W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects Fall 2016 “Sugary Mixed-Plate”: Landscape of Power and Separation on 20Th-Century Hawaiian Sugar Plantations Joshua Timsing Maka'ala Gastilo College of William and Mary, jtgastilo@email.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/etd Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Gastilo, Joshua Timsing Maka'ala, "“Sugary Mixed-Plate”: Landscape of Power and Separation on 20Th- Century Hawaiian Sugar Plantations" (2016). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects.21220/S2J01D This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@wm.
“Sugary Mixed-Plate”: Landscape of Power and Separation on 20th century Hawaiian Sugar Plantations Joshua Timsing Maka ʻala Gastilo Hilo, Hawaiʻi Bachelor of Arts, Linfield College, 2008 Bachelor of Arts, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, 2013 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of Anthropology The College of William and Mary August, 2016 © Copyright by Joshua Timsing Maka ʻala Gastilo 2016 ABSTRACT PAGE Archaeology in the Hawaiian Islands predominantly focuses on pre-contact and immediate post- contact contexts, while largely ignoring post-1870 phenomena. The scarcity of studies examining these settings points out the rich opportunities for investigating dynamics that influenced Hawaiian sugar plantation laborer perceptions of power, authority, and class relations on 20th century Hawaiian plantations. Part of the Hawaiian sugar planters’ strategy to dominate the political governance of Hawaiʻi and the social dynamics of the plantations was the establishment of racial hierarchies. Planters reinforced such hierarchies by promoting divisions and segregation and by establishing places of power in the form of managers’ and luna (overseers) residences.
These physical structures served as materializations of planter control reinforcing planter hegemony. This paper analyzes spatial and documentary data from the Pacific Sugar Mill, the Honokaʻa Sugar Company and the Onomea Sugar Company plantations on Hawaiʻi Island using a Marxist lens. Another theory that is employed to explore how planter hegemony materialized on the sugar plantation landscape of Hawaiʻi is Foucault’s notion of the “panopticon.” I expected to find structures of power in locations supporting the surveillance of laborer camps. However, my analysis suggests that Hawaiian sugar management strategies opposed this expectation.
Viewshed analyses indicate that managers and luna had limited surveillance capabilities from their homes, thus contradicting the possibility that an overt direct visual surveillance was an active management strategy. These findings also suggest that laborer camps located closer to structures associated with plantation management were under more direct surveillance than more isolated camps based on their position within the racial hierarchy. Additionally, this investigation indicates that the surveilled areas enjoyed more access to facilities located in the core of the plantation such as stores, schools, and hospitals. Ultimately this analysis of three 20th century sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi highlights the materialization of planter hegemony on the landscape by underscoring the relation between spatial and social distance in the context of racial hierarchies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Dedications iv List of Tables v List of Figures vi Introduction 1 Theoretical Perspective 5 Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Occupational Structure and Social Dynamics 12 Previous Research 17 19th and 20th century Hawaiian Political and Economic History 24 Environment 28 Pacific Sugar Mill, Honokaʻa Sugar Company, and Onomea Sugar Company Contexts 30 Pacific Sugar Mill History 30 Honokaʻa Sugar Company History 31 Onomea Sugar Company History 32 Hawaiian Sugar Industry Labor 34 Viewshed Analysis 38 Results 40 Pacific Sugar Mill Plantation Analysis Results 40 Honokaʻa Sugar Company Plantation Analysis Results 48 Onomea Sugar Company Plantation Analysis Results 53 Discussion 58 i Conclusion 61 References Cited 63 Appendix A. Data Tables 68 Appendix B. Plantation Maps 71 Glossary of Hawaiian Terms 78 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my most sincere thanks to my committee members for their support and encouragement: Dr. Jennifer Kahn; my committee chair; Dr.
Jonathan Glasser; and Dr. They have been instrumental to the development and completion of my work and I sincerely appreciate their guidance. I would also like to thank Dr. Neil Norman for his support, mentoring, informative feedback, as well as his encouragement to think about my work from numerous perspectives.
This work also would not have been possible without the help of Ed Olson and John Cross of the Olson trust, Dr. Momi Naughton of the North Hawaii Education and Research Center, as well as Dore Minatodani and Jodie Mattos of the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association archives of the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa. Each person has contributed significantly to this work by helping me engage with the archival material necessary to complete this project. Last but not least I also wish to thank the Cohort of 2015 in particular Madeline Gunter, Alexis Ohman, and Elizabeth Scholz who have supported my personal and professional growth by providing me with feedback, guidance and invaluable friendship throughout the development of this project.
iii This Master’s thesis is dedicated to my family who has never ceased to support my work as well as all those who were plantation workers or are descended from plantation workers in Hawaiʻi. iv LIST OF TABLES 1. Peak immigration dates and countries of origin of Hawaiian sugar industry laborers 35 2. Proximate Calculated distances between Laborer camps, facilities, and plantation management structures on the PSM plantation 68 3.
Proximate Calculated distances between Laborer camps, facilities, and plantation management structures on the HSC plantation 69 4. Proximate Calculated distances between Laborer camps, facilities, and plantation management structures on the OSC plantation. 70 v LIST OF FIGURES 1. Map of general locations of the PSM, HSC, and OSC plantations on the island of Hawaiʻi 3 2.
Census of wages of plantation laborers based on perceived racial groups for the PSM 36 3. Hawaiian Sugar Planter’s Association racial categorization of plantation workers 37 4. Viewshed analyses of the manager’s and head luna houses as well as the sugar mill at the PSM 41 5. Distribution of laborer camps on the PSM landscape 44 6.
