ABSTRACT - lsil2017.files.wordpress.com · Web viewin the Hawaiian language. By inquiring into...

Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour

Linking the Past with the FutureConference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora

and Identity Formation.June 18th – 23th, 2018 , Paramaribo, Suriname

Org. IGSR& Faculty of Humanities and IMWO, in collaboration with Nat. Arch. Sur.

The research for this article was conducted via a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No. AdG 695573

INDENTURED EDUCATION:PORTUGUESE CHILDREN AND SCHOOLING POLICY

IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CARIBBEAN AND HAWAI‘I

Panel 37. Identity Formation and Circuits of Mobility in the Age of Post-Slavery Indenture

Nicholas B. MillerInstitute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon

NOTE: As this is a draft paper please DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE without the express

prior permission of the author.

ABSTRACT

Through the prism of educational policy, this paper compares the policies and experiences of Portuguese islander indenture in the British Caribbean and Hawai‘i. Due to the particular racialization of the Portuguese as occupying a liminal status of whiteness, governments in both sites held a disproportionate concern with educating the children of Portuguese labourers. This paper will first access the extent to which Portuguese children had privileged access relative to other ethnic groups to education in British Guiana, where no universal education policy was established until the twentieth century. The paper will then examine the integration of Portuguese children at the pre-existing universal educational system in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, which prior to the arrival of Portuguese children was mainly conducted in the Hawaiian language. By inquiring into the ways in which Portuguese children were

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N.B. Miller, “Indentured Education”

DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE without the express prior permission of the author.

viewed by colonial regimes as particularly “valuable” contributions to plantation populations, this paper will outline future directions for the transnational analysis of nineteenth-century indentured labour and the comparative analysis of differential racialization processes in nineteenth-century plantation contexts.

INTRODUCTION

Over the course of the nineteenth century, more than sixty thousand Portuguese men, women and children voyaged via contracts of indenture to labour upon plantations across the Caribbean, and, from 1878 onwards, Hawai‘i. While a relatively small fraction of the some two million individuals that undertook intercontinental migration via contracts of indenture in the century after 1830, these Portuguese migrants were significant in constituting the only European cohort numbering beyond a few thousand to experience indenture during the century (for a rough guide see Northrup 1995, 156-157, though do note that Northrup significantly undercounts Portuguese contract migration to Hawai‘i by not including post-annexation numbers). Unlike in the eighteenth century, when hundreds of thousands of British, French and Irish persons came to the Caribbean as indentured labourers, the colour and memory of indentured experience during the nineteenth century grew distinctly browner. Indeed, the narrative that Madeiran, Azorean, and on a smaller scale, continental Portuguese labour migrants were “imported” by white elites in both the Caribbean and Hawai‘i in order to “bolster white supremacy” holds generally true for both sites. Yet we may here set out the stakes of comparing these two very distant sites through two initial observations as to the local particularities of this general process. For the Caribbean, we might see the colonial instrumentality of the Portuguese as lying in their perceived potential to act as a high middling though still subservient group in racially stratified systems of local power topped by resident European elites. In Hawai‘i, which would not become a conventional colony until US annexation following a series of white-dominated coups d’etat in the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Portuguese offered a unique promise for a putatively sovereign Kingdom that from 1830 onwards governed under the influence of various blends of the imperial discursive cocktail of the civilizing mission, Christianity and indigenous uplift. There, resident whites and Native Hawaiian elites celebrated the Portuguese for their racially ambiguous capacity to assimilate with either community, and fundamentally, constituting a Christian alternative to Chinese or Japanese labourers.

Despite the similarities of geographic, class and kin origins of nineteenth-century Portuguese contract labourers to the Caribbean and Hawai‘i, scholars have rarely attempted to compare the legal mechanisms through which their mobility was channelled, and the similar instrumentality of their migration within racially stratified systems of sugar plantation production and colonial society. When this has been attempted, it has been mainly by generalists lacking an expertise in either context (for example, Newitt 2015, 169-180, 196-197, 201-203). Together with the work of Cristiana Bastos, PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project The Colour of Labour, and associated expert Brackette Williams, this paper

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constitutes a preliminary endeavour to test the utility of comparing Portuguese experiences in Hawai‘i and the Caribbean, and the extent to which this may shed new light upon the processes of collective identity formation, circuits of labour mobility, and racialization in the nineteenth century world of indenture. Here, I offer a pilot testing of the commensurability (or not) of the social historical experience and racialized institutional instrumentality of these various Portuguese communities through the vantage point of primary education.

The paper as presently submitted is still at an early stage, written prior to a first round of primary research in the Caribbean to be conducted at the National Archives of Guyana, Georgetown immediately before the upcoming workshop and panel in Suriname. I underline that all conclusions are provisional. For this reason, all leads, recommendations and suggestions are most highly welcomed. Information relating to Caribbean contexts below has been taken mainly from a synthesis of existing secondary material, along with digitized primary material accessible via various online channels, and is admittedly incomplete. The discussion of Hawai‘i is the product of approximately two years’ worth of archival work and reflection that I have conducted over the past two years as part of a monograph project on the local and international politics of indentured labour migration to Hawai‘i. At this conference, I hope to gain new perspectives on how to place Hawai‘i within the wider global story of indentured immigration during the nineteenth century. It is my hope that my Hawai‘i specialization may likewise provoke reflection by those far better placed to recount Caribbean history than me about the challenges and opportunities for an interstitial comparison of nineteenth-century indentured experiences.

