Page 285 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

20 Critical Pedagogy of Place: A Framework for Understanding Relationships 259

more than half of the population of Hawaii. For this reason, I focus on the events
that have made large-scale Asian settlement possible in Hawaii by briefly outlining
the history of colonization of Hawaii within the last 150 years.
Using excerpts from Strangers from a different shore by Ronald Takaki (1989),
as well as Candace Fujikane’s (2008) essay, Asian settler colonialism in the US
colony of Hawai’i, I present in this section Asian settlement in Hawaii as being
inextricably linked to American colonial efforts to secure a cheap, expendable labor
base for the growing Hawaiian sugarcane plantation economy of the 1850s. Both
Takaki and Fujikane describe this period as a time when the indigenous Hawaiian
population began to decline due to disease brought by White settlers, with 1852
marking the arrival of the first major group of male Chinese contract laborers. By
1882, Chinese plantation laborers constituted nearly a quarter of the total popula-
tion in Hawaii. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew across the USA at this time, eventually
resulting in the 1882 legislation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, forcing plantation
owners to seek cheap labor from new sources when the 1898 annexation of Hawaii
by the USA barred further immigration.
Takaki (1989) and Fujikane (2008) note that the first Japanese government-
sponsored laborers arrived in Hawaii in 1885 as part of Japan’s “peaceful expansion
policy” which supported emigration of citizens to other countries. By 1900, the
Japanese settler population was second only to the Chinese. On the verge of bank-
ruptcy and reeling from a nationwide famine, the Korean government briefly sup-
ported labor emigration to Hawaii and Mexico in 1903, but by 1905, the Korean
government halted the policy due to reports of worker mistreatment (Ch’oe 2006).
After winning the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars of 1904–1905, Korea
became a forced protectorate of Japan, halting any further emigration and begin-
ning 40 years of Japanese occupation of Korea (Takaki 1989). Responding to pro-
tests by Japanese laborers who sought to improve working conditions, plantation
owners sought new, cheap labor from the Philippines in 1906. The Philippines was
acquired from Spain after the Spanish-American war of 1898 (along with Guam
and Puerto Rico) and, subsequently, large numbers of Filipino laborers began being
shipped from one American colony to another to work the expanding sugar planta-
tions. By the 1930s, Filipinos had replaced the Japanese as the largest ethnic labor
group on the plantations (Saranillio 2006).
Following the US termination of the contract-labor system in 1900, whereby it
became illegal to require the completion of 3–5 years of labor before workers could
return to their home country or take employment elsewhere, many plantation laborers
found they had no power to fight unfair employment practices other than going on
strike. Takaki (1989) reports plantation owners purposefully developed an ethni-
cally diverse workforce to repress unions and break ethnic labor strikes. For
example, owners capitalized on the animosity of the Japanese by Koreans (whose
homeland was forcibly occupied) by mobilizing Koreans to different plantations to
work as strikebreakers when Japanese laborers organized to strike. Described as a
significant precursor to the large-scale organization of pan-Asians that emerged in
the late 1960s, the unification of interethnic labor groups in the 1920s continued
throughout the 1940s. Laborers began to leverage greater power with the plantation