Native Hawaiian Missionaries, Indigenous Explorers of the Pacific

Western societies have mistakenly presumed that exploration is one of the defining characteristics of “civilization” and that it marks them as being superior to those they “discover.” However, this perspective obscures the fact that indigenous peoples engaged in exploration for their own reasons. During the second half of the nineteenth century, thirty-eight Native Hawaiians went abroad – sometimes for decades – to establish Protestant missions throughout the Pacific, often on islands and among indigenous communities that white missionaries deemed as too dangerous. Drawing from letters and reports written home, newspaper articles they wrote while abroad, and records left by others who tracked their mission work, this paper will examine the experiences of several Native Hawaiian missionaries in the Marquesas, Marshall, Gilbert, and Caroline Islands. These sources demonstrate the ways these missionaries acted as explorers by documenting discoveries in places new to their people. Rather than simply illustrating yet another example of indigenous agency, this paper seeks to understand these actors in their historical specificity and on their terms. The ways the indigenous missionaries viewed new spaces and other Native peoples suggests that their perspectives reflected and influenced the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s sense of political place amid other nations in the late nineteenth century.