At the initiation of flows of indentured Portuguese islanders to the Caribbean and Hawai‘i, a fundamental difference between the two sites in terms of primary education existed. Whilst a system of universal education had been established in Hawai‘i from the early nineteenth century, this would wait until the twentieth century for the British Caribbean (King 1999, 13-22). This not only meant that the typical experience of Portuguese migrant children in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i was more likely to include some hours in a basic schoolhouse, but also resulted in differential instrumentalizations by political and economic elites of Portuguese migrant children. The accommodation of large waves of Portuguese children into a universal primary schooling system in Hawai‘i established initially for Native Hawaiians coincided with a shift in the main language of instruction from Hawaiian to English. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, the effective racial segregation of the closest thing (temporarily) approximating mass education—the Emancipation Schools established for the descendants of recently free slaves—along with the much-maligned maintenance of inter-confessional rivalry in the provision of education, led to a patchwork system of inconsistent quality and insufficient coverage that was decried throughout the century as exacerbating racial divisions and inhibiting the development of a common local culture.

One of the most compelling similarities borne from comparing the Portuguese in British Guiana and Hawai‘i is the socio-racial location of the communities in both sites during the nineteenth century and their later afterlives. In both contexts, the Portuguese were considered by both governing authorities and local populations as constituting a community apart from the “white” or “European”, a distinction that first became institutionalised via categories deployed in censuses and government departments after the initiation of mass

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contract labour waves from the Atlantic islands in the 1830s and 1870s respectively. Although in both contexts of relatively short duration even for individual adult Portuguese migrants, the historical connection with plantation labour definitively impacted processes of local acculturation as well as general social perception by other groups. In the twentieth century, the Portuguese in Hawai‘i were variously appraised as “local” (versus “haole”, the latter defined in terms of Anglo-Saxon inheritance, and as the century wore on, “mainlander” status), or, in a playful contradiction of the binary local/outsider distinction, “local haole” (though this status was/is also applied to Anglo-Saxon whites appraised as not conforming to the normal “haole” mould in terms of education, class or behaviour) (Rosa 2014; Rohrer 2010; Geschwender, Carroll-Seguin and Brill 1988, 515-527). Similarly, the Portuguese in most parts of the British Caribbean were viewed as a community apart from the Anglicised European class, enshrined for instance after Guyanese independence as one of the six constituent peoples of the new Guyanese nation, and a people apart from the “Europeans”. As late as 1961, Raymond Smith declared that the Portuguese “did not project the social image of the white group” (Smith 1961, 101). Below, I compare the non-integration of Caribbean schools with the inter-ethnic character of Hawai‘i public schools in the nineteenth century to suggest provisional conclusions concerning the local valences of the intergenerational cultivation of the Portuguese in both sites as a community at the boundary between the “European”/“white” and the “non-European”/“non-white”.

BRITISH GUIANA

The fundamental issue with educational provision throughout the nineteenth century in the British Caribbean lay at the intersection between rivalries of state-church power, inter-confessional rivalries, ideologies of racial and ethnic stratification and an imperial economic-political logic of tropical colonial primary production. Despite a flurry of special committees, parliamentary inquiries, and pubic discussion on the urgency of universal primary education in the British Caribbean throughout the nineteenth century, the landscape at century’s end remained one where access to education remained rigidly stratified along racial, class and gendered lines. In general terms, Portuguese immigrants and their descendants had underprivileged access to education relative to other Europeans, but enjoyed privileged access relative to non-European groups, particularly East Indians, for whom only scanty access to formal education existed during the century. Generally there was an expansion of state interest in the provision of colonial education over the course of the century, mainly via growing subventions to church organisations (King 1999, 13-22).

The foreground of issues between church and state control of education in the Caribbean were apparent prior to the arrival of large waves of indentured immigration, during the creation and completely insufficient financing of the Emancipation Schools in the 1833. The British government fell far short of delivering upon the “liberal amounts” promised for the “religious and moral education of the Negro population to be emancipated”, and underwired the religious order-dominated educational landscape of the British Caribbean by having four Protestant missionary societies carry out the establishment and administration of the emancipation schools (Kandasammy, 2005). The amounts apportioned for the education

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of an emancipated population of approximately 84,000 in British Guiana was merely £1,950 for 1835 and £2,145 in 1837 (roughly US$366,000 in 2015 dollars, or around US$4.36 per person per annum). Planters virulently rejected a colonial office proposal in 1836 to fund schools locally, and the expiration of the Negro Education Grant in 1845 led to the worsening of an already desperately insufficient system. An 1840 Education Commission carried out by John Wray (of the London Missionary Society) cited the major issues at local schools being poor attendance and flagrant abuses of child labour prohibitions by local planters. In 1841, the Commission judged that effective enrolment rates in primary schools at just over 40% (9,513 out of a total student age population of 21,172), with a doubling of schools (151 from 74) over the ten-year period prior (Kandasammy, 2005).

