Joy Schulz is a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, focusing on US foreign policy and comparative politics in the Pacific region. Schulz has written two books: When Women Ruled the Pacific: Female Political Power in Nineteenth-century Hawai’i and Tahiti and Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific, which won the 2018 award for best book on the history of the Pacific West from the Western History Association, a US-based nonprofit.
You have extensively researched female political power in the Pacific, particularly in Hawai’i and Tahiti in the 19th century. What inspired your interest in this topic, and why do you feel it's important to highlight the roles of women in Pacific political history?
[There are] two ways to answer your question. The first is—when I was researching my first book on children who grew up under the Hawaiian Kingdom, whose parents were Americans but [who] were born in the islands—I came across Queen Liliʻuokalani as a fascinating person. She was a Christian based upon the American missionary movement in Hawai’i, but she also was an Indigenous Hawaiian [who] was attempting to merge both cultures. I wanted to follow up with more in-detail research of her life after that first book.
The second way to answer your question would be in Indigenous Studies. There [are often] references to the fact that Indigenous communities have allowed women a greater political role, but I've never really seen it fleshed out in the literature. I've never seen any sort of manuscript or detailed explanation of what that actually looked like in a comparative setting in a very industrial space and time. Researching Liliʻuokalani and some of the women who came before in Hawai’i, I also came across some of the queens in Tahiti. I thought this would be a fantastic book [in which] to talk about women in this particular part of the world because they were so unique and different from women exercising rights in other parts of the world.
How did you select the four women you’ve focused on in your work, [Purea, ‘Aimata, Ka’ahumanu, Lili’uokalani], and what aspects of their leadership stood out?
The fact that British, French, Spanish, and American men met these women at particular points in history [is crucial]. That the very first American and European men “discovering” these islands were coming into contact with women rulers—and then that those same nation-states decided to control or take over the independence of those islands at the exact same time that women were in political power—was just too good of a story not to tell. Just the fact that gender played such a huge role in the geopolitics of the Pacific.
How did these dynamics develop over the period of colonization? For example, we have this force of patriarchal imperialism at the same time we have these matriarchies. How did these gender dynamics interact more specifically for imperialism to develop?
Being a historian of American foreign policy interested in [its] religious component, [I am fascinated by] the fact that Americans and the British in the 19th century [were] very united in what they believe[d] their theological role was in the world. That understanding—among missionaries and even among sympathetic political leaders in Parliament [and] in Congress and the presidency really supporting the religious component of foreign policy—made the gender dynamics all the more contested. Within the 19th-century Protestant Christian tradition, gender ideology was very dominant and limiting in terms of equality for women. The fact that these missionaries had such an outsized role even before the governments did in both Hawai’i and Tahiti meant that those gender roles were very much imposed culturally before they were actually imposed militarily.
How do you see these cultural and religious influences persisting beyond the colonial period into today, or even in the following decades?
Looking at our political climate today, we have some real positives. We've had a woman [as] Speaker of the House, a woman [as] Vice President, [and] many women in high national Cabinet positions. Yet, there is still somewhat of a dialog within our American electorate about women being in high political office—but even more importantly, within our religious faith traditions, which [still] highly influence our political process. We are still lagging behind where Hawai’i and Tahiti were 300 [or even] 500 years ago. That is disturbing, as someone who want[s] to see people [and particularly women] of faith be embraced [in] true equality. The history of our nations can't be ignored. Gender politics was [not] perfect in Polynesian societies by any means, but it was different, and it was criticized because it was different: women being treated as political equals or even superiors to men.
What do you think it would look like for these differences to begin to be reconciled now? Looking back towards the past, what lessons could we gain today?
One of my goals for writing [When Women Ruled the Pacific] was to write it in such a way that it would be accessible to students at whatever level—[whether] collegiate, high school, [or] graduate. I wrote it with the student in mind because I think that there is such power and pride in knowing about one's history. My goal would be that every student—in Hawai’i, [Tahiti], and beyond, [to] the French [and] American empire[s] that still exist today—would become familiarized with these women's names. Let's just start there: the fact that we have a Purea and an Aimata [and] nobody even knows who they are. We know Kamehameha the first, second, and third. But do we know Kaʻahumanu? In Hawai’i, they do. This is something that children can take pride in, and they can learn their own histories as being instrumental and directive to the rest of the world. Whether the world accepted [it] at the time or not, [Indigenous communities] were ahead. They were far ahead of Western traditions that had more military power, and it lends itself to a dialogue about cultural imperialism, but also the lasting power of a cultural tradition that is the antithesis of what we would today consider moral.
