Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Transnational Hula as Colonial Culture

2011; Routledge; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00223344.2011.607260

1469-9605

Adria L. Imada,

Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies

Abstract During what was perhaps the first transnational hula tour of North America and Europe between 1892 and 1896, hula performers received sustained attention during a critical period when Hawai‘i's political status and proposed annexation by the US was a topic of national and international debate. Given Hawai‘i's subordinate economic and political status even prior to formal colonisation in 1898, hula operated as a form of colonial culture that became a part of mass, racialised entertainment on the rise in Europe and the US. While little known today, hula dancers who were previously members of the royal Hawaiian court circulated through international expositions, vaudeville theatres, dime museums and café-concerts. This gendered and sexualised colonial exhibition of hula associated Hawai‘i with the eroticised bodies and movements of women. However, late-19th-century Euro-American circuits also systematised opportunities for non-chiefly Hawaiian women to perform gendered cultural knowledge, travel and work. To illuminate the ambivalent character of transnational hula, as both colonial culture and opportunity for women performers, this paper traces the experiences of one member of the troupe: Kini Kapahu (also known as ‘Jennie Wilson’), previously a court dancer and later known as Hawai‘i's ‘first lady’. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Executive Editor Vicki Luker, anonymous readers, and editors of The Journal of Pacific History for their insightful and productive comments. Notes 1 Queen Lili‘uokalani yielded her crown while appealing to the US Executive in 1893. She abdicated in 1895 after she was arrested and threatened with the execution of her supporters. However, she renounced that abdication upon her release. Liliuokalani, Hawai‘i's Story by Hawai‘i's Queen (Tokyo 1964 [1898]). Note on language: Following modern Hawaiian orthography, I use diacritical marks — the ‘okina (glottal stop) and the kahakō (macron indicating long vowel) — for Hawaiian terms (e.g., Hawai‘i). Words such as ‘Hawaiian’ are English words and therefore do not require diacritical marks. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language sources did not employ diacritical marks, therefore I have preserved the original spelling of names and words in these documents with the exception of prominent names that follow contemporary spelling conventions (e.g., Lili‘uokalani; Kapahukulaokamāmalu). 2 Daily Inter Ocean, 14 August 1893. 3 Daily Inter Ocean, 30 July 1893. 4 James Revell Carr discusses these early performances in ‘In The wake of John Kanaka: musical interactions between Euro-American sailors and Pacific Islanders, 1600–1900’, PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara 2006). Some scholars have maintained that the first hula on the US continent was performed at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. For example, see Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku, ‘A court dancer disagrees with Emerson's classic book on the hula’, Ethnomusicology, 8 (1964), 161–4, and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ‘Acculturation in Hawaiian dance’, Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, 25th Anniversary Issue 4 (1972), 38–46. Kini Kapahu claimed that she was the ‘first girl to leave Hawai‘i to go as a dancer in the mainland’, ‘Interview with Jenny [sic] Wilson and Joann Kealiinohomoku’, 1962 July, Tape HAW 59.13.3, Bishop Museum (hereinafter Tape, BM). 5 David A. Chappell, ‘Shipboard relations between Pacific Island women and Euroamerican men, 1767–1887’, Journal of Pacific History, 27 (1992), 144. 6 Ibid., 144–5. Examples of this gendered tourism and venturing include the Raiatean wife of a trader experiencing Valparaiso and a Marquesan woman travelling to Salem, Massachusetts. 