During the 1840s and 1850s, it became increasingly appraised by educationalists and school inspectors (often those coming temporarily from abroad) that the Church-dominated system was insufficient due to the growing interethnic character of British Guiana following the arrival of large groups of indentured Chinese, Madeirans and East Indians. The first estate school for the education of immigrant children was not established until 1861, and this was envisioned primarily for the education of East Indians. Over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, state control of schooling grew in fits and starts in competition with church authority. Advocacy for the creation of a system of secular government-funded schools frequently met the persistent disdain of Church leaders, such as in British Guiana following the 1875 Longden Commission on Education (Menzes 1992, 111). In 1887, Bishop Galton expressed discontent of rising secularism at the 11 Catholic elementary schools in British Guiana, which he judged almost entirely dependant upon government grants and staffed with instructors who were only nominal Catholics (Menzes 1992, 113-114). Yet despite the gradual increasing of central funding of education, the highly inter-confessional and fragmented character of its provision in the region would persist well into the twentieth century.

The diversity of language and religious groups caused by diverse flows of indentured immigration was cited as a political problem as early as the mid nineteenth century. In 1851, the British Guiana Commission on Education, appointed by George Dennis, first inspector of schools for British Guiana, decried as a serious detriment to local education and community life the lack of cohesion among the different races in the colony, exacerbated by the recent arrival of large contingents of Asian immigrants, whom he described as immersed in the “grossest paganism” (Bacchus 1994, 36). The recommendation of the commission was for the establishment of common schools for the children of all the various groups to attend, to be run by the state. This was totally opposed by religious bodies as well as white planter and commercial elites fearful of tax increases and upwardly mobile non-Europeans, and the Colonial Office overturned the recommendation (Bacchus 1994, 35-36). Various other commissions for other island contexts, particularly Trinidad, would recommend the same general policy mid-century to similarly no avail. I am very interested going forward in drawing out the discursive circulation of a perceived political necessity for integrated schools in the mid-nineteenth century, the parallels of which to Hawai‘i are highly interesting.

In face of the failure of repeated proposals for integrated state-run schools to become a reality in the mid-nineteenth century, the main reaction to the arrival of Portuguese children in British Guiana was to refract a spectrum of colour lines between various schools. For

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example, Friar Walker, a prominent Catholic educationalist, advocated during the 1850s and 1860s a stringent policy of ethnic separatism in Catholic schools and fought against English Jesuits who had hoped that Portuguese children would attend pre-existing Catholic schools (Menzes 1992, 109-110). This fed into a spirit of separatism of the like encouraged by Friar Schembri in 1861, who feared that co-education with settled Europeans would lead to a loss to the cohesiveness of the Portuguese community and a decline in Portuguese language abilities (BG/15, Fr. Walker to Fr. Provincial, 1861.11.06, f. 469, quoted in Menzes 1992, 110). This tendency towards ethnic division was apparent during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, which saw rise of social welfare provision through voluntary associations founded along ethnic structures, such as the foundation of a Portuguese Benevolent Society in 1875, one of whose main aims was the establishment of schools for members’ children (Menzes 1992, 109).

Whilst Madeirans in Guyana in the 1840s were celebrated by the planter press for being “imprudently laborious”, by the mid 1850s both Creoles and resident English merchants resented Portuguese control of small trades, foregrounding the anti-Portuguese riots of 1856. (Menzes 1992, 45 and 121). 1856 has been termed by Menzes as the end of the local “honeymoon” with the Portuguese, with the group subject to resent by Creoles for benefitting from racial preference by the white ruling class, whom themselves increasingly resented the “excessive” business success of Portuguese (Menzes 1992, 47). Walter Rodney contended that the Portuguese were “pampered” in their business ambitions by whites from the 1840s to 1870s, but by 1880 became open to attack from the planter class for exceeding their “proper” place (Rodney, 1981, 143). Scholarship on the education of Portuguese children and their descendants has tended to be marginalized, due in large part from being judged a community that was ultimately “numerically insignificant” (Bacchus 1994, 6). While certainly never of the size of the African, East Indian or Amerindian populations, this dismissal may be borne more from an ahistorical assimilation of contemporary demographic realities than to the historical particularities of colonial British Guiana. As I develop my research into this matter further, I am interested in using the education of Portuguese children as a bellwether of the complex story of exclusionary stratification as a device of colonial governance during the nineteenth century.

The 1860s witnessed increased interest among the Portuguese community for religious as well as secular education, in part because later, non-indentured migrants from Madeira and the Azores tended to be more literate than the original indentured labourer arrivals (Menzes 1992, 110). Friar Walker in 1861 claimed that the result of Portuguese children not being able to attend English-speaking Catholic schools was the existence of a lively trade in independent schools, with “many little schools for boys and girls up and down the town” (Menzes 1992, 111). A Portuguese Female School was opened in Brickdam under the tutelage of Miss C. D’Oliveira in 1862.

During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, an interest amongst the Portuguese community in heritage language acquisition became apparent, with for instance a Portuguese language school founded in 1888 (Daily Chronicle 1888.04.05). Yet, this movement coincided with a shift of certain members of the Portuguese communities to political positions in the 1890s, which placed an onus on the acquisition of English skills.

