August 11, 2010 – Honokaa, Hawaii
Video by David Corrigan | Voice of Tim Bryan
The culture of the sugar industry on the Hamakua Coast is being chronicled in a new exhibit on display in Honokaa.
The show features the work of photographer Paul Christensen, and covers five decades of the plantation era on the Big Island.
Christensen was a Brooklyn native who first served as a timekeeper for the Kukuihaele Division of Honoka‘a Sugar Company in 1933. Christensen eventually rose to the position of “luna” where he oversaw about 900 workers, and all the while he snapped away with his camera, documenting the plantation era in black and white.
For former sugar industry employees like Joe Branco, Robert DeRego, and Romel Dela Cruz, the exhibit was a step back in time.
The exhibit is free and open to the public from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, at the North Hawai‘i Education & Research Center in Honokaa. The show ends on August 14th.
Thanks.
“The record of one plantation may serve as an indication of the range of pay scales for field workers. Honokaa Sugar Plantation, on the island of Hawaii, was one of the more stable concerns, continuing under unified management throughout its history from 1876 to the present. The basic pay rates shown in Table 7 agree generally with more fragmentary data from a variety of plantations of varying sizes and levels of sophistication.” (WORKING IN HAWAII / A LABOR HISTORY, Edward D. Beechert, University of Hawaii Press)
“A Japanese storekeeper named Goto, widely known for his advocacy of Japanese plantation workers, was lynched in Honokaa in 1899. Goto’s offense was that he acted as interpreter for th Japanese workers in and around Honokaa where his general store was located. (The official Japanese interpreter was in Hilo, some fifty miles and two days distant.) The sheriff reported that ‘five foreigners and one Hawaiian’ had been arrested and would be tried. The five men, overseers on a nearby plantation, were subsequently found guilty of manslaughter. Released on bail pending appeal, they promptly vanished from Hawaii.’ [Footnote: U.S. Dept. of State, Consular Reports, vol. 62, no. 233, Wray Taylor, ‘Labor in Hawaii,’ p. 229; Yoneda (1971).”] (WORKING IN HAWAII / A LABOR HISTORY, Edward D. Beechert, University of Hawaii Press)
“The 1930s also ushered in the age of industrial unionism, as the militancy of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the Congress of Industrial Organizations appeared in Hawaii’i in the form of ILWU organizers. They pushed for solidarity on an industrywide basis and insisted on absolute interethnic collaboration, even at the expense of bruising the egos of Japanese American leaders who had longer experience and more ‘seniority.’ This strategy prevented the Big Five from effectively implementing its divide-and-rule tactic against the different ethnic groups. [Footnote: The ILWU produced a racial variant of its own by alienating several important nisei labor leaders who felt that the policy simply affirmed mainland haole leadership at the expense of homegrown Japanese American talent. See Kotani, A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE, 125-141.] (NO SWORD TO BURY / JAPANESE AMERICANS IN HAWAI’I DURING WORLD WAR II, Franklin Odo, Temple University Press)
Overseer, Bookkeeper / clerk, Sugar boiler, Carpenter, Blacksmith, Mason, Painter, Harness maker, Chemist — list of “Skilled Labor positions” on Hawaiian Sugar Plantations in 1899. ([Source: U.S. Dept. of State, U.S. Consular Report, 1900, vol.62, no 233, p. 230.] WORKING IN HAWAII / A LABOR HISTORY, Edward D. Beechert, University of Hawaii Press)
“She was a year younger
than I, twenty-three when she left Korea.
Did she simply close
the door of her father’s house
and walk away. And
was it a long way
through the tailor shops of Pusan
to the wharf where the boat
waited to take her to an island
whose name she had
only recently learned,
on whose shore
a man waited,
turning her photograph
to the light when the lanterns
in the camp outside
Waialua Sugar Mill were lit
and the inside of his room
grew luminous
from the wings of moths
migrating out of the cane stalks?”
—from the beginning of Cathy Song’s poem, “Picture Bride,” one of the poems in, PICTURE BRIDE, Cathy Song, Yale University Press