7 Noel J. Kent, Hawaii: islands under the influence (Honolulu 1993) discusses these hegemonic economic structures, while Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio provides careful analysis of Western interventions in ali‘i and monarchical autonomy in Dismembering Lāhui: a history of the Hawaiian nation to 1887 (Honolulu 2002). In 1887, a secret organisation called the ‘Hawaiian League’, composed of missionary descendants, sugar planters and businessmen, used the threat of an all-White militia to force Kalākaua to appoint a new cabinet comprised of its members and accept a new constitution. This 1887 constitution — nicknamed the ‘Bayonet Constitution’ because of the coercive circumstances of its adoption — reduced the king to a constitutional monarch with severely limited powers. The House of Nobles in the legislature was no longer appointed by the king, but elected, and Kalākaua did not retain the authority to remove his ministers. That same year, Hawaiian independence was further compromised when the king's new ‘reform’ cabinet renewed a reciprocity treaty with the US that allowed sugar planters in Hawai‘i to reap great profits. In exchange for renewal of a treaty that permitted Hawaiian sugar duty-free into the US, the US sought exclusive use of Pearl Harbor, the only natural harbour in the north Pacific, for a naval and commercial port. Kalākaua refused, but weakened by the Bayonet Constitution, he was unable to prevent renewal of the reciprocity treaty. Thus the US secured Pearl Harbor and an official military foothold in Hawai‘i in 1887. 8 Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, 224. Noenoe K. Silva also astutely observes that Kalākaua had the ‘misfortune’ to reign during a period when the sons of haole missionaries came of age; unlike their fathers, they were unsupervised by an outside foreign mission. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian resistance to American colonialism (Durham 2004), 89–90. 9 Elsewhere, I discuss how the consumption of Hawaiian bodies on stage at the turn of the century helped to constitute an imperial relationship between the US and Hawai‘i. This ‘imagined intimacy’ — a benign, mutual, and consensual relationship — masked the violence of the colonial takeover. Adria L. Imada, ‘Hawaiians on tour: hula circuits through the American empire’, American Quarterly, 56:1 (2004), 134–5. 10 Christopher Balme, ‘New compatriots: Samoans on display in Wilhelminian Germany’, Journal of Pacific History, 42:3 (2007), 332. 11 For discussions of North American exhibitions, see Raymond Corbey, ‘Ethnographic showcases, 1870–1930’, Cultural Anthropology, 8:3 (1993), 338–69; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: visions of empire at American international expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago 1984); Robert W. Rydell, John E. Finding, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: world's fairs in the United States (Washington 2000); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America (New York 1992) and ‘Buffalo Bill's “Wild West” and the mythologization of the American empire’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham 1993), 164–81. For analyses of Pacific Islands and Pacific Islander exhibitions in Europe, see Ewan Johnston, ‘Reinventing Fiji at 19th-century and early 20th-century exhibitions’, Journal of Pacific History, 40:1 (2005), 23–44 and Balme, ‘New compatriots’, 331–44. 12 The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History holds guidebooks and travelogues on world's fairs, while the Hawai‘i State Archives (herineafter HSA) and Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawai‘i (hereinafter BM) are important repositories for personal collections, photographs, and manuscripts. The most reliable and extensive primary source is approximately 15 hours of audiotaped oral histories of Kini Kapahu conducted by ethnomusicologist Joann Kealiinohomoku in 1962, when Kini was 89 years old. These interviews are held by the BM. Aeko Sereno used these tapes for ‘Images of the hula dancer and “hula girl”: 1778–1970’, PhD thesis, University of Hawaii (Honolulu 1990), which in turn is a helpful source. I have also relied on mid-20th century articles on Kini in Hawai‘i periodicals and newspapers; Hawaiian and English language newspapers from the late-19th century do not mention Kini Kapahu by name. Bob Krauss's research notes and interviews held at the HSA and his biography of John H. Wilson are also a valuable source on Kini Kapahu. See Bob Krauss, Johnny Wilson: first Hawaiian Democrat (Honolulu 1994). 13 I have chosen to use Kini Kapahu's Hawaiian name, which she and her Hawaiian intimates preferred. The bulk of the biographical material written in English, however, identifies her as ‘Jennie Wilson’, Wilson being her surname after marriage. McColgan was her Irish father's surname. Her Hawaiian name has been listed as ‘Kini Kapahukula-o-Kamamalu Huhu’ and ‘Ana Kini Kuululani’ in Kathleen Dickenson Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, Paradise of the Pacific, 63 (December 1952), 36, and Jerry Hopkins, ‘Kini Wilson’, in Barbara Bennett Peterson (ed.), Notable Women of Hawai‘i (Honolulu 1984), 406–8, respectively. 