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(Menzes 1992, 63). Higher-level technical training channelled individual aspirational Portuguese through the veins of the British Empire, with a number of Portuguese-Guyanese going to Britain for training as doctors in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (Menzes 1992, 70). This coincided with the founding of a Portuguese College directed by E de M Brito Nobrega in the 1890s, whose goal was to produce local businessmen in “their own language” so as to replace the need for new inflows of merchants from Madeira to carry out the trans-Atlantic trade as linguistic intermediaries, yet the college had only a short life and its goals met via Portuguese language schools as the local Portuguese Catholic School (Menzes 1992, 113). Generally, it was clear at century’s end that the Portuguese community in British Guiana was becoming increasingly creolized, with Bishop Galton claiming in 1887 that “the rising generation and the majority of the younger Portuguese had lost the Portuguese language” (BG/20, Bishop Galton to Fr. Knight, 1887.11.11, ff. 721-22, quoted in Menzes 1992, 110). As would happen in Hawaii, the Portuguese community was becoming locally creolized whilst maintaining a reproduced distinction from membership within a narrow cohort of “Europeans”.

HAWAI‘I

In Hawai‘i, folk memory of a tight connection between Portuguese migrants and the introduction of English at islands schools still exists. For instance, local comedian Andy Bumatai, who indulges in the popular genre of interethnic comedy about the various communities of modern Hawai‘i, includes in his number on the Portuguese an imaginary discussion between haole (white Anglo-Saxon) sugar cane bosses and Portuguese heads of household en route to labour in Hawai‘i. The heads of household first demanded the right to bring their extremely large families, to which the planters happily assented. They then continued the negotiations:

Then the Portuguese people said—plus, we like you build schools for our kids. And the sugar cane owners said—OK, sure. As a result, the Portuguese is the first immigrants to Hawai‘i that had kids went school in Hawai‘i, and learned, mostly, in English. You know, because the sugar cane guys are all haole, eh?, and they like other people talk their language. (Bumatai 2015, “Pidgin 101 – Portuguese People”, YouTube video, transcribed in Hawaiian Pidgin/Hawaii‘i Creole English)

Recent academic literature on the topic has minimized this narrative, in part because it effaces the existence of a universal system of public education that, until the 1870s, was conducted mainly in the Hawaiian language. Sovereignty-focused historical accounts in particular have emphasized the formal banning of Hawaiian-language instruction at islands schools during the oligarchic Republic period (1893-98), which is perceived as having heralded the end of nominal Native Hawaiian governance in the aftermath of a series of white-led coups d’etat that eroded Native Hawaiian rule in the late 1880s and resulted in the overthrowing of Queen Liluokalani and monarchic rule in 1893. Yet, the transition to English-medium popular education in the islands began two decades before the downfall of the monarchy, at precisely

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the same time that Portuguese indentured labourers were first coming to the islands under contracts that guaranteed their children free access to local schools. More intriguingly, this coincided precisely at the peak of what has retroactively been labelled the “First Hawaiian Renaissance”, a period in which the ruling monarch, David Kalākaua, in league with a Parliamentary majority of “Young Hawaiians” and their white supporters, embraced an ambitiously nationalist attempt to counter “establishment” resident foreigner (particularly US American) political dominance.

The schools themselves were modelled closely after American practice, established in the early nineteenth century through an intersection of missionary endeavour and Hawaiian elite and popular interest in acquiring literacy. On the eve of the fall of the Hawaiian Kingdom, over 90 per cent of Native Hawaiian students were receiving primary education in the English language. The initiation of major immigration flows in the late 1870s to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i closely coincided with an epochal pedagogical shift at island schools to English-language instruction. In the existing literature, these two trends have been investigated separately. Yet, whereas the schools of the Kingdom have been characterised as the most American institutional formation existing in Hawai‘i prior to annexation, the immigration system drew explicitly from the example of European tropical colonies, particularly Britain, with British Guiana being explicitly cited as proving the aptitude of Madeirans as sugar cane labourers. The ambition for contract labourers to serve as a basis of future population however meant that the two systems overlapped due to the explicit appraisal that the schools were the most effective means of ensuring the assimilation of diverse groups into a single “nation” – the valences of which were contested and various appraised between intestine divisions between Native Hawaiian ruling elites, Republicans, traditionalists, Western planters, and anti-Asian polemicists. Below, I explore how questions of language and assimilation were site to a confrontation by individual policy makers with the practicalities of implementing mechanisms of integration in the unique backdrop of a Kingdom purportedly founded upon the progress of its indigenous inhabitants.

The project of securing “free immigration” from Portugal to Hawai‘i had been proposed as early as 1865 (AH MS INTERIOR DEPT / Box 14 / IMMIGRATION: Minutes of Board of Immigration (1865-67): 1865.02.14). Unsponsored migration from Portugal, largely the Azores and Cape Verde, had occurred during the whaling era, leading to a Portuguese population of around 500 in the islands prior to the initiation of contract labour flows (Knowlton 2004, 89-94). The connection between Portugal and Cape Verde lead to a conflation of the two amongst Hawaiian actors. For instance, on the eve of the arrival of the first ship of indentured Madeirans in 1878, Samuel (alias Kamuela) Parker, a part Native Hawaiian plantation owner in Waimea on the Island of Hawai‘i and later Minister of Foreign Affairs under Queen Lili‘uokalani, expressed eagerness to engage labour “from the next lot that Arrives for the Government” from “Cape de Verde” (AH MS INTERIOR DEPT, Box 18, IMMIGRATION: Portuguese (1865-99). 1865.04.03. “Instructions for J. Spencer, Immigration from Cape de Verde Islands”).

