Benjamin Madley: “Travel Writers, Journalists, and Officials”

Benjamin Madley, University of California, Los Angeles och Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala: “Travel Writers, Journalists, and Officials: Finding Native Hawaiians in the California Gold Rush, 1848–1868”

Presentation
Assembling disparate sources can sometimes reveal largely forgotten histories. This talk will explore how the works of travel writers, journalists, and officials reveal the presence of perhaps 1,000 or more Native Hawaiian miners in the California Gold Rush. When brought into conversation, these different sources reveal when, where, how, and why Native Hawaiians mined, the reasons for their decline, and how they shaped California and Hawai‘i. Finally, the talk will explore why we do not know more about this history, the growing field of diasporic Hawaiian studies, the importance of uncovering hidden histories of voluntary Indigenous migration and labor in the making of the western United States, and the issues involved in stitching together disparate sources to create a narrative.