If you were to visit the Fort Vancouver National Site, you would learn that Hawaiians have been in Vancouver since the early 19th century. During that visit, you would also learn that Hawaiians were called “Kanakas,” Hawaiian for human being, and that “Kanaka Village” stood just west of the Fort, where Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) workers lived. The prosperity of the fur trade brought fur trappers from around the globe together with nearly 100 Hawaiians who lived in this community, many with their Native wives. If you are from Vancouver and visited the Fort in third or fourth grade, but haven’t been there in years, you would find that it has changed. There are new buildings, trails around the fort, a land bridge connecting the site to the waterfront, and more interpretation about the variety of people who once lived there. If you moved here from somewhere else and haven’t visited, you are missing out.

Vancouver and Hawai’i are connected by water, with the Hawaiian Islands centrally located between Asia and the Northwest Coast. By the early 1800s, Hawai’i hosted the busiest ports in the Pacific. Sailing vessels from around the world regularly stopped at “Owyhee,” also known as the “Sandwich Islands” to replenish supplies and repair ships. Fort Vancouver sent agricultural goods to the islands and imported Hawaiian staples such as hogs, sugar cane, salt, molasses, coffee, wicker baskets, and sweet potatoes. By 1829, the HBC opened an office in Oahu to manage trade in goods and people, including Kanaka laborers. Hawaiians quickly dubbed the store aienui, or the “big debt.” Contact brought disease and cultural decimation to Hawai’i, and many Hawaiians left the islands for work in the Northwest.

Hawaiians did not always leave the islands willingly. Some men were forcibly indentured, while women were sometimes kidnapped, as in the case of two Hawaiian girls lured aboard a British ship in the 1790s. The teenage girls, saved by a disapproving captain who provided them with clothing and locked them away from sailors, eventually returned to Hawai’i aboard Captain George Vancouver’s ship.

Eight Hawaiians staffed the Pacific Northwest’s first sawmill in 1828. By 1830, the HBC shipped 200,000 board feet of lumber to the Hawaiian Islands. In 1837, the mill employed ten yoke of oxen and twenty-eight men. The following year, the HBC erected an expanded steam sawmill with a forge. One 1840 observer wrote: “The saw mill, too, is a scene of constant toil. Thirty or forty Sandwich Islanders are felling the pines and dragging them to the mill; sets of hands are plying two gangs of saws by night and day; nine hundred thousand feet per annum are constantly being shipped to foreign ports,” in Hawai’i and California. The mill continued to produce until after the Oregon Treaty of 1846, when the U.S. gained all territory south of the 49th parallel, including the lands of Fort Vancouver. In 1849, the HBC rented its Columbia River sawmill to an American.

Hawaiians typically contracted as HBC company servants for three year terms. They were paid in cash and merchandise, usually warm winter clothing. They worked as sailors, company guards, guides, cooks, loggers, and in other capacities at the Fort and on fur brigades. By the peak of HBC commerce in 1844, the company employed more than 300-400 Hawaiian men at its various Columbia River posts.

Most 19th century Hawaiian emigrants to Fort Vancouver were young single men. In Kanaka Village, multiple languages were spoken and Chinook Jargon flourished. Company servants, who worked six days a week, built their own homes on their own time, primarily at their own expense. Like others in the Village, including Scots and French Canadians, the Indian wives of Kanaka workers often worked as farm laborers, salmon processors, or even in manufacturing objects, such as candles and portage straps for sale in the company store. The HBC often hired the sons of Hawaiians and Native women, while their daughters frequently married other Hawaiians who worked for the company. Thus, American Indian communities and Hawaiians became intimately connected throughout the Northwest. Over time, census records classified their descendants as “Indian” and many lived on reservations, sometimes unaware of their Hawaiian heritage.

One well-known Hawaiian at Fort Vancouver was Naukane (John Coxe), who served in the courts of Kamehameha I and Crown Prince Liholiho (Kamehameha II), and was present at the death of Captain Cook. Naukane settled permanently in the Northwest in 1826. He worked for the HBC as a middleman (rower) and established “Coxe’s piggery,” an HBC swineherd that grew to 1,500 under his direction. When his HBC contract ended in 1843, he remained in Vancouver as a freeman. He died in 1850 and was buried in the Hudson’s Bay Company cemetery. Another well-known Hawaiian was William Kaulehelehe, who served as teacher and chaplain for Fort Vancouver’s Hawaiians at the Owyhee Church. He was called “Kanaka William.”

Euro-Americans often changed Hawaiian names, making it difficult to trace individuals in the historic record. Some Hawaiians took the names of ships on which they traveled; others assumed common appellations like Jack or Tom, followed or preceded by the word Kanaka. Still others took less common names, like Ropeyarn, who lived at Fort Vancouver from 1841-1845.
As American settlement in Oregon Country increased in the 1840s, Hawaiians experienced racial discrimination. In 1849, Hawaiians were denied American citizenship, in part due to their HBC connection. Like African Americans, Hawaiians were explicitly excluded from land ownership under the 1850 Oregon Land Claim Donation Act.

Still, many Hawaiians remained in the region, their impact visible on the Northwest landscape through place names. Eastern Oregon’s Owyhee River is named for Hawaiians killed there in 1819. Hawaiians have lived near places like Kanaka Creek, Kanaka Bar, and Kanaka Glen. The river port town of Kalama, north of Vancouver, also reflects the region’s Hawaiian heritage. Kalama means “light” or “torch,” and refers to Hawaiian HBC agent, John Kalama, stationed there to collect furs from nearby Native villages and married to Mary, daughter of a Nisqually chief.

If you want to experience Vancouver’s Hawaiian culture, be sure to attend the July 24 and 25 Hawaiian Festival in Esther Short Park. The festival, sponsored by the Ke Kukui Foundation, will host arts, crafts, food, hula, and music, a legacy of Vancouver’s Hawaiian culture with deep roots in the past. CCRH and National Park Service staff will be on site to answer questions about Hawaiian history in the Pacific Northwest.

The Center for Columbia River History (CCRH) is a consortium of the Washington State Historical Society, Portland State University and Washington State University Vancouver. The CCRH mission is to promote study of the history of the Columbia River basin and to present the results publicly. CCRH is dedicated to examining the hidden histories of the Basin and to helping people think about the historical record from different perspectives. CCRH offers free public programs and has an extensive historical Web site at www.ccrh.org.