Kanaka (Pacific Island Worker) - United States

United States

As early as the 1820s, native workers from the Sandwich Islands were employed in the kitchen and other skilled trades by the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, mostly living south and west of the main palisade in an area known as "Kanaka Village." Kanakas, as Native Hawaiian workers employed in agriculture and ranching, were present in the mainland United States (primarily in California under Spanish colonial arrangement and later American company contracts) as early as 1850, but their migration peaked between 1900 and 1930. Most of their families present in the fields soon blended by intermarriage into the Chinese, Filipino, and more numerous Mexican populations with whom they came in contact. Native Hawaiians harvested sugar beets and picked apples at one point in the states of Washington and Oregon. There is also documentation of the presence of several hundred Native Hawaiian paniolos or cowboys across the Great Basin of the Western US.Kanakas were also mentioned in the book 'Two Year's before the Mast' by Richard Henry Dana (1840) who worked alongside him during his sea voyage from Boston to Cape Horn.