamlessly with the attempts to exploit Kanaka Hawai’i labor.”16 In missionary eyes, such practices placed Native Hawaiians in closer proximity to na’aupo (ignorance) than na’auao (enlightenment) and dictated further guidance from American missionaries before allowing for self-governance.

Many American missionaries saw California’s Gold Rush as a significant threat to Hawai’i’s national progress towards na’auao. By the summer of 1848, news of gold’s discovery in California had quickly spread throughout the Islands via both English-language and Hawaiian-language newspapers. On June 25, 1848, the Honolulu-based English-language paper, The Polynesian, reported, "An exceedingly rich gold mine has been discovered in the Sacramento Valley, and all classes and sexes have deserted their occupations and rushed en masse to make their fortunes …. We can assure our readers there is no hoax in this; for we have seen the gold with our own eyes, and it really benefited our optics.”17 By July 1848, the Polynesian reported that, "The little city of Honolulu has probably never before witnessed such an excitement as the gold fever has created. Probably not less than 200 will leave for California in the course of two months.”18 American missionaries, the majority of whom edited the Islands’ Hawaiian-language newspapers, attempted to downplay such excitement. For example, one author wrote in an article published on August 26, 1848, in the missionary-edited newspaper Ka Elele Hawaii:

We have heard that there are large quantities of gold there at the Sacramento River: it’s about a hundred miles wide and the wild brush where you get it is probably about a hundred miles wide. It’s mixed in the dirt, and lots of people go there and dig for gold for them. Some find a lot. some find just a bit. But there are lots of problems there; some problems being famine, no food; the cost to buy food is very dear. Where to get food is far. Another problem is sickness. There is lots of sickness and many deaths. Another thing is lots of rum drinking and rioting. There is no law and no one to enforce. There is no Sabbath. It is really a bad place. That is what people say who go there and make it back. Some people hope to go there; because they are ignorant! Don’t go. Stay. It’s no good to go there. You will see that those who go there encounter problems.19

Illness and disease were common concerns among missionaries on the Islands. By late 1848, the Islands were entering into a new deadly epidemic of whooping cough, measles, dysentery, and influenza. According to one source, an estimated 10,000 persons, more than one-tenth of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s population, died from these causes.20

Still, many maka’āinanana, Native Hawaiians who were members of Hawai’i’s commoner class, decided to make the journey across the Pacific to California in the Spring of 1848. These men were not only in search of fortune; they were educated, literate, Christian members of Hawaiian Congregational churches in search of expanding their knowledge of a foreign land and its peoples. As they left, one American missionary on the Islands, the Reverend Timothy Dwight Hunt, saw an opportunity for working in another ‘foreign’ land as well. A “New School Presbyterian” from New England, Hunt was part of the eleventh company of ABCFM-sponsored missionaries that arrived on the Islands (Hunt landed at Lahaina, Maui) in 1844.21 However, soon after arriving in Maui, Hunt quickly became disillusioned with the Island ministry. Though he displayed an aptitude for speaking in the ‘olelo Hawai’i (Hawaiian language) quickly, he apparently experienced little success in attracting a large Native congregation. Following a relocation from Lahaina to Honolulu in the Summer of 1848, he wrote to Rev. Baldwin, “Change of place has produced no change in feeling. . . I am yet doing missionary work, only I am talking to white skins instead of red ones. . . My congregation consists of various classes of persons: missionaries, merchants, judges, lawyers, mechanics, and some others.”22 In early October 1848, he officially resigned his ABCFM post and accepted a new post by the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), the ABCFM’s domestic U.S. counterpart, as Chaplain of the City of San Francisco.23 On October 25, 1848, Hunt’s wife Mary Hedges wrote, “The great excitement and emigration to the coast consequent to the discoveries of gold in California have rendered the forming of a new church here [in Honolulu] impracticable and my dear husband has also gone to San Francisco to try and do good there. . . we and others have felt that Providence has opened before him a door of greater usefulness at California and that it was his duty to go.”24 Still, she had reservations. Mary wrote her brother, “I wonder what he [Hunt] will do in such a land of strangers! Their best hotel [is] like the lowest grog shop! No regard for the Sabbath, or religion, or human life! . . . I fear that he may be obliged to return without having found a door of entrance there, the gold diggers have become so desperate!”25 Hunt’s decision appears to have been fortuitous for many Native Hawaiian Christians looking to find spiritual anchor before setting off for the goldfields.

Native Hawaiian immigrants were among Hunt’s first Congregational followers in the early years of his San Francisco ministry, and it seems Hunt intended to keep it that way, at least out of loyalty to his former ABCFM colleagues. In a letter to “Bros. Castle” dated February 27, 1849, Hunt regretted that he “could not take root” in Hawaiian soil but “still, the unbidden ‘aloha’ is on my tongue whenever I meet a Hawaiian. My Kanaka meeting on Sabbath afternoons tends perhaps to keep alive old feelings.”26 A few months later, on April 23, 1848, he wrote the Rev. Baldwin, “It has been a great satisfaction to me during my residence here that I could speak the language of the Hawaiians and thus meet with a company of them from Sabbath to Sabbath and preach to them the gospel.”27 These early Sabbath meetings likely occurred in front of a schoolhouse on Portsmouth Square, where Hunt conducted most of his services from November 1, 1848 to February 10, 1850.28 In early April 1849, he met “5 of the 6 church members” of Baldwin’s Lahaina church parish (Wainee Church), men who had just arrived in San Francisco the day before, along with “five other kanakas.” According to Hunt, the men “took my hand as they would of an old kumu [teacher]. Particularly was I pleased with their early visit to me to whose spiritual care you had committed them.” On the day of their meeting, Hunt wrote,

The day was an unusually warm one for San Francisco, so they seated themselves on the grass before the door and I gave them a lecture, as introductory to life in this place. I inquired first what they intended to do, to go to the mines immediately or remain awhile in town? They replied that for awhile they would remain here. I then asked them where they were to stop and whether they had brought a house with them. They replied that they have a “hale aho” [sic, reference to a thatched grass hut] but where to set it up they knew not. I then pointed out to them a retired place on the beach, under the lee of a pali [cliff] where they would be sheltered from the cold raw winds from the sea and where wood also would be convenient.29

Hunt’s introduction to life in California likely echoed some of Mary’s concerns about the place. His lecture to them as an “introductory to life in this place,” inquiry regarding their timing of departure for mines, and concern over their shelter were all indications of the paternal feelings he harbored towards the men.

