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Race, Religion, and Citizenship in Mormon Country: Native Hawaiians in Salt Lake City, 1869–1889
Matthew Kester
This essay traces the growth and development of the Native Hawaiian community in Salt Lake City, examines popular representations of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in nineteenth-century Utah, and chronicles the 1889 Utah Supreme Court case that excluded Native Hawaiians from United States citizenship based on their race.
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I'll start with the story of one man's life. John W. Kauleinamoku was one of the earliest Native Hawaiian converts to Mormonism who settled in Salt Lake City in the nineteenth century. In 1875, he immigrated to Utah from Hawai'i after completing a Mormon mission to the South Ki'i district in Kona. Described later as an "intelligent native and fluent speaker," Kauleinamoku was well-known among many Salt Lake City Mormons.1 In April of 1875, he addressed his fellow Mormons at a semiannual religious conference.2 In the spring of 1876, a party of six Native Hawaiians traveled to Salt Lake City with the returning missionary Alma L. Smith. Accompanying this group was a woman named Likibeka, who John Kauleinamoku later married. He and his new wife were included in an 1884 Salt Lake City directory where he is said to have been employed as a stonecutter.3 |
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Sometime in 1887, Kauleinamoku was called on a second Mormon mission, this time to New Zealand, where he remained for two years. He returned to Salt Lake City and found work as a carpenter. Kauleinamoku purchased a lot and built a home in the Warm Springs district of the city, an inexpensive, working-class neighborhood of Scandinavian migrants and Native American families located on the outskirts of town. In the following months, several other Native Hawaiian families who had settled in the city joined Kauleinamoku in the Warm Springs district. By this time, the community of Native Hawaiian Saints living in the city had grown considerably, as had the tensions between Mormons and non-Mormons over political control of the territory in the years leading up to statehood. Animosity toward the growing Native Hawaiian community from white residents (both Mormon and non-Mormon) of Salt Lake City increased in 1889, resulting in part from a controversy over Native Hawaiian applications for United States citizenship and suffrage, and in part from fears over a rumored outbreak of leprosy in the community. Responding to these tensions, Kauleinamoku represented the Native Hawaiian community on a committee tasked with finding a place to relocate community members outside of the city. When a settlement site was selected, Kauleinamoku and his family joined approximately forty-five other Native Hawaiian families and relocated to their new home in Skull Valley, seventy-five miles southeast of Salt Lake City. They named the new settlement Iosepa, after the Mormon apostle Joseph F. Smith. Sometime in the 1890s, Kauleinamoku contracted leprosy, one of three individuals in the settlement to do so, and he died in Iosepa on 21 July 1899.4 |
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In the pages that follow, I examine the history of Native Hawaiian Mormons in Salt Lake City from 1869 to 1889, the year that Native Hawaiians were found legally ineligible for United States citizenship based on their race. Following the 1889 ruling, approximately fifty Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in Utah moved to the small, isolated settlement of Iosepa. While Iosepa has received the most attention from historians, comparatively little work has been done on the experiences of Native Hawaiian Mormons living in Salt Lake City in the years before Iosepa was established.5 |
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