The Hui Panalä'au Program

This article relates to The Not-Quite States of America

Imagine being sent to a remote island just to populate it so that your country can then call it theirs. The Hui Panalä'au program did just that, as Doug Mack describes in The Not-Quite States of America.

As Japan became increasingly aggressive to its Pacific neighbors in the 1930s, the United States needed an effective way of keeping Japan's unbridled ambitions in check. It built runways and outposts on Wake Island, Midway Atoll, and Palmyra Atoll, all remote islands in the Pacific. The US also decided to lay claim to three smaller islands, Howland, Baker and Jarvis by first populating them.

The U.S. Navy decided that Hawaiians would be best for this purpose and recruits were signed on from the Kamehameha School for Boys in Honolulu with a payment offer of three dollars a day to go to these islands, a five-day trip from Hawaii by boat, and set up camp. Eventually students from other schools were also signed on, for a total of 130 students. In the book, one such "colonist" bursts the bubble about these being trips to lush islands: "They were flat, barren...There's scrub brush and birds, that's all," he says. There were groups of five, rotating every couple of months and some signed on for additional rotations.

These islanders' job was to keep daily logs of how they were surviving, growing food and fishing, and taking samples of flora. As the tension in the Pacific built up, they were to file reports with the Navy, their immediate bosses, about Japanese ships passing nearby. After a year of being occupied in this manner, the United States decreed that these remote islands were the country's sovereign property, a move that would prove wise when, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. officially set up a military base on Baker Island.

Unsurprisingly, the islands were repeatedly attacked by Japan and two of the colonists died. After suffering dwindling food supplies and constant threats from the air, the rest were evacuated to Honolulu, their contribution to America's geopolitical ambitions barely acknowledged.

Today, Baker, Jarvis and Howland Islands are uninhabited and under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The 2010 documentary Under the Jarvis Moon describes the experiences of these Hawaiian colonists and the harsh conditions they suffered.

Howland, Baker and Jarvis Islands, courtesy of www.livingmoon.com
Hui Panalaʻau, courtesy of Noelle Kahanu

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Not-Quite States of America. It originally ran in April 2017 and has been updated for the February 2018 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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