Hunt’s foremost concern regarding Native Hawaiians, however, seems to have been the maintenance of their moral character in California. He must have anticipated the need to preach to Native Hawaiian immigrants in California, for Hunt brought with him to San Francisco palapala or literature written in ‘olelo Hawai’i. For ABCFM missionaries involved with the Sandwich Islands Mission Project, use of palapala was critical not only in preaching Christianity to Native Hawaiians but in maintaining adherence to Protestant rules of conduct and principles of faith. Among the palapala at Hunt’s disposal in San Francisco were ka Palapala Hemolele (Holy scriptures), including the Baibala Hawai’i (Hawaiian Bible) and hymnals in ‘olelo Hawai’i. In a letter dated June 8, 1849, Hunt described in detail another Sabbath meeting with Native Hawaiian parishioners indicating the palapala he used in his service.

One cloth tent and one house of poles covered [by] lauhola [sic] mats [which] constituted their Kauhale Hawaii [Hawaiian Village or Neighborhood]. Some twenty or thirty natives were together, Kaenaena occupying somewhat a central position among them. My two companions seated themselves on what appeared to be a pulu [mulch or padding] mattress rolled up. I took for my seat and pulpit a half barrel of pork covered over with a small mat. We sung the hymn “Pomaikai wale no lakou” [“They Are Truly Blessed”] (110) after which I read the 6th chapter of _ Timothy, after which I lead them in prayer. I then took for my text, “O ka punikala, a ka mole no ia o na hewa a pau” [“O ka puni kālā, ‘o ka mole nō ia o nā hewa a pau” or “The Lust of Money is the Root of All Evil”] . . . All this was under the open heavens and in view of the Bay and shipping.30

Hunt’s message to his parishioners could not be second-guessed – the desire for gold was a temptation that would lure Native Hawaiian Christians back to nau’aupō or “hewa Hawai’i” if they were not careful. That he was willing to meet with Native Hawaiians at their beach settlement rather than in front of the Portsmouth Square schoolhouse indicates the lengths he was willing to go hold onto his Native Hawaiian congregation in San Francisco.

By early summer of 1849, however, Hunt realized that holding onto such a congregation would not be possible. In his June 8, 1849 letter to Baldwin, Hunt reported:

The church members Kae and Keanu came on shore and reached the kanaka village while I was preaching to a remnant of the old company. The most of the former companies had left for the mines the week previous. And our Cook, Makaike, went with them! I anticipated it, notwithstanding the written contract to the contrary. I gave him $50 a month but that is nothing in the enlarged vision of a man with yellow fever.31

Still, Hunt felt it was his duty to monitor and report on the moral character of these church members to Baldwin whenever possible. In another letter dated July 23, 1849, Hunt reported that “Bros. Damon,” a reference to the Reverend Samuel Chenery Damon, had spent a night at “Kanaka Diggings” (Irish Creek, CA) and said that the immigrants were “behaving well” and having “meetings on the Sabbath.” He also mentioned the miners were “getting some gold” which he brought down from the hills to “take to their friends (Oahu kama'aina I suppose).”32 Damon himself also wrote in the newsletter The Friend on how pleased he was to see the majority of Native Hawaiian men at the Irish Creek encampment adhering to principles of the Christian faith. “I was glad to learn that a majority of the Hawaiians were true to their tee-total principles, while those who were seduced had been long upon the coast and away from missionary influences,” he wrote, implying that the community was abstaining from alcohol. “It was gratifying to learn that these people regularly assembled upon the Sabbath for Divine Service, which was conducted by two of their number, well established in the faith.”33 All such practices were encouraging signs that Native Hawaiians could maintain their progress towards na’auao despite having distanced themselves physically from the Islands and missionary-led congregations.

Still, Hunt took comfort that physical hardship in the mines would convince most natives to return to San Francisco and eventually to the Islands. In his letter dated July 23, 1849, Hunt indicated that one of Baldwin’s sponsored-parishioners, Kahookauu had just boarded a ship back to Hawai’i the day before. He noted that:

I am glad to inform you that K. has maintained as far as I know an unsullied character. He has quite frequently called on me since he arrived and has been invariably been at our meeting on Sab. [Sabbath] afternoon. He has not been to the mines but has worked steadily at his trade at $10 per diem. He has been once or twice quite sick with a cold and as a recent one or rather a succession of colds has left him with chronic cough. He says he is afraid to remain – saying “Aole ku pono, keia aina i kou kino.” [This country is no good for my health]. Other natives are also setting their faces homeward. The natives who went up a few weeks since to the mines were nearly all taken sick immediately but at last reports they were recovering.34

Cholera was often a major culprit, with major outbreaks of the disease occurring in San Francisco and Sacramento during the Gold Rush’s early years.35 Smallpox was another. In the early 1860s, several Native Hawaiian settlements in El Dorado County, including Irish Creek, were devastated by a smallpox epidemic. One Native Hawaiian miner and Christian, Iosepa [Joseph] Opunui, described his battle with smallpox as follows: “I have been confined to bed for four months now, and this is the fifth month. I came down with a fever as quick as opening the mouth or a flash of lightning, so I have hope in Jesus Christ, the Lord, who is the same over all spiritual matters.”36 One missionary wrote in the Missionary Herald:

Many of the natives have gone to try their fortunes in the land of gold. Most of our foreign population has gone also. After a while we shall expect both classes to flock back in multitudes. . . We fear that they will also bring the small pox, or other contagious diseases, to make a still wider desolation among the poor Hawaiians; or we may have an importation of California morals, more to be dreaded than the cholera or plague.37

“California morals” were considered just as deleterious to the Hawai’i’s Native population as physical diseases were. On October 21, 1850, Hunt wrote:

Every Sab. there or less at my morning service – they look to me as their natural protector and father. . . . I always urge the natives to return, telling them that this is an “aina ke pono ole ia lakou.” [“country no good for them”] . . . Poor creatures! They are here as sheep without a shepherd. Always urge them to remain at home.38

Native Hawaiians, from Hunt’s perspective, were physically and morally incapable of navigating life in America. This perceived incapability enforced Hunt’s feelings of benevolent paternalism towards Natives from Hawai’i. Ironically, these expressions of paternalism encouraged other American missionaries to travel eastward towards to California more so than convince Native Hawaiians they should return home.

Native Hawaiian Christians continued to work and worship in California throughout the 1850s, slowly establishing communities with the help of missionary assistance. In one of his last letters from California to the Islands, a letter dated August 3, 1855, Hunt described meeting with a group of Native Hawaiian miners at Yreka. At the time he was on a missionary expedition to the Pacific Northwest on behalf of the AHMS. He told “Bros. Clark” (likely the Reverend Ephraim Weston Clark, third pastor of Kawaiahaʻo Church in Honolulu, Hawaii) that he had discovered “a company of Islanders at Yreka in Siskiyou Co. near Oregon,” to “about 30 of whom” he “administered the Sacrament at the Methodist Church.” He noted their desire for palapala and requested that Brother Clark send Bibles and hymnals in the Hawaiian language.39 In September of 1858, the Reverend Lowell Smith, another ABCFM missionary who had been involved with the Sandwich Islands Mission Project, visited the Irish Creek settlement. In an article of Ka Hae Hawai’i dated January 12, 1859, Smith says he delivered “Bibles, new testament, hymns of praise, children’s hymns, lyrics, sermons, geography, math, basic arithmetic” and other secular and non-secular works to the community.40 It is important to note that some of these works were not simply translations from English to the Hawaiian language but authored in the Hawaiian language by scholars such as David Malo.41 During his visit, Smith also observed the work of the Native Hawaiian men: “I know their work, that they dig for gold; and I also saw some foreigners and Chinese, digging the gold. They do not find much these days because of little water. Sometimes two, sometimes three dollars a day, and nothing more.”42 Despite their poor wages, the men of Irish Creek were actively practicing Christianity and sharing Hawaiian culture with members of their community. They were also communicating with other mining communities and their kin on the Islands via Hawaiian-language newspapers. One such newspaper was the Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a (The Independent), what historian Helen G. Chapin calls the “longest-running and most successful Hawaiian language journal” lasting from 1861 to 1927.43 Two other newspapers popular amongst miners were Ka Hae Hawaii (The Hawaiian Flag) and Ka Hōkū Loa (The Great Star). Smith brought copies of both papers to Irish Creek during his 1858 visit.44

Such palapala, secular and non-secular literature in ‘olelo Hawai’i, was instrumental in a Christian revival that took place at Irish Creek in the Spring of 1862, a revival that involved the participation and conversion of Native American women to the Protestant Faith. In May of 1862, the community of Irish Creek established the Aha Hui Misionari Hawaiian O Califonia (Hawaiian Missionary Society of California) under the direction of Theodore Weld Gulick, son of ABCFM missionaries Peter and Fanny Gulick. The society’s stated purpose was to uplift and enlighten the Indigenous peoples of California. One particular Native woman involved in the revival, a Konkow Maidu girl by the Hawaiian name of Wai‘ūlili (Babling Waters), was considered a poster child for Christian uplift. Charles Aarona, a native of Molokai, described Wai‘ūlili as “a woman highly proficient in Hawaiian language as if she was born natively in Hawai‘i.”45 Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick, Theodore’s brother, reported on July 5, 1862, of the revival at Irish Creek in the following manner:

About five months ago, the thoughtless Hawaiians here woke up and abandoned the entertainments of this world and sought out the needs of the soul. Wai‘ūlili was among them. She went to services and read often from the Holy Bible and took on the work in services with the other women and confessed with regret the darkness she was in before and the ignorance of her parents, and she prayed in services, as in other place, to the powerful God in Heaven. She greatly desired to get her mother [Lemaine] and bring her to live here in order to teach her in the things of the soul.46

Although the revival at Irish Creek lasted only six months, Native American women continued to show interest in adopting Christian ideals within other Native Hawaiian settlements. When Reverend Smith returned to California in 1866, he visited a Native Hawaiian community at Grapevine Gulch, near Ione in Calaveras County. In a letter published July 7, 1866, he wrote:

I went back that evening to the shady village of the Hawaiians. We met that night in a service and in the morning we met again. That evening we met again and discussed at length what was needed for their souls. Their deficiencies were evident due to lack of a Pastor to live amongst them, to tend to them, and to lead them. They had been supplied with Bibles and hymnals and song books for children. They were proficient in reading and singing. . . There was one Indian woman who requested a Hawaiian Bible.47

Smith also mentions performing one marital ceremony between a Native Hawaiian man and Native American woman: “Weddings. I married a Hawaiian man and an Indian woman.” And he mentions other “married” Native American/Native Hawaiian couples living in the community: “Meri Kupokoli, an Indian, the wife married to Ka‘aiāhua; and Maria, an Indian, the wife married to Makuahine.”48 It is unclear if these other pairings were sanctioned by the Church or instances of opposite-sex cohabitation. Cohabitation was often the norm in Native Hawaiian/Native American communities; Wai‘ūlili, for example, was “mare” (married) to two Native Hawaiian men during her life, G.H. Kamakea and Edward Mahuka. However there is no mention that her marriages were officiated by American pastors.49 Historian David Chang writes that while “Kanaka and Native Californians like the Concow and Maidu certainly had practices in which opposite-sex couples created pairings, they were neither surrounded by formation of marriage nor covenanted nor assumed its lifetime status.”50 In any case, the pairings often facilitated the spread of Hawaiian Christianity, literature, and culture to a larger community, including women and children.

