Women’s Work: The Last Queens of Hawaii

The last two queens of Hawaii imagined new ways to care for people with leprosy; their efforts did not last, but their legacy remains.

Queen Kapiʻolani and Princess Liliʻuokalani  at Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, 1887 (Hawaii State Archives)

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In the summer of 1887, Queen Victoria of England celebrated her Golden Jubilee. At the event were two royal women representing Hawaii: Queen Kapiʻolani (wife of King Kalākaua) and Princess Liliʻuokalani (sister of the king and the heir to the throne). The trip was cut short soon after the Queen’s Jubilee, however, when Kapiʻolani and Liliʻuokalani received troubling news from home: Rebels of the Hawaiian League, a group of mostly white and foreign residents, forced King Kalākaua to sign a new constitution limiting the king’s power.

Queen Kapiʻolani ca. 1883 and Princess Liliʻuokalani (Wikimedia Commons / Library of Congress)

The “Bayonet Constitution” became a dividing line in Hawaiian history, changing the power structure in the kingdom. It also unraveled years of work Queen Kapiʻolani and Princess Liliʻuokalani had devoted to their people. Since 1881, the royal women had been at the forefront of efforts to change how Hawaiians managed the care and treatment of people with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease.

Disease was a problem on the Hawaiian Islands throughout the 19th century. By 1840, one scholar estimates, more than 80 percent of indigenous Hawaiians had died from measles, whooping cough, dysentery, and other diseases brought by outsiders. Cases of leprosy also began growing at alarming rates. At the time, leprosy was greatly feared because it was contagious, disfiguring, and incurable. In 1865, King Kamehameha V signed legislation designed to target the disease. Within a year, anyone found to have leprosy would be sent to live on the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokaʻi island.

64 boys who lived at Kalaupapa, 1889  (Wikimedia Commons)

It was an isolated location, but one with many resources. Scholar Pennie Moblo notes that when the site was chosen, there was plenty of access to sweet potato, taro, and fish, three foods well-known to many Hawaiians. Officials believed that by quarantining patients in this area, they would be able to live on their own, without infecting others. Sometimes, family members received permission to accompany a patient to Kalaupapa. Local residents occasionally supported the them in the early years as well, particularly with food and supplies.

The settlement on Kalaupapa (Historic Hawaii Foundation)

Still, the practice of sending patients with leprosy to Kalaupapa was not universally supported. Many Hawaiians continued to petition for a different approach to leprosy care, calling for the creation of leprosy hospitals on each island. Some believed this would be better than complete exile. These petitions went ignored for many years.

Leprosy policy did not change immediately when Kalākaua became king in 1874, but in 1881, he left Hawaii to tour the world, leaving Princess Liliʻuokalani as regent. While he was gone, Liliʻuokalani made her first visit to Kalaupapa to visit the leprosy community. When she returned to Oahu, she started plans to open the Kakaʻako Branch Hospital in Honolulu. This would be a center focused on care and treatment of those with leprosy, at least in earlier stages of the disease.

Then Queen Kapiʻolani got involved. By 1883, she and the king began a search for medical professionals who could provide care at Kakaʻako Branch Hospital. They contacted at least 50 different religious orders devoted to medical care. Patients with leprosy were usually stigmatized; many people did not want to care for people with the disease. Only one woman said yes. In November 1883, Mother Marianne Cope and five members of the Sisters of St. Francis arrived in Oʻahu.

The Queen’s efforts had only begun. In June 1884, Queen Kapiʻolani began raising funds for the patients and residents of Kalaupapa. A month later, she and Princess Liliʻuokalani toured Kalaupapa. During her visit, the queen stopped at every home. She asked residents about their health and their lives in the community. The superintendent of Kalaupapa, who traveled with her, saw the queen’s reaction to the peoples’ stories, writing: “The Queen seeing with her own eyes the poverty, squalor and squalid bare conditions of the homes of some of her people, was visibly affected…” The experience made a lasting impact on the queen. In the months that followed, she solicited supplies and funds to create more than 700 care packages for the people of Kalaupapa, directly responding to the needs they had shared with her.

But the people of Kalaupapa had other concerns, too. For nearly two decades, Hawaiian law had separated many families with their exile policy, but Kalaupapa had also become a community. Some patients were fortunate to still have family members with them. Others were beginning new families in the settlement there. Now, there were a number of children at Kalaupapa — many of whom had contracted leprosy. Residents at Kalaupapa asked Queen Kapiʻolani to do something for the young girls in particular.

