The last queen of Hawai‘i used many names during her lifetime. Her missionary teachers called her Lydia. As a young bride she was known as Lydia Dominis. As princess and queen she became Lili‘uokalani. In letters to her intimate friends and family, she called herself Lili‘u, the name she was given at birth. I’ve chosen to call her Lili‘u because it’s the name she most frequently called herself.
Telling the story of a woman whose mother tongue was Hawaiian was challenging for me, a non-Hawaiian speaker. But I was fortunate in that Lili‘u wrote the vast majority of her diary entries and her letters in English, as did most of the members of her immediate family. She learned to write in English before she learned to write in Hawaiian as a student at the Royal School. And as heir apparent and then queen, fully grasping that English was the language of the nineteenth century’s ruling classes, she strove to speak it well, despite struggling early on with spelling and grammar. Westerners who met her were continually surprised by Lili‘u’s fluency in the language of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.
English, alongside Hawaiian, became the predominant language used for most government documents by the 1870s, which made my efforts to understand the kingdom’s affairs easier. But as the political situation in Hawai‘i grew grave for Lili‘u in the mid- to late 1890s she switched to writing in Hawaiian to some close friends because she believed her letters were being intercepted and read by her English-speaking enemies. Most of these letters have been translated into English. During that same period, she began coding some of her diary entries, using a preexisting code that equated numbers with letters of the Hawaiian alphabet. In 1971 a volunteer at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum decoded the entries into Hawaiian. Some years later, the decoded Hawaiian words were translated into English at the Hawai‘i State Archives.
Because Hawaiian is a complex language that often contains multiple meanings for the same word, translation can be difficult and may not always reflect subtleties. There is also a tradition among native speakers of using metaphor, or kaona, which is often translated as “hidden meaning.” An example of this is contained in the letters written in Hawaiian from Emma Nāwahī to Lili‘u when she was in Washington hoping to stave off annexation. Those letters are rich in metaphorical language, which, from the distance of more than a century, makes it now impossible to more than guess at what she really meant: even the English translations are cryptic.
I’ve relied on the translations of Lili‘u’s writings that are preserved alongside the original manuscripts in the Hawai‘i State Archives and elsewhere, as well as transcripts of her diary entries from the state archives and the Bishop Museum archives. Usually, but not always, these translations were made at the behest of the archive staff and are often many decades old. For translating individual Hawaiian words, I have used the Hawaiian dictionary of Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, as well as Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library. This wonderful resource is an extension of the many-pronged efforts by educators and native speakers of Hawaiian to revitalize the language and save it from extinction. The revitalization of Hawaiian, now in its third decade, is ongoing.
Lili‘u’s native language is far more nuanced than many nonspeakers realize. Because the written language was given only twelve letters in its alphabet by missionaries, many Hawaiian words may initially seem very similar in spelling and pronunciation. What distinguishes the sound and meaning of many of the words are a glottal stop, or ‘okina, separating vowels (the symbol ‘), and the kahakō or macron (the symbol ˉ over a vowel) indicating that the sound of that vowel is drawn out. The word pau, spelled without any diacritical mark, for instance, means finished, ended, or all done. But when spelled pa‘u, with an ‘okina, it describes soot, smudge, or ink powder; when spelled pa‘ū it means moldy or moist.
During the queen’s lifetime, the kahakō was not used and the ‘okina used only intermittently. Indeed, Hawaiian was not a written language until the arrival of Christian missionaries in 1820, eighteen years before Lili‘u was born. When the missionaries translated the Bible—the first text in written Hawaiian—they did not include diacritical markings and that set the standard for written Hawaiian for the next 150 years.
Starting in the 1970s, consistent diacriticals were introduced into written Hawaiian to reflect the subtlety of the language and help modern speakers understand and pronounce it more easily. I have not inserted diacritical markings into the nineteenth-century diaries, letters, and documents that I cite, following their original form, but I do use them for Hawaiian proper names, as a way to help readers navigate through the subtle differences in the pronunciation of so many consonant-filled Hawaiian names.
Additionally, I have used a word that nineteenth-century Hawaiians themselves often used in referring to white people: haole. In its modern usage, this term is sometimes used derisively, but its original meaning merely indicated that a person—or even a plant, an animal, or a language —was foreign. In referring to the people native to the Hawaiian Islands, whom some Hawaiian activists and scholars now call kanaka maoli (kanaka means “people” and maoli refers to a native), I simply use “native Hawaiians,” which is what Lili‘u herself called her people. Respecting the Hawaiian usage of the word, the term haole is not pluralized with an s, as it would be in English. Thus, throughout the book I refer to groups of haole—not haoles—and flower garlands as lei.