Meanwhile, between 1848 and 1863, the Sandwich Islands Mission Project underwent significant change in its organization and governance. In 1848, Dr. Anderson began traveling to the Islands to promote Native Hawaiian self-sufficiency, in accordance with the ABCFM’s foreign missionary “three selfs” model. In 1851, as a result of Anderson’s efforts, the Hawaiian Mission Society (HMS) was created to evangelize the Pacific, and in 1854, the Sandwich Island Mission was officially disbanded and renamed the Hawaiian Evangelical Association (HEA), which took over governance of Congregational activities in the Islands from the ABCFM. However, as of 1863, both HEA and its sister organization, the HMS, remained dominated by elderly white ministers. Anderson felt this white dominance jeopardized the HMS’s overall intent to promote religious independence for the Hawaiian Kingdom. At an annual meeting in June 1863, he persuaded the HEA to take over the HMS, grant full membership to Hawaiians, and to work on ordaining more Hawaiian pastors.51 Out of twenty large churches in Hawai’i, sixty parishes were created and placed under the charge of Native pastors with the guidance and support of the Hawaiian Board and its corresponding secretary.52 Thereafter, all missionary activities both on the Islands and throughout Oceania became commonly known as the Hawaiian Mission Project.53

One Native pastor who benefited from the newly formed Hawaiian Mission Project was a young California Indian man identified only by a Hawaiian name, Ioane Makani (John Wind), in the literature. One source identifies Makani as “he Ilikini no Sakalamento, Kaleponia” [“an Indian of Sacramento, California”], indicating he may have been of either Nisenan Maidu or Valley Miwok tribal ancestry. In 1850, at the age of six, Makani traveled to the Hawaiian Kingdom under the care of “e kekahi haole” (a white man) whose name is unidentified. While residing in Kona, Hawai’i, he was taught how to read in the Hawaiian language and subsequently brought into membership of the Protestant Church by the Reverend J.D. Parisa. He was then sent to a boarding school in Hilo where he lived for a few years with a “Mr. Alexander” before attending the Presbyterian ministerial school at the Hawaiian Congregational Church (now known as Ka'ahumanu Congregational Church) in Wailuku, Maui.54 An article published in the Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a dated July 7, 1866, states that:

He [Makani] has a strong desire to go home and preach to his own brothers and sisters about the life of Christ. We have hope for him that he will meet up with the Hawaiians in California. We have given him letters for the member friends there, we asked Rev. E. T. Taylor to assist him for us so that he can care for himself. . . .We appreciated how much this outsider greatly desired to know the priesthood and how unlikely it was that he would return to his Indian people who live as savages in the wilderness of America.55

Such writings reiterated missionary racial ideology that relegated American Indians to tier of na’aupo (darkness or ignorance) – uncivilized and unredeemable. However, they also expressed hope that, as a Native pastor, Makani might continue the paternal supervision of Native Hawaiians in the diaspora. Thus, Makani was required to cross over and navigate three nations in his missionary practice – Native American, Hawaiian, and American.

In the summer of 1867, Makani stepped off the clipper ship The Comet in San Francisco following a months-long voyage from the Hawaiian Islands.56 He boarded a train to a town he identified as “Kakarameka” [Sacramento], which had been assigned several different Hawaiian names by the 1870s.57 There he found a community of California Indian people who, in his words, “had no clothes and white people completely rejected them the way I saw it.”58 By September of 1867, Makani had reached the Native Hawaiian community of Vernon, an agricultural/fishing colony on the upper Sacramento River. The Vernon community comprised a mix of Native Hawaiian men, Native American women, and mixed-blood offspring.59 John Kapu, Native Hawaiian fisherman and kahuna (spiritual leader) of Vernon, reported that:

Ioane Makani, Indian, visited our office last 27th of September, which was a Friday. He stayed with us until Sunday. We met together with him in a church service that day all the way into night and he explained about the kingdom of heaven before the eight of us: three men, two women, and three girls. We Hawaiians stopped at the yard of Homa when we heard of the Spring of Life that lives coming from among the strangers and natives of this land, and we, the people, filled up the place to overflowing, while we fell into listening to the goodness of the Godly Trinity, and that is how we remained and were sad in our hearts. And for half of last Sunday we went and met with the local Indians of this place.60

Such services contrasted sharply with Reverend Hunt’s lectures/sermons to Native Hawaiians on a beach overlooking the San Francisco Bay in 1849. American pastors were no longer leading Hawaiian Congregational services, Native pastors were. Furthermore, Native Hawaiians in California were succeeding in extending their na’auao to Native Californians through kinship and evangelism, both of which formed the backbone of community-building in the diaspora.

