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:

    Europe and the U.K. are yesterday’s world. Tomorrow is in the United States.
    R.W. ‘Tiny’ Rowland (b. 1917)

    The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism.... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side in the present world struggle but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities of the changing and convulsive world in which American policy must operate.
    James Reston (b. 1909)

    Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1954)

    What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)