The arrival of Portuguese families in Hawai‘i from 1878 constituted a major demographic shift in the school age population in the islands. Originating mainly from Madeira and the Azores, Portuguese contract labourers constituted the third largest group of

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immigrants to arrive in the islands before annexation. Of the 10,957 Portuguese migrants who arrived in Hawai‘i from the late 1870s up to the fall of the Kingdom in 1893 via indentured labour contracts, nearly half (5,304) were children. This constituted a considerable demographic impact in an archipelago whose entire population in 1890 was 89,990. Portuguese pupils constituted a majority of foreigners at Hawaiian schools from 1884 onward into the twentieth century, peaking at 64% on the eve of the overthrow of the monarchy in 1892, constituting 21% of the total student population that same year. This growth was rapid and dramatic. In 1880, they had only constituted 0.6% of total student population, or 10.2% of foreign student population. By 1884, they were 10% of total student population, or 52% of foreign student population. The 1880s witnessed considerable growth in all student populations except for full Hawaiians and US Americans. The number of European students (excluding Portuguese) surpassed US American students in 1884, and the number of Chinese students surpassed the US American in the first school report conducted after the overthrow of the Kingdom, in 1894. While the great emigration of Japanese labourers in the 1890s would cause them to be the plurality of the population by the time of annexation, most were single men. Even in 1894, there were more resident German or British students in island schools than Japanese. (Biennial Reports of the President of the Board of Education (Kingdom of Hawai‘i), 1880-1894).

Hawai‘i by the mid nineteenth century was defined by one of the highest literacy rates in the world. This was a direct outcome of missionary activity spearheaded by New England Puritans from the early nineteenth century onwards; as well as Native Hawaiian’s evident curiosity about the new knowledge forms coming from abroad. The Native Hawaiian intellectual Samuel Kamakau proudly mocked observers in Paris at the World Expo of 1867, who asked him about his “cannibal” islands, pointing to the stacks of Hawaiian language newspapers that featured in the Hawaiian stall at the expo. He expressed their shock: “‘The cannibal island is ahead in literacy, and the enlightened countries of Europe are behind it!’” (Kamakau 1992, 409). In the 1870s, Hawai‘i’s educational system was used as evidence of success of the civilising mission, with good institutions trumping racial essentialism. By 1882, Hawai‘i’s educational regime had become a trope in educational reform, with the Brazilian jurist and man of letters, Rui Barbosa, pointing to Hawai‘i as an example to which Brazil could aspire (Barbosa 2010, 83). The board of education in 1880 publically stylized itself as borne from leading practices from Prussia and the United States. In a letter prepared for the King to be presented to Ginseppe Pietro Giustin, the board claimed “the system of public instruction in the Hawaiian Islands is modelled after the system in operation in the United States of America, which is that of Prussia as modified for its application in the US by the Honorable Horace Mann, and other eminent American educators”. Progress had been very rapid with very few illiterate persons resident in the islands, with the effect of enfranchising “the minds of the people and to develop a national spirit of liberty and independence” (AH MS 261, vol. 19: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing, 1880.07.23).

Given the foundation of the Hawaiian schooling system from missionary endeavour, first Protestant, then Catholic and Mormon, a complex, multilayer educational system existed when Portuguese migrants came to the islands en masse starting in the late 1870s. This system was defined by an inequality based in language and financial means: government-run

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common schools taught in Hawaiian were free; English-language select schools administered by various confessions were mainly the preserve of foreigners as well as Native Hawaiian elites. These required tuition. In 1880, 57% of all students in the islands taught in Hawaiian; this declined to 44% in 1882; 32.5% in 1884; 22.4% in 1886; 15.6% in 1888; 7.7% in 1890; and 5.1% on the eve of the overthrow of Liluokalani. Heads of the board of education persistently claimed that the conversion of Hawaiian-language common schools into English-language select schools had “brought about at the request of the Hawaiians themselves” (Rep. Board of Education 1888, 19). The published reports of the legislative committee for education as well as the biennial reports of the Board of Education, directly appointed by the sovereign, are replete with reproduced petitions. It is however difficult to identify petitions within the archives during this period that speak specifically to this. Rather, the great majority of petitions dealt with more mundane issues of teacher complaints as well as requests for closer schools to be built.

From the late 1870s, the official line was that movement towards English schools was on behest of parental demand, described as the “favourite schools of the people” (Rep. Board of Education 1880, 10). In 1878, the Committee of Education of the Legislative Assembly, comprised of two resident foreigners and three Native Hawaiian elites, including the famous historian of Hawaiian antiquity David Malo, described as one of the major points and tendencies of the education system “the gradual supplanting of schools taught in the Hawaiian language and replacing them with English teaching” (BPMP MS Legislative – Committees – Education – Reports – 1878 – box 34.03, 1). Malo most likely wrote the critique included in the report expressing anxieties about the cultural impact of switching to English language instruction. In 1880, the Board of Education defensively stated that it did “not admit that in the establishment of English Schools they aim at the suppression of the Hawaiian language”, holding instead “the impracticability of properly educating Hawaiians only in a tongue other than their own vernacular” (Rep. Board of Education 1880, 6). A committee of five Native Hawaiian legislators in 1882 however suggested, with nostalgia and regret, that English be made the main language of schools in the language. The Board that same year cursorily noted that it would continue favouring English language schools. A persistent unfulfilled promise, made as an apparent compromise for those with cultural anxieties about the decline of the Hawaiian language, was that Hawaiian language instruction would be offered at English-medium schools for the purpose of teaching literacy to Native Hawaiian students. (Rep. Board of Education 1884, 10.) This promise was made persistently throughout the 1880s without effect. By 1892, on the eve of the deposition of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the Board grew bolder in its pro-English stance. “Every one conversant with the desire of the Hawaiian parents at the present time will readily understand that the fate of the common schools is foredoomed. Even in the very remotest spots the parents desire that their children should be taught in English” (Rep. Board of Education 1892, 8-9.).