By the summer of 1868, Makani had set up his own missionary schools in the town of Colfax, California. The same year, the Reverend J.F. Pogue, an American missionary under the ABCFM, traveled from the Islands to Colfax to witness Makani’s progress with the local tribal community. In an article dated August 8, 1868, Pogue wrote the following:

I heard that there were some Hawaiians living in that town and that there was also a school near there for adulterous Indians. And when I asked, I was told that the school was that of Ioane Makani’s, the Indian who was educated in the Hawaiian Islands who was sent here by the Hawaiian Board as a teacher for his people here. When I got a hold of an Indian he led me to the house of Ioane Makani. I found him in the field planting watermelons [or squash]. Outside of his yard there were a few groups of women preparing oak fruit [acorns] for their dinner. Makani had many other schools in other areas. We met with the Indians, but he said they were very stubborn people. He had hoped that that two or three of them would become Christians, but they did not agree to become members.61

In another letter dated September 19, 1868, Pogue provides a little more detail about Makani’s school:

John built a wooden house there; it has two rooms, one for the school and the other for the bedroom. There is a blackboard in the school room, and other things that help him teach his students. John's disciples were not many, for these Indians were weak, transient, and ignorant of the intoxicating effects of liquor. There are ten students at a time, six in one or not at all. Their language was not written in their books; there is nothing else that will make them wise so quickly. They were taught in English. But when John had preached the Gospel in their own language, two or three of them believed that they had embraced the word of God and believed in Jesus Christ. But none of them were admitted into the Church. We spoke with some Hawaiian people about John Makani, and they told us that he was a good, kind man, and that he was hard at work.62

Makani was clearly trilingual; he knew a California Indian language (perhaps some form of Maiduan), ka ‘olelo Hawaii (the Hawaiian language), and English. While his work to convert Native Californians to Christianity may not have been met with much success, it is clear that American missionary paternalism had enabled him with the resources to establish schools to educate Native American peoples with resources in English.

Makani and Wai‘ūlili, both California Indians, challenged American missionary notions that Native Americans were incapable of achieving Christian na’auao or that Native Hawaiians were incapable of maintaining and teaching na’auao outside of the Islands. Such was the paradox of American missionary paternalism in the Hawaiian diaspora to California in the mid-nineteenth century. By portraying Native Americans and Native Hawaiians as childlike, naïve, and ignorant in their public sermons, publications, and personal correspondence, American Protestant missionaries could assert Anglo-European racial superiority and “whiteness” over darker-skinned peoples. Yet by preaching in ‘olelo Hawai’i, providing palapala, and maintaining networks of communication across the Pacific, American missionaries, regardless of their racial perspectives, served as anchors of Hawaiian Congregationalism for Native Hawaiian Christians in a foreign land. Both Native Hawaiians and their Native American kinsmen used American missionary paternalism to their advantage, not just for purposes of adopting and practicing Christianity, but to take advantage of American systems of education, expand their knowledge of the outside world, and transcend the racial boundaries of American colonialism. Rather than oppressing the Native peoples, American missionary paternalism fostered Native Hawaiian/Native American community establishment in California by supplying a very common tool of nation-building: literature.

