Kanaka: The Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

Kanaka tells the fascinating story of complex ethnic interaction on the
Pacific coast, from California to Alaska. Its focus is on the first
generation of Hawaiians (known as Kanakas) who came to North America;
they arrived between the 1830s and the 1860s, almost all of them via the
Hudson’s Bay Company, which recruited laborers in Hawaii on journeys
between China and the Pacific Northwest. Although the HBC was required
to provide return passage for these “servants” (as the Company’s
lowest-paid employees were officially designated), many chose to remain
in British Columbia.

Koppel integrates the story of the Hawaiian presence with an account of
the complex economic, political, and social relations in the
19th-century Pacific Northwest. He also documents Kanaka participation
in the California gold rush. Like many other HBC employees, Kanaka males
often married women from local First Nations peoples. Koppel explores to
some extent the questions of identity raised by such marriages within
the families they generated, but the reader is left hungry for more
detail. At any rate, the original Kanaka settlers have left not only a
legacy of place names through the Pacific Northwest but also a vigorous
lineage within the ethnic mix of contemporary British Columbia.