14 Kini is the Hawaiian transliteration of Jennie. 15 Although nearly 90 years old at the time, Kini spoke lucidly about her childhood and hula training. Kini and her mother have been erroneously named as the main informants in a foundational ethnography of hula, published by the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: the sacred songs of the hula ([Washington 1909] Honolulu 1997), 28–37. This misstatement, subsequently published in Kealiinohomoku's ‘A court dancer disagrees with Emerson's classic book on the hula’, has become attached to Kini's biography. See, for example, Jennie Wilson's entry in Peterson, Notable Women of Hawai‘i. However, Kini was only one of dozens of laypeople and experts that Emerson interviewed over the course of his research. Emerson's fieldnotes and diaries held by the Huntington Library as well as transcriptions of his fieldnotes in the Theodore Kelsey collection (M-86) at the HSA reveal names of numerous Hawaiian informants. 16 Kini's collection at the HSA, catalogued under the name Jennie Wilson, is modest, whereas a sizable government archive is retained for her husband, John H. Wilson, who served as Honolulu mayor. 17 Ironically, Kini Kapahu and her contemporaries are the ‘native informants’ whose knowledge underwrote ethnography and ethnomusicology of 20th-century Hawai‘i, although remaining largely anonymous or undocumented. See for instance, Emerson's The Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, and anthropologist Helen H. Roberts's audio recordings and manuscript collection of chants and mele held by the BM. Their respective archives remain valuable today for practising po‘e hula. 18 Dorothy B. Barrère, ‘The hula in retrospect’, in Dorothy B. Barrère, Mary Kawena Pukui and Marion Kelly, Hula: historical perspectives (Honolulu 1980), 40. 19 By 1859, all public exhibitions of hula charging admission were forbidden without a prohibitive ten-dollar licence issued by the government's ministry of interior. Licences were only granted in the port cities of Honolulu. Violators were subject to a $500 fine or imprisonment for six months with hard labour. By the 1870s, the legislature reduced these penalties to $100 or three months’ hard labour, and performances were no longer restricted to Honolulu. See Noenoe K. Silva, ‘He kānāwai e ho‘opau i na hula kuolo Hawai‘i: the political economy of banning the hula’, Hawaiian Journal of History, 34 (2000), 29–48, and Barrère, ‘The hula in retrospect’, 41. 20 See, for example, ‘Pau ole no hoi ka hana kahiko o Hawaii nei’ (The old practices of Hawaii are not over), which objected to hula performed during the mourning of the ali‘i Victoria Kamāmalu Ka‘ahumanu in 1866. Nupepa Kuokoa, 7 July 1866. Barrère discusses other examples of Hawaiian critiques of hula in ‘The Hula in retrospect’, 43–6. 21 Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 108. 22 Daws, Shoal of Time, 219; Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 108, 112. See Barrère et al., Hula: historical perspectives, Appendix D, ‘List of hula at the coronation of King Kalākaua’, (‘Papa Kuhikuhi o Na Hula Poni Moi’) a programme for 1883 coronation ceremonies, 133–9, and Stillman, Sacred Hula, especially 22–8, for a detailed analysis of the kinds of mele and hula (e.g., hula ‘āla‘apapa, hula pāipu, hula ‘ōlapa) performed at the coronation. 23 Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 108–9. 24 Barrère, ‘The Hula in retrospect’, 21. 25 The founding date of 1886 was specified by Kini Kapahu in an interview, Tape HAW 59.8.2, BM. 26 Kini referred to the Hui Lei Mamo as a ‘glee club’ of ‘girls’ in interviews conducted by Theodore Kelsey. She also identified ‘Iolani’ as the glee club of all male singers that ‘belonged to King Kalakaua’. Theodore Kelsey Collection, M-86, Folder 397, HSA. 27 Tape HAW 59.12.2, BM. During this interview in 1962, Kini could not remember the other two women's names. Kini also confirmed during this interview that she joined Kalakaua's court at the age of 14; this is corroborated in ‘Last living court dancer’. However, another secondary source offers a slightly different account. Although Kalākaua had asked Kini to join the troupe earlier, Kini's mother Kapahukulaokamāmalu refused. Only when her mother's friend Queen Kapi‘olani intervened after Kini's 16th birthday was she permitted to dance hula with the group. Clarice B. Taylor, ‘Tales about Hawai‘i’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 14 April 1952. 28 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 29 Tape HAW 59.5.1, BM. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., and ‘Court dancer’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 29 May 1960. 