Playing with Fire: Volcanoes, Voyages, and the Environmental Impact of White Missionary Children in the Pacific during the Nineteenth Century

This paper will explore the ways in which white missionary children, born in the Hawaiian Islands during the 19^th century, were viewed by their parents as agents of trade and purveyors of culture between the United States and Hawaiian Kingdom.  Their childhoods—isolated by parental design—became the playing ground for a new generation of Hawaiian subjects, whom many in the United States and Hawaiian Islands believed represented the future of the kingdom.  Building upon recent scholarship, such as Edward Melillo’s “First Green Revolution” (AHR, 2012), Kariann Yokota’s Unbecoming British (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Kerri Inglis’ Mai Lepera (University of Hawaii, Press, 2013), “Playing with Fire” demonstrates how commodities, diseases, and land appropriations in the Hawaiian Islands impacted both the Hawaiian kingdom and United States, as well as reveals how missionary children involved themselves in such revolutionary commerce.  Despite parental efforts to remove their children from indigenous Hawaiian culture and politics, missionary children often appropriated their childhoods for themselves, leaving an environmental footprint visible across the Pacific world.