As much as possible, I’ve tried to tell Lili‘u’s life story using transcripts of her diary entries, her letters, and other primary source documents. I am enormously fortunate to have been granted early access to a collection donated in late 2009 to the Hawai‘i State Archives by David W. Forbes, the state’s leading bibliographer. Mr. Forbes spent four years collecting and transcribing letters and other significant documents of the members of the kingdom’s last royal family, some of which have never before been published. The Forbes Collection runs to some 1,852 pages.
I’ve also relied on Lili‘u’s English-language autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, which she published in 1898 as a weapon in her campaign to stave off annexation. It is the only autobiography ever written by a Hawaiian monarch. By comparing earlier drafts of the manuscript against the published book, I discovered large sections that her editor had cut out because she or Lili‘u’s publisher considered them too inflammatory.
It should be noted that there has been some dispute over how much of the book was written by Lili‘u herself and how much should be attributed to her collaborator, an American journalist named Julius A. Palmer. Mr. Forbes describes Hawaii’s Story as a “told to” book, one in which Lili‘u dictated her story to Palmer, who then typed it and added linguistic refinements. Based on my examination of her letters and diaries, I believe the book largely reflects her perspective, though some of the flowery and more dramatic language in it was certainly Palmer’s.
Another primary source was The Queen’s Songbook, the result of a monumental twenty-five-year project by the Hui Hānai Council. It provided me with insight into Lili‘u’s life and creative process for which I am deeply grateful. The president of the Hui Hānai at the time of publication was Agnes C. Conrad, Hawai‘i’s state archivist from 1959 to 1982.
As for secondary sources on the queen’s life, there are surprisingly few. Helena G. Allen’s The Betrayal of Liliuokalani, first published in 1982, is a highly sympathetic though not entirely credible account of the queen’s life, which depends in part on taped interviews and other source material that I was unable to either locate or substantiate. The other biographies on Lili‘u are shelved in the young adult or children’s sections of the library. Albertine Loomis’s For Whom Are the Stars? is an excellent and well-researched account of the overthrow, despite lacking endnotes.
For an overall view of Hawaiian history, I’ve relied on Ralph S. Kuykendall’s three-volume The Hawaiian Kingdom, with a particular focus on volume III, covering the years of the Kalākaua dynasty. Kuykendall spent forty years producing his life’s work, beginning in the late 1920s and traveling to Washington, D.C., London, and elsewhere to gather documents for it. In comparing his work to the primary documents I examined, I found him consistently admirable in terms of his fact gathering and generally evenhanded in his treatment of the complex, racially charged series of events leading to the overthrow.
Kuykendall, who passed away in 1963 before finishing the final chapter of his third volume, is now targeted by some modern historians of Hawai‘i for not including more of the native Hawaiian perspective in his work. This is a valid criticism. Kuykendall did much of his work before the renaissance of Hawaiian language and culture began in the 1970s and ’80s, and he did not have the benefit of many of the English translations of Hawaiian newspapers and chants that are available today. While I’ve retraced many of his steps and examined the same documents he cited from the Hawai‘i State Archives, the Hawaiian Historical Society, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, and Bishop Museum Archives, I also relied on crucial materials that were not available when he wrote his study, for example, the recently unsealed Judd Collection at the Bishop Museum.
To balance out the mainly haole accounts of Lili‘u’s world, I’ve sought to include the native Hawaiian perspective as much as possible. I’ve sought out translations of Hawaiian-language newspapers from the nineteenth century, as well as incorporated the perspective of traditional Hawaiian historians, such as David Malo and John Papa ‘I‘i. I’ve also turned to some excellent works of more recent scholarship on this period of history, including Noenoe K. Silva’s Aloha Betrayed, Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio’s Dismembering Lāhui, Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor’s NāKua‘āina: Living Hawaiian Culture, Tom Coffman’s Nation Within, John Van Dyke’s Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?, (see this book’s bibliography.) and Neil Thomas Proto’s The Rights of My People.
Because Hawaiian history was passed down entirely through chants and stories until the first few decades of the nineteenth century, there are far more accounts available of the island kingdom written by foreigner travelers and missionaries in English than there are by native Hawaiians. As researchers and historians continue to translate Hawaiian-language newspapers and other source materials, however, the already-rich portrait of Lili‘u and other Hawaiians who lived through the overthrow will gain even more texture and depth.