About Braided Waters
“In his new and extensively researched history of Hawai’i’s often marginalized yet fought-over ‘middle island,’ Wade Graham opens a window to ‘a place of remarkable endurance, resistance, and cultural resilience.’ Graham skillfully demonstrates how control over water has been at the center of Molokai’s ecological, economic, social, and political history both in the precontact Polynesian period and in the even more dramatic changes of the past two centuries. The story of Molokai is, moreover, the larger story of the Hawaiian Islands. Graham’s book deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in Hawaiian and Polynesian history.”
—Patrick V. Kirch, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii’s Molokai Island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.
"Now Hawaii has found its environmental historian in Wade Graham, an exceptionally talented writer and scholar.... His book is rich in theory and insight, and it should stand for a long time as an exceptional piece of history—a provocative tale of evolution.”
—Donald Worster, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Kansas
“Compellingly argued, theoretically robust, and deeply researched, Braided Waters is an invaluable contribution to the historical literature about Molokai and the Hawaiian Islands in general that deserves a wide readership. Hopefully, it will spark more research into the environmental history of these stunningly beautiful and ecologically ravaged islands.”
—Frank Zelko, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii
Wade Graham
University of California Press
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520298590/braided-waters
280 pp. 6 x 9 Illus: 12 bw figures, 4 maps
9780520298590 December 2018
Review: Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawai'i
By Frank Zelko, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 50, Number 3, Winter 2020,
pp. 459-462 (Review)
Published by The MIT Press.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/741634
Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawai’i. By Wade Graham (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018) 262 pp. $70.00 Graham’s emphasis on the importance of the availability and control of water in shaping Molokai—and the Hawaiian islands in general—brings to mind debates about Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic despotism in Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New York, 1957). It is also redolent of the influential lineage of ecologically oriented anthropologists—Steward, Rappaport, Netting, and Sahlins, among others—whose theories of socio-ecological change helped to shape the work of early environmental historians such as Worster.1 Little wonder that Worster enthusiastically praises Graham’s work in his foreword.
Braided Waters offers a broadly chronological environmental history of the Hawaiian Islands, and Molokai in particular, beginning with the first 800 or so years of Polynesian settlement, followed by a series of chapters organized around important demarcations in Hawaiian ecological and economic history. By the time the first humans arrived on the islands, several million years of isolated evolution had produced stunning levels of biodiversity and endemism. For example, compared to Hawaii’s dozens of specialized honeycreeper species—all likely evolved from a wayward flock of Eurasian rosefinches—Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches would have seemed about as interesting as Hyde Park starlings. Polynesian settlement, which likely occurred in at least two waves, resulted from the same forces that pushed Norse settlers across the north Atlantic: Limited arable land combined with primogeniture meant that “oceanic expansion was a farmer’s imperative” (15). On board their vessels, these wayfarers packed their staples—taro, yam, and sweet potato (the latter indicating trade between Polynesians and South Americans)—along with various vegetables, fruits, and animals. Some they brought intentionally (chickens and pigs), and others presumably not (rats). Settling first in the well-watered valleys that favored irrigated taro farming—the most efficient form of agriculture on the islands—population growth gradually forced expansion into dryer leeward regions more suited to sweet potato and yam. Leeward agriculture was less stable and more labor-intensive, unsurprisingly spurring warfare among leeward chiefs eager to conquer the taro valleys of their windward rivals.
Graham’s history of pre-colonial Hawai’i is heavily indebted to Kirch, an archeologist, particularly his collaborative work with Sahlins.2 Their fine-grained studies of Hawaiian material culture and ecological change in Oahu’s Anahulu river valley inform Graham’s theorizing throughout. Resource “thickness” or “thinness,” he argues, correlates with social “bigness,” and although the historical mechanism is at base environmental, it is not so much a deterministic and linear relation as it is a circular one: “Social bigness thrives on physical bigness and makes more of it through intensified land use to obtain more surplus, thereby making more social bigness through stratification.” The result is that frequently, although not inevitably, “social stratification and environmental degradation will tend to produce one another reciprocally” (42). This conclusion is similar to the one that Worster—heavily informed by Wittfogel and Steward—reached in his analysis of California’s hydraulic history.3 In Hawai’i, Graham argues, regardless of whether the mode of production was primarily wet or dry, “Bigness constitutes itself, at least in part, on the destruction of the environmental basis of small community reproduction and by seizing control over the common resources that remain,” thereby expanding “into new areas with capital-intensive infrastructure and labor-intensive production” (43).
Graham demonstrates that the environmental and cultural imperatives that shaped life in pre-colonial Hawai’i subsequently continued to do so, albeit within a different political and economic framework. “Thickness” increasingly came to mean an environment’s ability to support crop production for a global market, and in Hawai’i that meant sugar cane, which further intensified the importance of water management, subordinating virtually all hydraulic projects to the needs of the sugar industry. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, Graham details the work of Harold Lyon, a plant pathologist hired by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to manage the territory’s upland forests in order to maximize water supply. Since Hawai’i was essentially a sugar colony by the late nineteenth century, Lyon effectively became the equivalent of a state forester. For the first decades of the twentieth century, he applied his eclectic blend of eugenics, utilitarian conservation, and sugar boosterism to forest management. Native plants, like native peoples, were destined to make way for the coming of American civilization. Lyon oversaw a massive re-planting program emphasizing hardy and fast-growing species—such as eucalypts, figs, bamboo, and guava—that he thought would stabilize the soil and create an optimal watershed for the sugar plains below. Today’s upland forests remain a legacy of Lyon’s “mad science,” as Graham calls it, not least in the back of the Mānoa Valley, site of the Harold Lyon Arboretum (151). Graham does not use the term, but one may as well call Lyon’s creation a “sugar forest,” the management of which largely obliterated the native upland ecosystem.