The first few years of arrival of Portuguese contract labourer children at the schools of the islands were characterised by improvised policy directives and incomplete enforcement of compulsory attendance for all children, irrespective of gender. The latter aspect was a matter of practicality as there were frequently no schools of either language located near new sites of sugar cultivation. Insights into the real world of education in this period can be deduced from

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an incomplete documentary record of minutes of the board of education as well as letters sent and received by the Board. Although the trend towards favouring English schools was already under way in 1880, new Hawaiian-language schools were still being found that year. One new Hawaiian-language common school was authorized for construction in January on the Kilauea plantation to serve 20 immigrant children from the South Seas Islands. No directive had yet been issued concerning the language immigrant children were supposed to acquire. Yet in June of that year the Board wrote to Castle, the chairman of the legislative assembly’s education committee, that English-language schools had to be established in order to meet the educational needs of plantations and the “necessities of their mixed populations” (AH MS 261, vol. 19: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing, 1880.06.17). A significant contrast can be detected in the preparations made for the arrivals of the first German contract labourer students in the islands versus the Portuguese. In 1881, careful preparations were made on Kauai to cater to the education of anticipated German migrants, with the board searching for a German-speaker as well as permitting the foundation of a bilingual German-English school funded completely by public money (AH MS 261, vol. 19: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing, 1881.03.04; Board of Education to J Mott Smith in San Francisco; AH MS 235, vol. 3, Minutes of the Board of Education, 1881.01.16). In 1882, the board of education explicitly refused to entertain petitions for the creation of Portuguese or bilingual schools, despite the exemption openly made for Germans on the island of Kauai (AH MS 235/3 Minutes Board of Education, 1882.09.14).

In 1881, the Department of Education issued a set of directives that ultimately put to rest the ambiguity in interpreting the provision of guaranteed education in Portuguese labour contracts. In May 1881, responding to the inspector general of schools’ inquiry of which schools Portuguese students were to be compelled to attend, the Board noted that “the Portuguese and others, are by their contracts entitled to proper instruction in the public schools for their children, and employers taking indentured from the Board of Immigration, assume this as one of the conditions to be, by them, carried out” (AH MS 261, vol. 19: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing. 1881.05.23. Education Office to DD Baldwin Esq., Inspector General of Schools.). Yet the Board left unclear whether Portuguese immigrants, if unwilling to pay the tuition charged by English-language select schools, could fulfil their legal obligation of compulsory schooling by sending their children to tuition-free Hawaiian language commons schools. In October, it released a definitive decision in which Hawaiian language instruction was racially incompatible with children of European descent. “Resolved that it is the opinion of the Board of Education that the proper instruction of children of European races can not be obtained through the medium of the common free schools of the Kingdom, which are taught in the Hawaiian language. And in order therefore that they shall receive the proper instructions stipulated in the agreements, they should be sent to the public schools of the country which are conducted in the English language, and in which it is a rule of the Board to charge $5.00 per annum tuition fee”. This fee to not be chargeable to parents, but rather to the employer (AH MS 235, vol. 3, Minutes of the Board of Education, 1881.10.27, pp. 78-79).

Implementation however remained challenging for years. Even in February 1882, the board emphasized that only Hawaiian schools were free. “Pupils who do not pay tuition fees,

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must attend the Common schools in the Hawaiian language, which are free”, and school books had to be paid for by pupils. (AH MS 261, vol. 21: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing. 1882.02.08. Education Office to G Waring Webb). The Board had to republish its directives in local papers in August 1882 due to noncompliance. The issue was not with Portuguese parents sending their children to common schools, but with few planters or parents willing to pay tuition fees (AH MS 261, vol. 21: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing, 1882.08.11 and 1882.11.02). School agents threatened legal action to reticent planters.

It was only in 1884 that the Board of Education, now headed by the highly colourful nationalist statesman Walter Murray Gibson, officially recognized the challenges and new opportunities posed by the arrival of Portuguese students in its biennial report. “The subject of the education of the Portuguese immigrants is one that has earnestly engaged the attention of the Board”. Given that the “purpose of the Government and the hope of the country is that these strangers from distance islands should become permanent and valuable settlers […] unquestionably one of the surest means to guarantee this result is to provide for the children of the strangers a sufficient and gratuitous opportunity to acquire a common education. […] Thus the Portuguese youth will grow up well informed and interested citizens of the State” (Rep. Board of Education 1884, 3-4).