32 Tape HAW 59.8.1, BM. 33 Tape HAW 59.8.2, BM. 34 Stillman, Sacred Hula, 16. Hula āla‘apapa is also more closely associated with hula kuahu, hula ‘bound by the observance of altar rituals honoring [the goddess] Laka’ (23). Kini, however, tended to gloss over the difference between these genres; she claimed that ‘ōlapa and āla‘apapa were the same, with ‘ōlapa being a shortened version of āla‘apapa. Tape HAW 59.8.1, BM. 35 Tape HAW 59.12.2, BM. 36 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. A search for Nakai in Hawaiian and English-language newspapers has not yielded any information. 37 For more on traditional hula training, see Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, 28–37, and Mary Kawena Pukui, ‘The hula, Hawai‘i's own dance’, in Dorothy B. Barrère, Mary Kawena Pukui and Marion Kelly, Hula: historical perspectives, 70–3. 38 Stillman, Sacred Hula, 23. Barrère in ‘The Hula in retrospect’, 63, however, does not interpret hula in 19th-century ‘Christianised’ Hawai‘i as a sacred or religious performance; rather, that it retained a spiritual aspect. 39 Mary Kawena Pukui, ‘The Hula’, unpublished manuscript in Henry Kekahuna papers, MS 445, Folder 51, HSA, 8. 40 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 41 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 42 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 43 ‘Jennie Wilson,’ Typescript Manuscript. Bob Krauss Workbook 3 (Sept 1891–June 1893), U-163, John H. Wilson Research Papers of Bob Krauss, HSA. 44 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. A similar account was published in Betty Patterson, ‘Aunt Jennie at 90 recalls her teens’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 4 March 1962. 45 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 46 Tapes HAW 59.8.2 and 59.12.2, BM. 47 ‘Ōlapa was the dancer, distinct from the ho‘opa‘a (chanter). See Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Hula Pahu: Hawaiian drum dances (Honolulu 1993). 48 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. I have found no American or Canadian newspaper coverage of the troupe prior to its arrival at the Chicago Columbian World's Exposition. 49 ‘Last living court dancer’. Since this photograph was in Kini's collection at the time the article was written, she would have been the most likely source of this information. 50 According to ‘Hula hula dancer is in hard luck’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 August 1895, at the time of his death, Kalākaua had been preparing 12 dancers to represent the country at the Chicago Fair. 51 Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 52 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. I have found no specific North American newspaper coverage of the troupe during this period. 53 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 4. See also Rydell et al., Fair America, 9. 54 Paul Nasaw, Going Out: the rise and fall of public amusements (Cambridge MA 1999), 71. Though exposition attendance figures were inflated, Nasaw suggests that even dividing these figures in half would mean Chicago had nearly 14 million fairgoers, still a huge audience for a nation of 62 million. 55 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the expositions universelles, great exhibitions and world's fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester 1988), 82. 56 Ibid., 42. 57 The organiser of the Chicago Midway, Sol Broom, had been influenced by living villages of French colonies on display at the 1899 Paris World's Fair. 58 The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 introduced the ethnographic model of ‘human showcases’, as described by Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 82. Raymond Corbey has also analysed the Midway sections of imperial fairs as ‘ethnographic showcases’, in ‘Ethnographic showcases, 1870–1930’. 59 Rand McNally & Co.'s A Week at the Fair, Illustrating Exhibits and Wonders of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago 1893), 232, 239. Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Collection 60, Chicago World's Fair, Box 4, National Museum of American History, Archives Center. 60 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 61 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. However, in another interview on Tape HAW 59.8.2, Kini said they performed hula ‘āla‘apapa instead of hula ‘ōlapa. She tended to use these terms interchangeably, although Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman makes a clear argument for their structural and spiritual differences in Sacred Hula, 16. 