Timothy Dwight Hunt to Rev. Baldwin, letter dated April 23, 1849. Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed April 13, 2019, https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/575. Hunt used the general term “kanakas” to refer to Native Hawaiians in California.
Hunt to Baldwin, October 21, 1850. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed February 11, 2019, https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/575.
David Chang, The World and All the Things upon It, Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 232.
Kealani Cook, “Ke Ao a me Ka Pō: Postmillennial Thought and Native Hawaiian Foreign Mission Work,” American Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 3 (September 2015), 893.
Kealani Cook, Return to Kahiki, Hawaiians in Oceania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 234. See also Kanalu G. Terry Young, Rethinking the Native Hawaiian Past (New York: Garland Publishing 1998), 20.
Cook, Return to Kahiki, 18.
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994. Steven Avella, “Phelan's Cemetery: Religion in the Urbanizing West, 1850-1869, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento” in California History 79, no. 2, Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California (Summer, 2000), 250-279.
Wesley S. Woo, “American Presbyterians, Presbyterian Mission: Christianizing and Civilizing The Chinese in Nineteenth Century California,” American Presbyterians, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 1990), 168.
Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Race, Religion, and Reconstruction in California, published for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, (University of California Press and the Huntington Library, 2012), 43.
Joshua Paddison, “New Directions in the History of Religion and Race,” American Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 4, (December 2016), 1008,
John P. Erdman, "A Brief Historical Sketch of the Hawaiian Board of Mission," in The Centennial Book, 77; Norman Meller, “Missionaries to Hawai’i: Shapers of the Island’s Government,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1958): 795, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/106591295801100403.
Rufus Anderson, The Theory of the Missions to the Heathen (Boston: Press of Crocker and Brewster, 1845), 73-74; Rufus Anderson, History of the Sandwich Islands Mission (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1870), 287.
William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World, American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 78.
Hiram Bingham. A residence of twenty-one years in the Sandwich Islands: or, the civil, religious, and political history of those islands: comprising a particular view of the missionary operations connected with the introduction and progress of Christianity and civilization among the Hawaiian people. Hartford, Connecticut: H. Huntington, 1848, 23.
“He ano nawaliwali ko Hawaii lahuikanaka, ua ku kulanaiana ia, no ka mea, ua haalele ko nei Lke ano pegana y aole nae i paa loa ma keano Kristiano, aia ma kahi waena. Ua hoonuiia ka eha o ka poe i hahai i na akua. . . . Manomano ka hemahema a me ka naaupo, a me ka pilikia a me ke kaumaha o ia poe“
“No Ka Hoowalewale [The Temptation],” Ka Elele Hawaii, July 14, 1849, Papakilo Database.
Noenoe Silva, “He Kanawai E Ho'opau I Na Hula Kuolo Hawai'i: The Political Economy of Banning the Hula,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 34 (2000): 32-33, https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10524/347/JL34035.pdf.
"California," The Polynesian, June 25th, 1848.
"Gold Fever," The Polynesian, July 9th, 1848,
“Ua lohe hou iho nei makou, he nui maoli no ke gaula malaila, ma ka muliwai Saremento: hookahi paha haneri mile ka laula a me ka laula o ka nahelehele aahi i loaa’i, ua huiia me ka lepo, a ua nui ka poe hele ilaila e eli iho a imi goula no lakou. Ua loaa nui i kekahi poe, ua loaa hapa i kekahi poe. Nui loa no nae ka pilikia malaila; Eia kekahi pilikia, o ka wi; aole ai, kaumaha loa ke kumukuai o ka ai. Loihi loa kahi e loaa’i ka ai, Eia kekahi pilikia, o ka mai; nui ka mai, a nui hoi ka make. Eia kekahi; nui ka inu rama, a me ka haunaele; aole Kanawai, aole mea nana e hoomalu; aole la Sabati; he wahi ino loa maoli no. Pela mai ka poe hele malaila, a hoi mai. Ua lana ka manao o kekahi poe kanaka e holo ilaila. No ka naaupo! Mai holo; e noho no; aole pono ka holo ilaila. E ike auanei kakou, o ka poe holo ilaila, e poino ana.”
“He Goula Ma California, [Gold in California],” Ka Elele Hawaii, August 26, 1848, Papakilo Database.
Robert C. Schmitt and Eleanor C. Nordyke, “Death in Hawai'i: The Epidemics of 1848—1849,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, Vol. 35 (2001), 1.
Hawaiian Mission Children's Society 1901, Portraits of American Protestant Missionaries to Hawaii, Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., 81.
Hunt to Baldwin, September 11, 1848. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed February 11, 2019,
Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California, 70.
Mary Hedges Hunt to “My dear brother”, Letter dated October 25, 1848, SF Theological Seminary, Hunt, Timothy Dwight Diaries, Letters, Papers, 54 _BX 9225H9A1 Boxes 1-4, Box 4, Letters from Mary Hedges Hunt.
Mary Hedges Hunt to “My dear brother”, Letter dated October 25, 1848, SF Theological Seminary, Hunt, Timothy Dwight Diaries, Letters, Papers, 54 _BX 9225H9A1 Boxes 1-4, Box 4, Letters from Mary Hedges Hunt.
Hunt to Bros. Castle, February 27, 1849. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed February 11, 2019,
Timothy Dwight Hunt to Rev. Baldwin, April 23, 1849. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed February 11, 2019,
History of the First Congregational Church of San Francisco, accessed February 9, 2019, https://www.sanfranciscoucc.org/history/.
Ibid. Hunt’s phrase “Hale aho” appears to be misspelling of the phrase “hale ako,” a Hawaiian term referring to a thatched house usually made of grass.
Timothy Dwight Hunt to Rev. Baldwin, letter dated June 8, 1849. Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed April 13, 2019, https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/575. The term “lauhala” (literally translated as “pandanus leaf” - “lau “meaning "leaf") refers to the leaves of the hala tree (Pandanus tectorius); Judd, et. al., Handy Hawaiian Dictionary, 269. Native Hawaiian immigrants apparently carried leaves of the hala tree with them on their journeys across the Pacific.
