The Lāhaināluna Views: New England Missionaries and Transplanting of a Vernacular

Abstract

In 1820, Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in the islands of Hawaiʻi. They expressed their goal of introducing Christinity in distinctly material terms, prioritizing especially the execution of an imagined landscape, one they planned to realize by “fill[ing] the habitable parts of those important islands with schools and churches, fruitful fields, and pleasant dwellings.” Engraved landscape views produced by scholars at a Seminary in Lāhaināluna, Maui, capture the missionʻs attempts at realizing this ideal, and expose the many ways it was a nearly rote replication of the built environment they had left back east. Looking closely at the images themselves, which were widely distributed in journals and books in New England, I examine the ways they promote three stages of mission intervention, the imposition of barrenness that allowed the missionaries to justify the “filling” they proposed, the conversion of that blank slate into fields dictated by American agricultural practices, and the population of those fields by imported and whitewashed, woodframe houses. Although the mission figured these landscape alterations as American ‘im- provements,’ they were heavily contrived and frequently unsuccessful, often remaining foreign fantasies that fit clumsily into the landscape of the islands. In these moments of mission failure, we can experience the persistence of Kanaka Maoli lifeways, and the multitude of instances in which the mission relied upon these practices even as they actively attempted to erase them.