A smaller island with a large dry plain and many narrow valleys unsuited to sugar growing or large population centers, Molokai, both during its Polynesian and colonial phases, was always on the “thin” side compared to Oahu and Maui. Pineapple became its most successful export. Otherwise, the dryer sections of the island were used for cattle ranching, and the wet valleys continued to support populations growing traditional Polynesian crops augmented by various imports. Ecologically, cattle and pineapple decimated the dry side of the island. Politically, Molokai has always been torn between those who wish to preserve as many pre-contact lifeways as possible and those who have sought to create export-oriented economic-growth schemes—best represented by the Molokai Project, an expensive publicly subsidized venture designed to move water to the dry eastern half of the island to benefit pineapple growers. However, the Project was completed just as pineapple corporations like Dole began taking advantage of lower labor costs in Central America and Southeast Asia. Costly, ecologically problematic, and ultimately unnecessary, it was a testament to ill-conceived development, a poorly planned attempt to “thicken” and “make big” a place that was always characterized by thinness and smallness.
Compellingly argued, theoretically robust, and deeply researched, Braided Waters is an invaluable contribution to the historical literature about Molokai and the Hawaiian Islands in general that deserves a wide readership. Hopefully, it will spark more research into the environmental history of these stunningly beautiful and ecologically ravaged islands.
1 See, for example, Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Chicago, 1955); Roy Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Berkeley, 1993); Robert Netting, Cultural Ecology (San Francisco, 1977; Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1978); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York, 1977).
2 Patrick Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (Chicago, 1992), 2 v.
3 Donald Worster, “Hydraulic Society in California: An Ecological Interpretation,” Agricultural History, LVI (1982), 503–515.
Frank Zelko
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Review: “Water and Empire in Hawai’i: ‘Braided Waters’ Reveals Deep History on Molokai”
By Charles Donelan. Santa Barbara Independent, July 10, 2019.
https://www.independent.com/2019/07/10/reading-issue-between-the-pages/
The Hawaiian Islands occupy a special place in the cultural imaginary, and for the most part, they have capitalized on it. The idea of “paradise on earth” makes for a powerful brand, and tourist destinations such as Oahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i have never been more popular or more expensive than they are today. Yet there’s one traditional image of Hawaiian paradise that sends mixed signals, and that’s the promise of “miles of empty white sand beaches.” The island where you will find the longest stretches of this fantasy condition is Molokai, and in a fascinating new book, Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawai‘i, environmental historian Wade Graham explains why the emptiness of this large island in the middle of the Hawaiian chain is not a healthy sign.
For most of us, the name Molokai conjures thoughts of Father Damien and the leper colony at Kalaupapa that was founded in 1866 when thousands of Native Hawaiians with no immunity to Hansen’s disease were quarantined there. While that colony does still exist and could until recently be visited by those willing to descend thousands of feet by mule to its location at the base of some of the world’s highest cliffs, even that marginal tourist attraction on Molokai is now closed.
For Graham, Molokai’s deep history of colonization by seafaring Polynesians centuries prior to contact with the West made it an ideal subject for exploring the history of a marginalized place. “History is still too often explained by looking at powerful, central, dominant places,” he contends, adding that “most of the world is not a center, but a margin — by definition the periphery is larger and more extensive than the core.” Thus the lessons about agriculture, empire, and sustainability he draws from the fate of Molokai have profound implications for how we understand the Anthropocene future.
“History is still too often explained by looking at powerful, central, dominant places… Most of the world is not a center, but a margin — by definition the periphery is larger and more extensive than the core.”
As can be seen in the book’s title — taken from a translation of the name Molokai, which means “braided waters” — the crucial factor in the island’s history has been the control of its limited water supply. Although the boarded-up condos, abandoned hotels, and overgrown golf courses that can be seen there today reflect only the most recent attempts to stimulate economic growth, remnants of other, more distant projects and civilizations can be found that indicate a pattern of exploitation and environmental degradation going back thousands of years to the Polynesians, well before the arrival of European explorers.
Aided by a battery of scientific approaches to analyzing land use, flora, and fauna over time, Braided Waters weaves a compelling, data-driven account of the original colonization of the Hawaiian Islands by seafaring Polynesians beginning around 1000 CE. The cascading effects of the introduction of nonnative species and agricultural intensification through extensive irrigation projects caused the island’s fragile ecosystem to become deforested, eroded, and desiccated.
Paradoxically, what was bad for the environment was good for those who occupied the top rungs of a very hierarchical society. Increased dependency on monoculture crops grown for export delivered more and more power into the hands of the ruling elite well before the arrival of western sugar and pineapple companies. After the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778, the inequalities present in preexisting native social structures were amplified by trade with similarly inclined Westerners, who were only too happy to deal with a society organized around a handful of all-powerful imperial authority figures.
In the second half of the book, the pace accelerates as various schemes to improve Molokai through crops such as sugar and pineapples are applied and run their course, leaving environmental ruin in their wake. Cattle and pigs chew up the native vegetation, sending washes of silt down the steep canyons to fill in what were at one time highly productive fishponds.
Today Molokai sits on an uneasy perch between worlds. Attempts to develop the island as a tourist destination have been blocked by Hawaiians whose embrace of subsistence strategies like fishing, hunting, and small-scale farming must be supplemented by welfare checks. The path to a sustainably authentic future for Molokai remains unclear, but thanks to Braided Waters, that territory now has a historically informed map.