PSM Overseer wage data 47 7. Viewshed analysis results for the manager’s house, head luna house, and mill on the HSC plantation 49 8. Distribution of laborer camps on the HSC landscape 51 9. Viewshed analyses of the manager’s house and the sugar mill of the OSC plantation 54 10.
Distribution of laborer camps on the OSC landscape 55 vi Introduction The “mixed-plate” or “plate lunch” serves as an analogy for contemporary Hawaiʻi’s social and cultural landscape. These dishes are usually comprised of two scoops of rice, macaroni salad, and multiple entrees such as Hawaiian kalua pig, Japanese chicken katsu, Korean kim chee, Chinese fried rice, and many other possibilities and combinations. It is this analogy—the mixture of ethnic components— that quite accurately describes the Hawaiian archipelago’s multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society. The title of this paper alludes to the mechanism that brought these diverse cultures and ethnicities together in Hawaiʻi: the sugar industry.
Since Western contact in 1778, the Hawaiian archipelago has been impacted by various socio-political and economic dynamics coming partly from the outside. However, the Hawaiian sugar industry was largely responsible for facilitating the introduction of a concentrated population of varied origins. Throughout the efflorescence of the Hawaiian sugar industry, early white sugar planters in Hawaiʻi promoted racial hierarchies in an attempt to control the social, political, and economic order in Hawaiʻi. This hegemony materialized in numerous ways, such as limiting the occupational mobility of certain people based on racist ideologies and differentiating pay grades depending on the worker’s position in the racial hierarchies (MacLennan 2014; Merry 2000; Takaki 1983).1 Planter hegemony also materialized in more overt ways on the landscape.
This phenomenon has been of growing interest to archaeologists such as James Delle (2014), whose work in Jamaica investigated the development of the coffee and sugar industries in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, this approach has not been applied to the Hawaiian Islands. The scarcity of historical archaeology focused on Hawaiian sugar plantation contexts offers 1 Racial hierarchies in Hawaii were not fixed and shifted over time in relation to planters’ political and social ideologies. 1 an opportunity to apply the theories and methods of other regions to the rich history of Hawaiʻi.
This study analyzes Hawaiian sugar plantations in order to contribute to the understanding of the role Hawaiian sugar plantations played in structuring laborer life, and the forms of discrimination that materialized out of laborer camp distribution from a spatio-temporal perspective. Specifically, I explore how racist planter ideology and hegemony materialized on the early 20th century Hawaiian sugar plantations of the Pacific Sugar Mill (PSM), the Honokaʻa Sugar Company (HSC), and the Onomea Sugar Company (OSC) on the Island of Hawaiʻi (See Appendix B. The PSM, HSC, and OSC plantations were selected to provide a regional comparison between plantations of the Hamakua and northern Hilo districts of Hawaiʻi. Moreover, I chose these three plantations because of their spatial proximity to one another.
The PSM abutted the HSC plantation, and later would become a branch of the HSC. In contrast, the OSC plantation is much further from either of these plantations and was owned by a different company. Aside from providing a regional focus, these three plantations were chosen to offer an opportunity to investigate differences in the materializations of social and racial discrimination dependent on different company policies. I utilize historical evidence in the form of aerial photographs, maps and historical documents to analyze the spatial and temporal trends of planters shaping the social and physical landscapes on Hawaiian plantations.
The temporal context of this study highlights three plantations between 1908 and the late 1940s and analyzes the spatial distribution of their laborer camps in relation to places of power, such as managers’ and luna (overseer) houses, and communal facilities such as schools, hospitals, and stores. Through these analyses, I seek to answer three questions: 1) How did planters materialize social separation on Hawaiian sugar plantation landscapes, 2) were laborer camps subject to strategies of surveillance, and 3) is there spatial evidence of shared 2 ideologies concerning patterns of ethnic segregation on plantations by plantation management? Figure 1. Map of general locations of the PSM, HSC, and OSC plantations on the island of Hawaiʻi I begin with a brief review of the archaeological, ethnographic, historical, and sociological research of Hawaiian sugar plantations and how my current study contributes to the understanding of the socio-political and economic dynamics that manifested in these contexts spatially and temporally. I then discuss the environmental setting of the Hawaiian archipelago and the history of the Hawaiian sugar industry to place the study in a local context.
More broadly, I provide an understanding of the historical developments that led to the rise of the Hawaiian sugar industry in the 19th 3 century, as well as the economic contexts in which immigrant groups were recruited and the landscapes planters attempted to shape for their own gain. Following these reviews, I discuss methodology as well as the results of the spatial and temporal analyses and synthesize them into a cohesive interpretation of how early to mid-20th century planters in Hawaiʻi transformed the landscapes for their own gain and socio-political control of the laborer population. I conclude with a discussion of the results in the context of future archaeological work in the Hawaiian Islands focused on sugar plantations. 4 Theoretical Perspective My investigation of Hawaiian sugar plantations is grounded in a theoretical framework that examines power and its various manifestations on the landscape.
To effectively examine these contexts, I utilize a Marxist perspective to analyze the spatio- temporal relationships between plantation laborer camps, managers’ and luna homes, and plantation facilities. As I will argue, socio-political and economic hierarchies based on perceptions of race materialized on the Hawaiian landscape throughout the sugar industry’s history.