Hunt to Baldwin, June 8, 1849. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed July 15, 2019.
Hunt to Baldwin, July 23, 1849. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed July 15, 2019. Kama’aina is a word used to describe Hawaii residents regardless of their racial background, as opposed to "kanaka" which means a person of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
Samuel C. Damon, “Kanaka Diggings,” The Friend, December 1, 1849 - Newspaper, Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed October 25, 2019, https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/1121.
Timothy Dwight Hunt to Rev. Baldwin, letter dated July 23, 1849. Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed April 13, 2019, https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/575.
Michael Roth, “Cholera, Community, and Public Health in Gold Rush Sacramento and San Francisco, “Pacific Historical Review (1997) 66 (4): 527.
“Aha ae nei o’u mahina i waiho ai maluna o kahi moe, a o ka lima keia o ka mahina. He fiva . . . Hiki wawe ka owaka ana o ka waha me he uwila la ka hiki wawe, nolaila, ua lana ko’u manao ma o Iesu Kristo la; ka Haku hookahi no ia o na mea uhane ola a pau..”
Opunui, Iosepa [Joseph Opunui, “Mai Kalifonia mai [From California],” Ka Hōkū Loa, July 1, 1861, Ulukua: Hawaiian Electronic Library.
Missionary Herald, October 1849, 362 as quoted in Robert C. Schmitt and Eleanor C. Nordyke, Death in Hawai’i: The Epidemics of 1848-1849, The Hawaiian Journal of History, Vol. 35 (2001), 5.
Hunt to Baldwin, Oct 21, 1850. “Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845-1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed July 15, 2019.
Timothy Dwight Hunt to Bro. Clark, August 3, 1855. Hunt, Timothy Dwight - Missionary Letters - 1845- 1855 - to members of the mission,” Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, accessed April 13, 2019, https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/575.
“he mau Baibala, kauoha hou, himeni hoolea, himeni kamaliii, lira, haiao, hoikehonua, helunaau, helu kamalii” Lowell Smith [L. Kamika], “Ka Holo Ana O L. Kamika Mai Sacramenato I Coloma [The Travels of Lowell Smith from Sacramento to Coloma],” Ka Hae Hawaii, January 12, 1859, Papakilo Database
Malo is known to have translated books from the Bible so they could be published in the Hawaiian language. From about 1835 he started writing notes on the Hawaiian religion and cultural history. In 1853, he wrote and published Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Antiquities), considered the single most important description of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture. See Davida Malo, edited and translated by Charles Langlas and Jeffrey Lyon, with a new biographical essay by Noelani Arista, The Mo’olelo Hawai’i of Davida Malo Volume 2: Hawaiian Text and Translation, University of Hawai’i Press, May 2020.
“Ua ike au i ka lakou hana, o ka eli goula; a ua ike hoi au i kekahi poe haole a me na Pake, e eli ana i ke Aole loaa nui mai ia lakou ia. mau la, no ka uuku o ka wai. Elua dala kekahi, ekolu kekahi i ka la ; a he ole hoi kekahi” Lowell Smith [L. Kamika], “Ka Holo Ana O L. Kamika Mai Sacramenato I Coloma [The Travels of Lowell Smith from Sacramento to Coloma],” Ka Hae Hawaii, January 12, 1859, Papakilo Database
Helen Chapin, “Newspapers of Hawai’i 1834 to 1903: From “He Liona” to the Pacific Cable,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, 18 (1984): 47.
Lowell Smith [L. Kamika], “Ka Holo Ana O L. Kamika Mai Sacramenato I Coloma [The Travels of Lowell Smith from Sacramento to Coloma],” Ka Hae Hawaii, January 12, 1859, Papakilo Database
“he wahine makaukau no ma ke olelo Hawaii, me he mea la ua hanau kupa ia oia ma Hawaii”
C. Aarona, “He Mau Palapala Mai Kaliponia Mai [Letters from California],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, June 21, 1862, Papakilo Database
“Elima paha mahina mamua aku nei, ua ala nui mai na kanaka palaka maanei, a ua haalele i na hana lealea o ke ao nei, a ua imi nui kekahi ma na mea e pono ai ko lakou uhane. A o Waiulili no kekahi, ua hele nui i na halawai, ua heluhelu pinepine i ka Palapala Hemolele, ua hapai pu me na wahine i ka hana ma na halawai; ua hoike no me ka minamina i kona pouli loa mamua, a me ka naaupo o kona mau makua; a ua pule no ia ma na halawai, a ma na wahi ike ole ia, i ke Akua mana ma ka Lani. Nui no kona makemake e kii aku i kona makuahine e hoi mai e noho pu me ia maanei, i hiki pono ke ao aku ia ia, ma na mea nui o ka uhane”
Kulika Kauka [Gulick, Dr..], “No ka Mai Puupuu Liilii, Ma Irish Creek Kaliponia” [Regarding Smallpox in Irish Creek, California], Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, July 5, 1862, Papakilo Database.
“Hoi no au ia ahiahi i ke kauhale malumalu o kanaka. Halawai nui makou ia po - a kakahiaka ae halawai hou; ahiahi ae la, halawai hou, a kuka loihi ma na mea e pono ai ko lakou mau uhane.Ua akaka lea ko lakou hemahema no ke Kahunapule ole, e noho pu, e kiai, a e alakai ia lakou.Ua lako no lakou i na Baibala, a me na Himeni a me na Lira. Ua akamai i ka heluhelu ana, a me ka himeni ana. . . Hookahi wahine ilikini kai noi mai i Baibala Hawaii”
L. Kamika [Lowell Smith,], “Mai a L. Kamika mai. [Koena o kela pule.] [From L. Kamika [Rest of that Week],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, July 7, 1866, Papakilo Database.
“Mare. Ua mare au i kekahi kanaka me ka wahine Ilikini” “Meri Kupokoli, he Ilikini, ka wahine mare a Kaaiahua; o Maria, he Ilikini, ka wahine mare a Makuahine,”
L. Kamika [Lowell Smith,], “Mai a L. Kamika mai. [Koena o kela pule.] [From L. Kamika [Rest of that Week],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, July 7, 1866, Papakilo Database.
Kulika Opio [Gulick, The Younger], “No Waiulili—(Babling Waters.) He Wahine Ilikini No Kaliponia,” [Waiulili (Babling Waters), An Indian Woman of California], Gulick, Theodore W., July 12, 1862, Papakilo Database; Gulick, Kulika Opio [Gulick, The Younger], “No Na Kanaka Hawaii Ma Kaliponia [About Hawaiians in California],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, July 26, 1862, Papakilo Database.
Chang, The World and All the Things upon It, Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, 169-171.
Rufus Anderson, History of the Sandwich Islands Mission (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1870), 287; John P. Erdman, "A Brief Historical Sketch of the Hawaiian Board of Mission," in The Centennial Book, 77; Norman Meller, “Missionaries to Hawai’i: Shapers of the Island’s Government,” Western Political Quarterly 11, no. 4 (December 1958): 795, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/106591295801100403. For 1854 changes as well as the 1863 constitution, see Minutes of the Meetings of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, 1854 (Honolulu: Mission Press, 1854), 4; Minutes of the Meetings of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, 1863 (Honolulu: Henry M. Whitney, 1863), 37.