62 Tapes HAW 59.8.2 and 59.5.1, BM. 63 For example, during Kalākaua's coronation and jubilee, hula performances proceeded for about two weeks. 64 Bob Krauss, Transcribed Interview with Napua Stevens, 3 June 1989, Bob Krauss Workbook, ‘Wilson Tapes Transcribed’, U-163, John H. Wilson Research Papers of Bob Krauss, HSA. 65 Tape HAW 59.1.1, BM. 66 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 67 Krauss, Interview with Napua Stevens. 68 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 69 Tape HAW 59.14.1, BM. 70 Belly dance refers to all solo dance forms with origins in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Although the belly dance was billed as Egyptian at the Chicago Exposition and Kini herself referred to her friends as ‘Egyptian’, the women may have hailed from North Africa or the Middle East. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young (eds), Belly Dance: orientalism, transnationalism and harem fantasy (Costa Mesa 2005), 1. For example, the famous Chicago Midway performer, ‘Little Egypt’, was played by a dancer from Armenia. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: black women performers and the shaping of the modern (Durham 2008), 101. 71 Patterson, ‘Aunt Jennie’. 72 Pacific Commercial Advertiser [PCA], 7 April 1893. The merchant, H.J. Moors, arranged this private exhibition when the Samoan government declined an invitation to the Chicago exposition. Although this village was supposed to be called ‘Polynesian’, exposition guidebooks refer to it as a ‘Samoan village’. Photographs and drawings of Samoans were published in fair guidebooks and periodicals, such as the Illustrated American, but none of Hawaiian performers. 73 Ibid. 74 Tape HAW 59.14.1, BM. 75 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. Nakai and Kanuku eventually returned to Honolulu. 76 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: history, theory, politics (London 1995), 60–3. 77 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 67. 78 There is some evidence that Pacific Islander performers appropriated exhibitions for their own edification and cultural exchanges with their Pacific cousins. Ewan Johnston has briefly described how Maori, Cook Islander and Fijian performers exchanged gifts and ceremonial greetings at the 1906–07 New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries held in Christchurch. Johnston, ‘Reinventing Fiji’, 36–7. 79 David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York 1997), 18. The Creole Show toured from 1890 to 1895. Brown, Babylon Girls, 92–7. 80 Daily Inter-Ocean, 23 July 1893. 81 Another, less plausible, possibility is one suggested by the Honolulu newspaper Daily Bulletin, 24 May 1893. It reported four women and two men leaving Honolulu by steamship for the Chicago Fair in May 1893. Perhaps this was a second group, but since the number of dancers matches Kini's troupe exactly, the Daily Bulletin may have printed erroneous information about Kini's troupe that left Hawai‘i in 1892. 82 Daily Inter-Ocean, 20 August 1893. 83 Washington Bee, 8 December 1894. Quoted in Krasner, Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness, 18. 84 John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the turn of the century (New York 1978), 26. 85 See, for example, New York Times, 30 January 1893 and 2 February 1893, Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 29 and 31 January 1893. 86 See Fayetteville Observer, 13 April 1893 and Daily Picayune, 7 December 1890. 87 ‘Theatrical gossip’, Daily Inter-Ocean, 30 July 1893. 88 ‘Is gone dance crazy’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 August 1893. 89 Ibid.; ‘As finished dance engagement at Chicago World's Fair, is heading for New York’, PCA, 25 November 1893. 90 Kini's charm bracelet includes charms stamped with dates from April 1894 to August 1894 in Germany. She stated that they toured for one year, but it is also conceivable that she returned to the US after six months and joined the vaudeville circuit. 91 Gavan Daws, A Dream of Islands: voyages of self-discovery in the South Seas (New York 1980), 9–11. 92 Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian voyagers on Euroamerican ships (London 1997) 32, 122–3. 93 ‘Court dancer’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 29 May 1960 and Hopkins, Notable Women of Hawaii, 406–8. 94 Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 95 Ibid.; Patterson, ‘Aunt Jennie’; and Hopkins, Notable Women of Hawaii, 406–7. 