By 1886, the critical issue became that of creating and teaching a multicultural polity. Gibson commended that 1/8 of state budget had been dedicated to education, judging this as essential due to “the large increase of foreign races in the Kingdom; and in view of the Portuguese and Japanese immigration, and the introduction of a foreign population that is blending and assimilating with the aboriginal dominant race and capable of forming with them one stock, we deem it all the more important to strive to maintain a high and thorough standard of public education.” (Rep. Board of Education 1886, 3). The note in the rise in Japanese numbers was more discursive than reality, reflecting his and Kalākaua’s enthusiasm for growth of Japanese population. Gibson commended Japanese students as fantastic in comparison with the unruly Portuguese, a repeated troupe in later reports, even though they would remain demographically insignificant until US annexation in 1898 (Rep. Board of Education 1886, 12).

Gibson described the function of the public schools as explicitly “intended to make a homogenous people”. Both “heredity and social surroundings” were at work in forming the child. “It is to be taken for granted that it is not desirable to have these diversities of language, moral and mental idiosyncrasies growing up in children expecting to make their home under one nationality. How important, therefore, becomes the school as a factor in moulding these seemingly refractory materials into one national element.” (Rep. Board of Education 1886, 12). Gibson pointed to the United States as the greatest example of overcoming this challenge, though noted that the issues in Hawai‘i were greater than those faced in the United States. Great difficulties were to be “met with in this small, but extremely cosmopolitan country. We have children from the four quarters of the globe. Here the East and the West meet. The Oriental and Occidental, with all their varieties, together with the Polynesian, are frequently found on a single bench in the same school” (Rep. Board of Education 1886, 12). The pedagogical challenged posed by this diversity “would puzzle a Pestalozzi, or a Horace Mann,

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to tell what to do, how to communicate anything in common to this motley multitude of children” (Rep. Board of Education 1886, 6). The construction of new school houses built mainly in order to teach Portuguese children may have been expensive “but it is money well spent. It is hoped that these Portuguese children of so strong and healthy blood will grow up, under our system of free schools, intelligent and useful citizens” (Rep. Board of Education 1886, 1).

A typical refrain was that Portuguese families required the guidance of government authorities to be fully actualized as valuable national stock. The Board of Education in 1886 produced a flyer about compulsory attendance laws in Chinese, Portuguese and Hawaiian for circulation on by school agents (AH MS 261, vol. 21: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing. 1886.07.21. Dept of Ed to GWC Jones Esq, School Agent, Kau). In 1887, it went so far as to contemplate punitive measures against intractable Portuguese truancy by bringing to court a few Portuguese parents who had resided in the islands for several years but neglected in sending their children to schools. (AH MS 261, vol. 21: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing. 1887.05.21. Dept of Ed to GWC Jones Esq, School Agent, Kau.) Education board authorities persistently complained of the supposed apathy Portuguese parents had for sending their children to school, and the unruly character of Portuguese children. They however noted that Portuguese children learned English with facility, though this was a trope also extended to Chinese and Japanese children. During the Republic, the new head of the board, Castle, contently described the success of training Portuguese parents to become more committed to sending their children to school Rep. Board of Education 1894, 2). American teachers generally headed the schools attended by Portuguese students up to the turn of the twentieth century. Exceptions however existed. In 1890, the English language school at Kipahulu, Maui, was run by three Native Hawaiians, who taught a total student body of 71, featuring 59 Hawaiians and Part Hawaiians, 10 Portuguese, and 2 Chinese. That same year, the school at Pulehu, Makawao, Maui, headed by a Native Hawaiian teacher, taught 18 students, 2 of whom were Portuguese.

The linguistic landscape had shifted radically over the course of a decade. In 1888, Bishop stated without equivocation that English was the essential language of the islands as was not only the dominant business language but “will serve as a medium of communication between our heterogeneous population” (Rep. Board of Education 1888, 19). In 1892, the problem was framed as the “polyglot nature of the school population”. Bishop used this to defend the mass hiring of foreign teachers in order to secure that proper English taught at schools, as well as the release of a new history textbook entitled the Brief History of the Hawaiian People. During the Republic, Castle, the head of the board of education, described the main goal of the school system since 1887, the year of the resident foreigner-led Bayonet Constitution, that “the chief object aimed at hitherto has been to teach the pupils of all the different nationalities attending our schools to think as well as to speak and write in English” (Rep. Board of Education 1894, 2).

While exemplary for the late nineteenth century, the Hawaiian educational system was not without significant gaps. In fact, the decline of the Hawaiian student population reported between 1880 and 1890 may have been in part from the rapid closure of Hawaiian-language schools without conveniently located English schools to replace them. New schools may have

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been located closer to plantations than to Hawaiian areas of settlement. Many petitions were received during the decade not testifying for an explicit preference for English-language instruction, but merely stating the need for a nearby English school to be erected. Significant gaps of coverage existed until the end of the century, with a petition received in 1895 from a collection of “resident homesteaders” at Honokaa Hamakua on the Island of Hawai‘i requesting a school to be built nearby. The signatories claimed over 100 children amongst them and were nearly all Portuguese, except for a certain “M. Kamipele” (AH MS 261, vol. 56, fol. 2 General Correspondence/by Subject/Petitions 1891-97. 1895.04.18).

