may have been memorialized in its name: as molo means gathering or braiding together, and kai means ocean waters.1 (The use of the glottal stop, Moloka‘i, is likely a modern mistake, possibly the invention of singers catering to tourists in Honolulu in the 1930s tailoring syllables to rhyme in their verses.)2 Molokai is in the middle; to go anywhere between the islands of Hawai‘i, Maui, Lana‘i, Kaho‘olawe, and O‘ahu, one must pass Molokai.3 With its several verdant farming valleys and a long shoreline studded with rich fish ponds during the precontact Polynesian period, the island was an opportunity for more powerful outsiders to come conquer and exploit. Hawaiian armies up to King Kamehameha’s in the early nineteenth century had little choice but to stop and fight over the island, often laying it to waste, en route to larger battles elsewhere. After the violence was suppressed, Molokai remained a lure to outsiders looking for land and wealth, who were always more powerful than the few dispersed inhabitants.
Molokai is an outer island in between, the near far away, an other place just next door; a place marginal to the main events of history and yet never entirely apart from them, transformed by them and yet filtering their impacts through its own conditions and structures. And, it is the contention of this study that this is not a defect from the point of view of writing history. Indeed, Molokai’s marginality, relative to its larger neighbors and to the larger outside world, gives it a focused explanatory power, like a small lens that refracts and reflects back bigger processes and wider histories with which it has intersected, thereby illuminating them in invaluable ways. Because it is more isolated and simplified in comparison to larger, more central places, certain processes are more visible, their outlines less blurred by complexity. To understand the history of this marginal place is to go a long way toward understanding the history of Hawai‘i, the United States, the Pacific, and the world.
One reason I chose Molokai to study is because it is a small, marginal, unimportant place within a somewhat larger, somewhat more consequential place, Hawai‘i—itself at the center of the world’s largest ocean and so a critical junction of Pacific and world history during the past two and a half globalizing centuries, as well as an active frontier of American expansion. Like a doormat, it has been at the center of a lot of action, and like a doormat, it has been really beaten up. And you can see the scuff marks pretty clearly; the island is just lying there open to view, essentially untouched by the modern development that has buried so many of the traces of history on the larger islands beneath hotels, subdivisions, and parking lots. But it is important not to focus exclusively on the island’s negative markers. It is also a place of remarkable endurance, resistance, and cultural resilience. Molokai people gained their reputation for sorcery through a millennium of resistance to powerful outside forces. They were celebrated for fierce independence from the demands of higher-status outsiders in a society rigidly ordered by caste and for an ethos that we might think of in modern terms as nature-centered and communitarian. Since the coming of the rest of the world to the Hawaiian Islands over the last two and a half centuries, Molokai almost alone has maintained many of the values and ways of the old Hawaiians, from the ‘ohana extended family, rooted in the soil of a small valley, to traditional forms of farming and fishing that help sustain a community-based lifestyle that has mostly vanished elsewhere. This is true in large part because the island has been, on the whole, a place of economic stagnation and persistent business and administrative failures. In ancient and modern Hawai‘i equally, Molokai was and is thought of as a land of regret for its failures and of longing for what it has preserved.
Molokai as a case study has many advantages from a historian’s point of view. It has a well-developed archaeological record, well spread over the island’s breadth, including a trove of groundbreaking work on one of the earliest and longest continuously inhabited Polynesian settlements, at Hālawa Valley. Historical traces are very visible on the island because there has been very little modern agricultural or urban development compared with the other Hawaiian islands. Because it has been marginal to the political and economic development of Hawai‘i in the postcontact period, there has been a retardation of historical effects: what may have happened on O‘ahu in the early nineteenth century might have happened on Molokai in the late nineteenth or even early twentieth, making such events easier for historical methods to see.
As a place near but peripheral to the center, O‘ahu, Molokai is a better theater in which to view environmental and economic history than political, diplomatic, or military history or the social history of the elites in Hawai‘i. Because of this—and the fact that these last subjects have been extensively worked over by other historians—this study takes as its focus the nexus between environment and society. It looks at how the land and ecosystems have changed over time with human intervention and at how social structures; land tenure; market conditions; definitions of common resources; and technologies such as irrigation, aquaculture, and new crops, including genetically modified organisms in the twenty-first century, have changed over time and have in turn affected the land. It looks for patterns, relationships, sequences of causation, cascade effects, and scale effects—especially spatial ones—in order to understand how these factors have worked on and with one another and how they have shaped the history of communities in Molokai.
Molokai’s exceptionalism has much to do with scale—but not in a straightforward or one-dimensional way. It is comparatively small and so is at a comparative disadvantage in population and resources to other islands. But scale does not work in a simple way: in many ways, the island is large. There are the obvious physical ways: it has the tallest sea cliffs in the world, up to three thousand feet, the longest fringing reef in the Hawaiian Islands, and once had the largest fishpond aquaculture complex in the Polynesian Pacific. And there are other, less obvious ways that have to do with the local, perceived relationships between people and things, which we will explore in this study. Molokai has a bit of everything, such as a representative mix of climates and terrains, as has been noted. It has a thoroughly mixed population, with the largest per capita percentage of native Hawaiians in the state cohabiting with transplanted Europeans and mainland Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and many others. Economically, it has supported at one time or another all of the components of Hawai‘i’s history: fishing, irrigated farming, dryland farming, fishpond aquaculture, ranching, sugar, coffee, pineapple, diversified fruit and vegetables, light manufacturing, and tourism. It has had irrigation both on a small scale, supporting traditional Hawaiian farms, and on a large scale, watering thousands of acres of industrial plantations. It has had (and continues to have) both a subsistence economy of small farms and homesteads and a huge, outside-capitalized export agribusiness sector employing cheap immigrant labor. Both have been materially aided by significant state and federal interventions, and both have coexisted on one island—though each mostly has had to itself one very different half of it.
The distribution of these features has largely been imposed by environmental variation: wet versus dry, level versus steep, rocky versus fertile. The environment is critical to everything in Molokai, both as constraint and as opportunity: some places are “thick” with natural resources, making them potentially prosperous and so coveted by outsiders; some are resource “thin” and so impoverished and ignored. Water, in abundance or scarcity, has from the beginning of settlement there fundamentally structured human social and economic possibilities and thus how people have restructured the natural environment to suit their aims. Hawai‘i is shaped by a fundamental wet/dry dichotomy, due to the permanent trade winds that produce rainfall on the windward sides of each island and arid rain shadows on the leeward sides. Some of the wettest places on Earth are just a few miles as the crow flies from extremely dry places; this situation is common on all of the large islands, and even on the smallest, precipitation, or the lack of it, is a basic environmental fact. Unavoidably, in Hawai‘i, water is the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural worlds, of the landscape and the social body that lives on it, and of their intersections. Water orders and differentiates production, reproduction, politics, and religion as well as their disorders in the forms of drought, erosion, warfare, and conquest—and in between these extremes, the thread of Hawaiian history unspools.
This is a long-range study, of a very long durée, from the antecedents of the arrival of Polynesians in Molokai around the year