Since many of these histories have been lost or forgotten, what does it mean to revisit them today and remember and learn from them? How can we remember these forgotten histories?
Take, for example, the [current] debate in K-12 schools over critical race theory. Think about how divisive it is and how many hours upon hours state legislatures have spent debating and coming up with rules about this issue. If you take politics out of it and look at [it] from a broader perspective, it is undeniable that race has played a massive role in US foreign and domestic politics. Gender has also played a massive role.
The earliest feminists were simply arguing for the right to speak out in their churches or on the public square about anti-slavery movements and their abolitionist stances. These are huge liberal questions that had this racial and gender component. We're talking about equality. [Prejudice] subverted the morality of the message and so that sort of prejudice that Western nations had was infused with Christianity. Those islands today are still largely Christian in some way, shape, or form. Tahiti is more secular, but there is [still a] strong minority who adhere to a Christian faith. You can have the coexistence of faith and equality. There was a different way to do this history. Liliʻuokalani was modeling a different way to do history, and she was right. Just because she quote, unquote “lost the war” does not mean she wasn't right, and we need to remember that.
Can you expand a little on what this different way of history looks like or has been?
You're looking for women in writings that aren't about women. The archives are [primarily] written by naval officers [and] sailors who are [in] mutiny and living on Tahiti in their glory days. [They are also written by] missionaries, predominantly men, [and] particularly in the English case, there were very few women missionaries writing [then]. Men are writing about women, and they're writing about these encounters. Then, they're rewriting [these narratives] later to add this [glorified] aspect to what they've accomplished in their lives. [One] idea of a historian [is] going beyond the archives and reading what's not there. It was very interesting to try to imagine everything from the [perspective of the] chiefs, who are women. [A] man is writing about an event, [and a female leader] is giving birth on an island while [others are] giving her island away to France. What would that actually be like, to experience that as a woman? I didn't write [and] I didn't publish anything that wasn't corroborated in the sources. I really tried to write it from their perspective. In doing that, I got angry at some of the women. I was mad at them for the decisions that they were making. The fact that I tried to put myself in their shoes, in their actual time and space, is what made the book work.
What do you think were some of the most difficult decisions made? With which did you disagree?
I empathize with Queen Pōmare [IV]. She was made Queen when she was a very young teenager, and she [acted as] a teenager. She liked to party; she liked to hang out with her friends; and she was not necessarily serious about doing what the British missionaries wanted her to do. You can imagine them tearing out their hair and being super serious about the direction the Isles needed to go and how terrible she was as a ruler.
On the one hand, you could see [Pōmare] going this different direction and pushing like a rebellious teenager when maybe she could have been more thoughtful. You can also see, on the other hand, how everything she did was a response to what she ultimately disagreed with: the power, the politics, and the culture that was being pushed upon her. [Pōmare] did fight back. She didn’t necessarily always do it in the most visionary or long-term, thoughtful way. But she was a very young girl, overwhelmed in her situation, and she was [simultaneously] surprisingly political and exceptionally devoted to her people.
What role do you think women’s leadership—both historically in the Pacific and today—plays in reshaping our understanding of power and governance?
The Indigenous movement is not going away and, if anything, is getting stronger [worldwide]. The United Nations and some of the [other] international agencies and organizations have really taken on the idea of human rights and cultural rights from an Indigenous perspective. The role and the voice[s] of women need to be a strong presence in those dialogues. We tend to think of political leadership as sort of monolithic or having one straight line. In fact, women have disrupted the political trajectories of world history at numerous points and yet have gotten very little credit. Think about Kaʻahumanu, [for example], who not only destroyed the religious taboos of her country, but [also] established a whole other order politically in just her lifetime. Islands tend to see change more rapidly because when two different cultures [conflict] in a small space, you see the ramifications very quickly. [It's] amazing that a woman was able to upend hundreds of years of history by her political will, and that Indigenous history is part of the larger history of Hawai’i. Women are part and parcel of any solution. They're instrumental to where we are today.
Black spoke with Schulz on October 21, 2024. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity, and italics have been added for emphasis.
Feature image courtesy of Metropolitan Community College on YouTube.
The views expressed in this piece are the interviewee's own and are not reflective of the views of the HIR.