Just one year later, the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls was dedicated in Honolulu in late 1885. Now Kalaupapa patients could send their healthy daughters to a place that could keep them from getting sick. For these families, Kapiʻolani Home represented a future for their daughters beyond Kalaupapa, even if it was one that kept them separate from the family and people they loved.

Mother Marianne Cope and other sisters at the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls (Wikimedia Commons)

Neither Kakaʻako Branch Hospital nor the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls was perfect: Locals criticized the presence of leprosy patients in Honolulu at times, and some protested the act of separating young girls from their families. When the first girls – orphans – were taken from Kalaupapa to go to the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls, for example, one resident attacked and killed several people helping with the girls’ transportation.

Yet both facilities offered new options for supporting patients and their families, at least in some way responding to the requests of Kalaupapa patients. Complete and utter isolation was no longer the only method of fighting leprosy. Exiling leprosy patients had not ended, but by creating facilities near the general population in Honolulu, Kapiʻolani and Liliʻuokalani were expanding options for care and imagining a society in which people with leprosy could be treated and live with dignity near their families and homes. Their efforts were attempts to respond directly to the requests of Kalaupapa patients, many of whom longed for family and friends back home.

This shift in how leprosy patients were treated can be seen in the declining numbers of people sent to Kalaupapa over time. In 1873, for instance, less than a decade after Kalaupapa opened, individuals from nearly 500 families were sent to the island because of leprosy. A decade later, in 1883, 290 people were sent there. The numbers continued to drop in the 1880s, down to 74 (1885), 28 (1886), and then just 10 people in the first half of 1887.

But the Bayonet Constitution reversed this trend. More people than ever were once again being sent to Kalaupapa as white settlers of the Hawaiian League took more power. Leprosy was not spreading at higher levels after 1887, so it is not entirely clear why exiles to Kalaupapa increased. However, since the majority of those sent to Kalaupapa were indigenous Hawaiians, one reason may be that white leaders were particularly concerned with controlling the native population. In 1888, 558 people were exiled to Kalaupapa, the largest number ever sent in a single year. By 1890, more than 1,200 people lived at Kalaupapa. Mother Marianne and the Sisters of St. Francis relocated to Kalaupapa to provide support at the new Bishop Home for Girls that had been built there in 1888. Exiling people with leprosy to Kalaupapa was once again the primary public health solution in Hawaii.

Bishop Home for Girls on Kalaupapa (Courtesy Sister of St. Francis of the Neumann Communites, Images of Old Hawaiʻi)

Liliʻuokalani assumed the throne when King Kalākaua died in early 1891. Like her brother and sister-in-law before her, she prioritized the leprosy patients. As queen, she made Kaluapapa the first destination on her tour of the kingdom. It was her third visit to Kalaupapa, but this one was more personal than ever. In early 1888, Liliʻuokalani’s friend Kapoli Kamakau had been sent to Kalaupapa after contracting leprosy. The Queen saw her friend during her visit to Kalaupapa in 1891 for the last time; Kapoli died just three months later.

Kapoli Kamakau (Library of Congress)

The story of the two queens and their efforts to help Hawaiian leprosy patients often seems to end here. In 1893, Liliʻuokalani was overthrown by white settlers. While she continued to fight for her country, the United States annexed the islands in 1898. Neither of the former queens visited Kalaupapa again, but the people there remembered the women who had tried to do so much for them. Thousands of Hawaiians protested annexation with petitions they sent to the United States, including 700 residents at Kalaupapa. For more than a decade, the last two queens of Hawaii had ensured that the people of Kalaupapa knew they were still part of the Hawaiian community. As the queens lost their power, the people of Kalaupapa continued to affirm their sense of belonging in the Hawaiian kingdom.

Newspaper story about Queen Liliʻuokalani filing a protest against the United States’ annexation of Hawaii (Library of Congress)

As an American territory, the new Hawaiian government focused more than ever on exiling leprosy patients to Kalaupapa, a practice that continued until 1969. No cure for Hansen’s Disease was developed until 1941, and it did not come to the patients at Kalaupapa until 1946, after World War II had ended. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter designated Kalaupapa a National Historical Park, but it has also remained a home: Any of the patients who lived at Kalaupapa before 1969 have the right to live there if they wish. Eight patients remain.

 

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Comments

  1. As usual- the United States of America crapped all over indigenous people every time they had the chance!
    Our history is a shameful reminder of what is happening today and in the future

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