ENDING REMARKS

Given that my work on the Caribbean is at an early stage, and I anticipate having a different perspective in simply three weeks’ time, when I will have visited Guyana for the first time, I will here forego a conventional conclusion. Indeed, perhaps the most obvious conclusion from a comparison between the experiences of Portuguese children and educational policy in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i and British Guiana is that we are dealing with two very different situations. Yet trying to find the similarities out of the differences in face of the many structural commonalities in both sites in terms of production, language and location in the global economic system seems to me to be worth pursuing. In lieu of a conclusion, I end this paper through an excursus to the politics of naturalisation and local identity in Hawai‘i and British Guiana in the 1880s and 1890s concerning the rights of non-citizens in both sites to access suffrage and government appointments.

While articulated in remarkably different political climates, the commonality was the right of Portuguese contract labourers and their descendants in distinctly racialized colonial contexts to participate in local elections and serve in local government without being formally naturalised. In Hawai‘i, the function of this lay in an instrumental use of the Portuguese as a numerous community of “white” voters, who, in league with sympathetic Hawaiian elites and the bulk of the resident American, British and German population, could be used to stylise a franchise which denied the electoral participation of the new majority Asian population and diminished dissenting Native Hawaiian votes to the point of workable pro-planter majorities (Coffman 2016). The way this worked was to limit the franchise not by race, but rather, language: mastery of Hawaiian, English, or any European language. The further trick here was to redefine eligibility in Hawaiian elections based not on naturalization as a citizen of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, but rather according to appeals to the “cosmopolitan” rights of all for recognition on the basis of being a (non-Asian) denizen of a polity. Intriguingly, in the same year that Portuguese liminal Europeanness was being used in Hawai‘i to provide a numerous community in lock step with a defined “majority” alliance between the white oligarchy and Hawaiian anti-monarchic forces (and local white militias including a few Portuguese members), a Portuguese man in British Guiana in 1893 demanded recognition of his rights as being simultaneously Portuguese but a local of Georgetown. He thought it unfair that he was not permitted to serve in the local colonial guard and proposed the formation of a specific Portuguese corps or battalion officered by Englishmen, since he “hated the very approach” of compulsory naturalization to this effect (Daily Liberal, 1893.06.21). This to him was the

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logical compromise between being in every sense a “true Portuguese” but also a veritable “son of Georgetown”. Proud of his ethnic distinction from other groups, he eagerly hoped to serve in a local military corps commissioned to preserve the prevailing colonial economic, social and racial order of the adopted home of his migrant parents.

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REFERENCES

Archival Material

AH (State Archives of Hawai‘i) MS INTERIOR DEPT, Box 14, IMMIGRATION: Minutes of Board of Immigration (1865-67)

AH MS INTERIOR DEPT, Box 18, IMMIGRATION: Portuguese (1865-99).

AH MS 235, vol. 3: Minutes of the Board of Education

AH MS 261, vol. 19: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing

AH MS 261, vol. 21: Letterbook, Typescript. Public Instruction, Letters, Outgoing

AH MS 261, vol. 56, fol. 2 General Correspondence/by Subject/Petitions 1891-97

Bishop Museum Archives (BPMP) MS Legislative – Committees – Education – Reports – 1878 – box 34.03, p. 1.

Primary Sources

Bumatai, Andy (2015). “Pidgin 101 – Portuguese People”, Youtube video, transcribed in Hawaiian Pidgin/Hawaii‘i Creole English, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-un-LUjRX14, posted 2015.11.29.

Kingdom of Hawai‘i (1880-1894). Biennial Reports of the President of the Board of Education.

Kamakau, Samuel (1992). Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools.

Barbosa, Rui (2010), “Reforma do ensino primario e varias instituicoes complementares da Instrucao Publica”, in Rui Barbosa, ed. Maria Cristina Gomes Machado. Recife: Colecao Educadores.

Daily Chronicle (Georgetown, Guyana).

Secondary Sources

Bacchus, M.K. (1994). Education as and for Legitimacy: Developments in West Indian Education between 1846 and 1895. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-un-LUjRX14



Coffman, Tom (2016). Nation Within: The Histoy of the American Occupation of Hawai‘i. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Geschwender, James A., Rita Carroll-Seguin and Howard Brill (1988). “The Portuguese and Haoles of Hawai‘i: Implications for the Origin of Ethnicity”. American Sociological Review 53(4): 515-527.

Kandasammy, Lloyd (2005). “A Brief History of Education in Guyana during the Nineteenth Century”. Stabroek News. September 22.

King, Ruby (1999). “Education in the British Caribbean: The Legacy of the Nineteenth Century”. In Educational Reform in the Commonwealth Caribbean, ed. Errol Miller, pp. 25–45. Washington, DC: Organization of American States.

Knowlton, Jr, Edgar C. (2004). “Cabo Verde, West Africa, and Hawai‘i”. In They Followed the Trade Wings. African Americans in Hawai‘i, vol. 43 of Social Process in Hawai‘i, pp. 89-94. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004.

Menzes, Mary Noel (1986). Scenes from the History of the Portuguese in Guyana. London: Victoria Printing Works.

Menzes, Mary Noel (1992). The Portuguese of Guyana: A Study in Culture and Conflict. Gujarat: Anand Press.

Newitt, Malyn (2015). Emigration and the Sea: An Alternative History of Portugal and the Portuguese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Northrup, David (1995). Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rodney, Walter (1981). A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Rohrer, Judy (2010). Haoles in Hawai‘i. Race and Ethnicity in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Rosa, John P. (2014). Local Story: The Massie-Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.

Smith, Raymond (1961). British Guiana. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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