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.

Read more about this topic:  Kanaka (Pacific Island Worker)

Famous quotes related to united states:

    Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
    Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain great fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man’s making which trample on these ideas, are null and void—wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.
    Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932)

    In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
    Umberto Eco (b. 1932)