96 Journalist and biographer Bob Krauss provides a detailed description of Kini's charm bracelet in Krauss Workbook 3 (Sept 1891–June 1893), U-163, HSA. When Krauss examined the bracelet around 1989, it was in the possession of Don Medcalf, owner of Hawaiian Islands Stamp and Coin, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. The charm bracelet includes these dates and cities: April 28, 1894 (Hamburg), May 10, 1894 (München), June 6, 1894 (Chemnitz), June 26, 1894 (German coin) and August 1, 1894 (Berlin). Napua Stevens [Poire], a friend of Kini's, also stated that she saw Kini wearing the charm bracelet. Krauss, Interview with Napua Stevens. 97 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: entertainment and festivity in turn-of-the-century France (New Haven 1988). 98 Charles Rearick, ‘Song and society in turn-of-the-century France’, Journal of Social History, 22:1 (1988), 45–63. 99 Rearick, ‘Song and society’, 53. 100 L.G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque 1996). 101 Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: the Americanization of the world, 1869–1922 (Chicago 2005), 109–10. 102 Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 103 PCA, 6 April 1895; Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 104 North American, 27 December 1894. 105 North American, 18 December 1894. 106 Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: the dime museum in America (New York 1997), 45. 107 Rachel Adams cites the display of the African Ota Benga at the St Louis Fair and Bronx zoo and the promotion of microcephalic twin sisters as freaks from the Yucatan. Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: freaks and the American cultural imagination (Chicago 2001), 30–2. 108 Nasaw, Going Out, 15–16. 109 Charles A. Brandenburgh took over the Ninth and Arch Museum in 1885. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 42. 110 Robert F. Looney (ed.), Old Philadelphia in Early Photographs, 1839–1914 (New York 1976), 108. 111 North American, 26 March 1895. 112 Ibid. 113 ‘Hula hula dancer is in hard luck’. 114 ‘Hula girls in hard luck’, Hawaiian Gazette, 13 August 1895. Pacific Commercial Advertiser of Honolulu also reported a similar story on 13 August 1895 with the title, ‘Hula girls stuck in Logansport, Indiana’. 115 ‘Hula hula dancer is in hard luck’. 116 ‘Unfortunate hula girls’, Hawaiian Gazette, 6 September 1895. 117 Nov 4, 1895 is engraved on the charm. 118 ‘Local brevities’, Hawaiian Gazette, 17 March 1896. 119 Ka Makaainana, 30 March 1896. 120 PCA, 6 April 1895; Ka Makaainana, 15 April 1895; Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 121 Tape HAW 59.8.2, BM. Kini said the last touring dancer to survive besides herself was an ‘Annie Bright’ who lived until about 1952; this may have been Annie Grube's married name. Kini also appears to have outlived her fellow Lei Mamo dancers as well; Aiala, who did not go on tour, died in August 1895. Hawaiian Gazette, 18 June 1895. 122 Tape HAW 59.7.1, BM. 123 Ibid. 124 Tape HAW 59.1.1, BM. 125 Tape HAW 59.3.1, BM. 126 Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 123–63. In 1893, the patriotic group Hui Aloha ‘Āina, men's and women's branches, presented Commissioner James Blount with testimony and documents that convinced Blount that the overthrow was illegal. After reviewing Blount's report, President Grover Cleveland declared the overthrow ‘an act of war’ (134). 127 Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio asserts the inherent political nature of hula, writing, ‘Hula was never just entertainment. It represented the very finest art of an ancient civilization and was itself political because many of the mele were praises of the Ali‘i genealogies and their relationships to the akua’. Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, 203. 128 David A. Chappell argues for more subtle, flexible analyses of resistance and protest that ‘combine various degrees of action, passivity, and victimization’ in ‘Active agents versus passive victims: decolonized historiography or problematic paradigm?’ Contemporary Pacific, 7:2 (1995), 313. 129 Mellen, ‘Honolulu's first lady’, 38. 130 Ka Makaainana, 28 October 1895. Malie Kaleikoa, one of the Hui Lei Mamo members and Hana [Hannah] Lilikalani, the sister of the dancer Pauahi Pinao, were two active members of this mourning group. 131 Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, ‘Of the people who love the land: vernacular history in the poetry of modern Hawaiian hula’, Amerasia Journal, 28:3 (2002), 92. 132 ‘Last living court dancer’; ‘Wary tourism officials skirt issue of Aunt Jennie's Aloha Week blast’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 22 October 1958, and ‘Aunty Jennie's views of Aloha Week’, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 21 October 1958. 133 Tape HAW 59.1.1, BM.