PWAC Victoria: Tom Koppel, Writing Sample

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A Canadian Luau

by Tom Koppel © 1995

A celebration of Canada's unsung Hawaiian heritage. Originally published in Equinox, Aug. 1995.

The sun beats down on the lush, mountainous island. Herk Roland, a brawny charter boat owner with Hawaiian facial features, muscles a log onto a beach fire. Above the coals, a whole pig rotates on a spit. Nearby, steam wafts from the traditional imu, where clams, mussels and oysters cook under layers of seaweed and burlap. Up behind the beach, three hundred people, many in bright Polynesian garb, have settled in for a good-time luau.

Cathy Roland, wearing garlands of flowers in her hair, entertains the guests while they await the feast. Switching easily between Hawaiian and English, she croons a South Seas lover's lament. "E ku'u morning dew, alia mai, alia mai" she sings, "To you alone I say, wait for me, wait for me." Three of her sisters, decked out in leis and muumuus, join her in the chorus. Backing them on bass, guitar and drums is their brother Dave Roland and a few of his friends. Like his sisters, Dave has long black hair and a distinctly Hawaiian look.

But this is not Hawaii. We are on scenic Salt Spring Island, off southeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The Rolands and their Hawaiian ancestors have been putting on luaus here for over a century.

The Rolands are descended from an adventurous Hawaiian named William Naukana, one of some 500 who came to the Northwest Coast in the 19th century to work in the fur trade. Scores of them married native Indian women, put down roots and stayed. They called themselves Kanakas, the Hawaiian for "human being," and established their own small settlements. Some became esteemed members of frontier society. Others were hanged for murder. Mainly, though, they were gutsy survivors who worked hard and adapted well to their chosen home. Their descendants gather each summer to party and celebrate their proud heritage.

American fur traders first began recruiting Hawaiians to work on the Columbia River in 1811. Honolulu was the most convenient source of cheap, reliable labour, and Hawaiians were valued for their superb swimming and boating skills. Serving under three-year contracts, their payment was food, clothing, $100 in merchandise and passage home.

Between 1820 and 1850 the British-owned Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) established a dozen fortified trading posts from Oregon to Alaska, including coastal B.C. Kanakas worked at all of them and on HBC ships. Eventually they were 30% to 60% of the work force at most of these isolated outposts in Indian territory. At the largest post, Fort Vancouver on the Columbia (today's Vancouver, Washington), they lived outside the stockade in the "Kanaka Village" and had their own minister and Owhyhee church.

Kanakas paddled canoes, sawed lumber, herded sheep, shovelled coal on steamships and stood endless hours of guard duty. One HBC officer valued them most highly for their loyalty and courage, "particularly against the Indians, for whom they entertain a very cordial contempt, and if they were let loose against them, they rush upon them like tigers." But the HBC also encouraged its men to marry Indian women, which many Kanakas did. Despite the cool climate, tough work and merciless discipline, some stayed in HBC service for 30 or 40 years.

Others went home and found Hawaii changed beyond recognition. By the 1850s disease had decimated the native Hawaiian population. Europeans and Americans were taking over the economy, and traditional culture was in decline. Many HBC Kanakas chose to return to the Northwest Coast. When settlement began, they were well placed to acquire land.

By the 1870s and 1880s, a concentration of Kanakas had settled in the San Juan Islands of Washington and the nearby Gulf Islands of B.C., especially Salt Spring. They cleared land, built log cabins, planted fruit trees and gardens, and fished for food. They even grew tobacco and brewed their own hooch. The Hawaiian language gradually died out, but other traditions lived on. Some families continued to eat imported poi, and told their children about the power of the kahunas. They fished according to the hukilau method of beach seining. And there was the luau. When the harvest was over and the rainy season began, the entire community would gather for week-long feasts featuring outdoor cooking and dancing.

This dance tradition is alive today. After the feast of roast pork and seafood, guests enjoy a rousing display of hula by three generations of B.C.'s Messer and Johnston families. They are descended from Owen Browne Jr., who had both Hawaiian and Tahitian blood and became a respected captain on the paddle wheel steamers that were the main transportation on Northwest rivers and lakes. Tito and Shannon Messer, in red and blue muumuus, weave provocative images with their hands. They lure a gaggle of men to join them in a schmaltzy fishing dance. And then, the show-stopper. Gorgeous young Natasha Johnston, in a low-slung wrap and a halter of coconut shells, pops eyeballs with a fiery and seductive Tahitian drum dance.

Master of ceremonies at the luau is Larry Bell, who acknowledges the Hawaiian connection to Northwest native communities. "We're all one people," he says, "all one blood." He introduces Indian groups from Cowichan on Vancouver Island and the Lummi Reservation in Washington State. To throbbing drumbeats, they perform a series of their traditional dances.

Larry Bell has been busy tracing his roots. "I was in Hawaii recently," he says, "at a heiau, a temple, with lava rocks and pieces of ti leaves. I sat down with my wife and said to her, 'Can't you feel it? Can't you feel something happening here?' And I started to cry."

Bell is descended from half-Hawaiian, half-Indian Maria Mahoy, who was born on Vancouver Island in 1855. She settled on Salt Spring Island with B.C.'s first whaling captain, Abel Douglas, had six children and delivered many others as a midwife. Douglas hunted whales in local waters and seals in the Bering Sea, then disappeared from her life.

Still young, Maria married half-British, half-Indian George Fisher and had six more children. They moved to tiny Russell Island around 1902, where they planted an orchard, kept sheep and a cow, and built a small house. The children rowed across to a one-room school on Salt Spring Island. George fished, built boats and pruned people's trees. Maria dug clams and gathered edible seaweed for a Chinese cash buyer who came around in his schooner.

But mainly Maria raised the children and kept house, filling the kerosene lamps, stoking the wood-burning cook stove, preparing meals, boiling clothes and diapers in huge tubs and scrubbing them by hand on a washboard. She put up fruits and vegetables in low-budget canning jars that she made from old bottles and sealed with flour-paste and wax paper. Lacking refrigeration, she smoked herring and salmon and hung butter and other perishables down the well.

Her life was an exotic hybrid of Hawaiian, Indian and Anglo-Canadian ways. She often speared an octopus for her pot, and liked to eat raw sea urchin eggs. She spoke some Hawaiian and taught hula to her children and grandchildren. She would go out in her canoe during thunderstorms and swim in the rain. While swimming, she would beat her chest and chant to call her Hawaiian guardian spirits.

But Maria also "talked Indian" and served tea to the local bands, who often visited in their canoes and brought her fish. Like the Indians, she draped tree boughs in the sea to collect sticky herring eggs. Like them, she believed certain owl calls portended death. And her grandchildren say she had psychic powers.

Maria Mahoy's descendants take a break from the luau for a stone laying at the little Catholic church where the family traditionally worshipped. Some of them still look quite Hawaiian, others hardly at all. As one quips, "there's a lot of cream in the coffee." Maria's grandson Harry Roberts, now in his 70s, recalls his summers on Russell Island and the adventurous spirit the Hawaiians brought to the Northwest coast.

Even as an old woman, he remembers, Maria was an intrepid sailor. When she needed supplies, she would pack the grandchildren into her 16-foot open boat and sail off to market. In a strong wind she would lean out and heel the boat right over. If the breeze failed, she had only to whistle for a while, and soon her sails filled again. "It was an old Hawaiian superstition," Roberts chuckles, but he swears it worked for her. As her ancestors had done before her, she would whistle for the wind.

Tom Koppel
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Last updated: April 22, 2002 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/koppel02.html