Meller, “Missionaries to Hawai’i,” 795.
For more on the evangelical activities of Native Hawaiian missionaries on the Islands and Hawaiian Congregational evangelism in Oceania see Cook, Return to Kahiki, Hawaiians in Oceania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
“He Malihini E Ao Ana E Lilo I Kahunapala [A Foreigner Learning to Become a Pastor],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, July 7, 1866, Papakilo Database; Pokue, J.F. [Pogue, J.F.], “No na mea i ike maka ai ma Kaleponi - Ioane Makani [Eyewitness Observations from California – John Makani],”, Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, September 19, 1868, Papakilo Database.
"He imi Ikaika loa kona e hoi a e hai aku I kona hanauna ponoi i ke ola ma o Kristo la. A he wahi manao lana ko makou nona, e launa pono aku aoia me na kanaka Hawaii ma Kaleponia. Ua haawi aku makou iaia he mau palapala i na makamak hoahanau malaila, a ua noi aku makou ia Rev. E. T. Kela (Taylor) e kokua iki aku iaia no kakou, i mea e hiki ai iaia e malama pono iaia iho … Ke mahalo nei makou i ke ake nui ana o keia malihini e ike i ka oihana kahunapale, a me he mea la aole paha o ole kona hoi aku a ao aku i kona Lahui ilikini e noho hihiu mai la i na ululaau o Amerika”
"He Malihini E Ao Ana E Lilo I Kahunapale [A Foreigner Learning to Become a Pastor,]” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, July 7, 1866, Papakilo Database.
Makani, Ioane, “He palapala mai Kaleponi mai [A message from California),” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, August 10, 1867, Papakilo Database.
“Kararameka” is assumed to be the town of “Sacramento” based on another article published in the Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a dated November 9, 1876, in which the town of “Kakarameka” is mentioned as the starting point of construction (in 1863) of the “alanui hao “ (iron road), rising up to 6,261 feet above sea level along the Sierra Nevada ridge, no doubt a description of the First Continental Railroad, originally known as the “Pacific Railroad.” See “Ke Alanui Hao O Ka Pakipika [The Iron Road of the Pacific]”, Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a , November 9, 1867. Ulukua Database.
“o lakou aahu kapa, a ua kue nuiia e na ilikeokeo ma ka’u nana aku ia lakou”
Makani, Ioane, “He palapala mai Kalepni mai [A message from California],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, August 10, 1867, Papakilo Database.
The town of Vernon/Verona, located just south of the junction of the Feather and Sacramento Rivers and roughly eighteen miles to the north of Sacramento, was originally established as a trading center in 1849 for miners of the Feather and Yuba Rivers. It was an agricultural/fishing colony by the time of Makani’s visit. See Charles Kenn, “Sutter’s Hawaiians,” The Saturday Star Bulletin, February 17, 1956, Ulukua Hawaiian Electronic Library and Charles Kenn; “Charles W. Kenn, “Descendants of Captain Sutter’s Kanakas,” Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Conference of California Historical Societies, ed. Richard Coke Wood (Sonora, Calif., Mother Lode Press: 1956), 87-101; Charles W. Kenn, “Sutter’s Canacas,” Sutter County Historical Society News Bulletin 1, no. 5 (1956): 3-5.
“Ua kipa mai o Ioane Makani Ilikini, ma ko makou nei wahi i ka la 27 o Sepatemaba nei, oia hoi ka Poalima, malaila no oia me makou a hiki i ka la Sabati. Ua halawai pu makou me ia ma ka halawai pule ana ia la a po, a ua weheweh mai oia i na mea o ke aupuni lani imua o makou ewalu, ekolu kane, elua wahine, a ekolu kaikamahine, a ua ku iho la makou i ka pa o Homa na kanaka Hawaii, i ka lohe ana aku i ka Punawai o ke Ola e o-la mai ana mai loko mai o ka malihini, a kupa hoi o keia aina, a o makou hoi o ka poe ua hele a piha, a hu, a helelei wale aku ka lohe ana i ka pono o ke Akua Kahikolu, oia noho wale iho la no, a he kaumaha no hoi ka naau. A i ka hapalua o ka la pule hele aku la oia e halawai me na kamaaina Ilikini o keia aina.”
Kapu, John, “No Ioane Makani Ilikini [About John Makani, An Indian],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, November 2,1867, Papakilo Database.
“lohe iho la au, he mau kanaka Hawaii ke noho ana ma ia kauhale, a he kula hoi kekahi e kokoke mai ana malaila no na Ilikini moe lua; a i kuu ninau ana, hai ia maila au, no Ioane Makane ia Kula, ka Ilikini i hoonaauaoia ma na Mokupuni o Hawaii, a i hoouna ia mai hoi ianei e ka Papa Hawaii, i kumuao i kona Lahui kanaka maanei. I ka loaa ana ia’u o kekahi keiki Ilikini nana wau i alakai aku i ka hale o ua o Ioane Makani Loaa aku oia ia’u ma ka waena e kanu ana he mau ipu-pu. Mawaho aku hoi o kona pa, he mau puulu wahine e hoomakaukau ana i na hua laau oka no ko lakou aina ahiahi. He nui no ko Makani mau kula ma kekahi mau wahi e ae; a halawai pu me na Ilikini, aka. hai mai la oia ia'u i ko lakou paakiki loa. Elua a ekolu paha ana mau mea i manaolana ai he mau Karistiano, aka, aohe nae he ae e komo i ka hoahanau.”
Pogue, J.F. “Na kanaka Hawaii ma Kaliponia.- [Mai ka Leta mai a Rev. J.F. Pogne] [The Hawaiians in California – [A Letter from Reverend J. F. Pogue]],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, August 8, 1868.
“Ioane i kukulu ae i wahi hale laau malaila; elua ona mau keena, he kena kula kekahi, a he keena moe kekahi. Aia ma ia keena kula he wahi papa eleele, a me na mea e ae e kokua ana i kona ao ana'u i kona mau haumana. Aole he nui na haumana a Ioane, no ka mea, o keia poe Inikini he poe hawawa, kuewa wale, makemake ole i ka ike, a inu rama a ona. He umi haumana i kekahi manawa, he eono i kekahi a he ole paha i kekahi. Aole o lakou buke ia ka lakou olelo; aole hui he mea e ae e naauao wawe ai lakou. Ma ka olelo haole i ao ia'ku ai lakou. Na Ioane nae i hai aku i ka Euanelio ma ka lakou olelo ponoi, manao iho la o Makani elua a ekolu paha o lakou i apo i ka olelo a ke Akua, a i manaoio aku ia Iesu Kristo. Aole nae i hookomoia ma kekahi o lakou i ka ekalesia. Ua kamailio pu makou me kekahi poe kanaka Hawaii no Ioane Makani, a olelo mai ia lakou, he kanaka oluolu a maikai ia, a ikaika hoi i ka hana.”
Pokue, J.F. [Pogue, J.F.], “No na mea i ike maka ai ma Kaleponi - Ioane Makani [Eyewitness Observations in California – John Makani],” Ka Nūpepa Kū‘oko‘a, September 19, 1868, Papakilo Database.