Graduate Student Research: Kaitlyn Little studies Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest
Kaitlyn Little describes her MA research project, "Pacific Intersections: Indigenous Hawaiians, British Colonial Enterprise, and the Displacement of Indigenous North Americans." She received a scholarship of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to conduct this project at Memorial University.
"My master’s research seeks to contribute to the reimagining of colonialism in the nineteenth century through studying the operations of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Pacific. In the early part of the nineteenth century the HBC restructured and extended its trade. The company established an agency on O’ahu in the Kingdom of Hawai’i and built forts along the Columbia and Fraser Rivers in the Pacific Northwest. To realize this trade, the HBC hired Indigenous Hawaiians to work on trade vessels and farms, as well as at sawmills, mines, and forts in the Pacific and Pacific Northwest. These operations were a small part of a larger emigration of Indigenous Hawaiian workers in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.
Historians such as Daniel Richter, Elizabeth Vibert, and Sylvia Van Kirk have provided valuable studies of settler-Indigenous relations, colonialism, and Indigenous displacement in North America, but less is known about how non-North American Indigenous groups figured into the changing history of colonialism in the Pacific Northwest. My research explores how HBC traders’ perceptions of Indigenous Hawaiians affected their employment and treatment, how specific ways of categorizing people intersected with the political economy of the fur trade, how Indigenous Hawaiians shaped prevailing ideas about race, and how their positions in the HBC trade affected Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest. Studying Indigenous Hawaiian workers is a point of departure for what I hope will be a contribution to a new understanding of colonialism in the Pacific.
I am able to do this research thanks to funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Memorial University, as well as support from my family, friends, and the History Department."
Kaitlyn Little, MA candidate, Department of History