A Century of Violated Rights (1865-1965)
Although the Board of Health wanted to protect Hawai’i’s population, it violated the patients’ rights by forcibly removing them from their families and regarding them as “civilly dead.” The decision to isolate the afflicted became controversial as Hawaiians constituted the majority of those who were sent by a newly established American government after Hawai’i’s 1898 annexation, introducing an aspect of racism as afflicted Americans escaped mandatory isolation.
"Many Native Hawaiians thought that the law of segregation was a special device aimed at them only to cause trouble, injustice, and to break up their homes..a tyrannical act...wholly unnecessary." "While the [Americans] saw disease as evidence of racial inferiority the Hawaiians believed it was a deliberate attempt to get rid of them, rendering a story of colonial persistence and of indigenous resistance...the leprosy endemic in Hawai'i was not so much a matter of implied filth as it was imputed weakness. Taken as political symbol, it is neither remarkable nor coincidence that the largest number of people confined at Moloka'i was in 1887, the year in which foreigners took control of the islands." |
Table courtesy of Dr. A. Mouritz's Report on Leprosy to the Board of Health (Feb. 1886).
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Photos courtesy of Hansen's Disease Medical Examination Photograph Collection from the Hawai'i State Archives.
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"Sixteen [Caucasian] men were sent to Kalaupapa in the first twenty years and although some had either learned to make do with Hawaiian rations or provided their own food, a few of them complained constantly of being neglected...They were not treated like Hawaiians...Although some whites suffered some stigma by contracting leprosy, the Board members did not think they should be asked to live at the level of the natives. An American patient, A. W. Carter justified his demands for preferred treatment on grounds that since foreigners paid a greater amount in taxes, they should be given more attention. White lepers were provided with individual homes, often built new for them and equipped with plumbing, and received special food allowances." |
Inadequate Living Conditions and Mistreatment
Patients were subjected to harsh conditions and mistreatment during the settlement's early years due to the Board of Health's ignorance of the patients who they believed were sent to Kalaupapa to die.
Photo courtesy of John Tayman's The Colony (2006).
"The sick residents of the settlement were simply herded and fed, not provided with such necessities as lamp-light, soap and dressing for their sores, without any means of transportation of their staple article of food and...entirely without any medical attendance whatever." |
Photo courtesy of the Hawaii State Archives.
"The Board of Health fully expected [the patients] to plant crops, make their own clothing, and care for themselves...There was no doctor, no hospital, and no store to provide them with the basic necessities of life. What [the patients] did find were kama'aina, the original residents of Kalaupapa...who were willing to help them." |
Kalaupapa leader Richard Marks on the mistreatment of Kalaupapa patients. Courtesy of Frances Carter via YouTube (2011).
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"The leprosy situation in Hawai'i was out of control, desperate, inhumane, and fraught with fear and violence. Segregation was a tragic joke. Considered a rational measure at the time, the segregation policies were carried out in an irrational manner. The laws required a sheriff to 'arrest' his young daughter for having leprosy, and a ninety-year-old man had to endure a long trip to Honolulu for an examination and then travel to Moloka'i, only to die on arrival." |
"We left Kailua on July 11. And when were on the boat, we were packed in a pigpen, with severe prohibitions not to go outside, and not to go up above, and there was only one place to stay from the day we boarded the boat." |
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Photo courtesy of the Hawaii State Archives.
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"[Patients were] the ones who [were] bringing fish and medicine to the sick and requested that [they] be paid for [their] efforts...that was, in fact, what the Board of Health had intended: that they should be self-sufficient and not a burden to the state...the patients were beginning to view the Board as a negligent, if not downright niggardly, makua (parent or provider)...the exiles had little warning of what was going to be needed; while some of them arrived with families and loads of household goods, others came with nothing and had to write to the Board of Health of supplies." "It is true that they could not believe it...[they were] expected to plant taro and other food with hands and feet that had been seriously damaged by leprosy in order that they would not starve; having to obey the orders of a man who did not understand their disease or their culture." |
NPR correspondent Terry Gloss' interview with The Colony author John Tayman about the inadequate food for patients (Feb. 2, 2006).
Photos courtesy of the Hawai'i State Archives.
"The Supervisors and other staff appointed by the board have not been educated at any foreign medical school or in Hawai'i and these people are the ones giving us the medicine as though they were doctors. We don't know the propriety and accuracy of this action whereas this is clearly violation of the [Civil Code]." |
"It seems the ethical problems are to be found in the details of the enforcement...Many patients referred to themselves as prisoners. There was no support system to ease them into their confinement...These conditions contributed to the inhumane treatment of people who were already suffering from physical and mental stress." |
[The leprous were] "left to themselves, cut loose from the loved dear ones at home without hope of ever seeing them again. [They] settled down to play a new role in the drama of life…Soon the food crop of Kalo and sweet potatoes were exhausted. [They] began to feel the pangs of hunger, the want of food, clothing and other necessary needs. There was much suffering…injustice and want of charity, unjust treatment and neglect…” |
Familial Separation
Furthermore, legally married couples were unjustly forced to spend their lives apart, and children who were born in the settlement were immediately separated and sent back to O'ahu.
Photos courtesy of Emmett Cahill's Yesterday at Kalaupapa (1991) and Anwei Skinsnes Law's Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory (2012).
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"The thoughts of the Hawaiian family have been aroused to ask you to discharge all persons who have been taken to places set apart for persons affected with the Leprosy. The Board of health has not acted right…what of the marriage contract?—and the instructions given to these persons on the day of their marriage by the clergyman? Telling man and woman to take care of each other until death! The Board of health has put themselves in the position of persons that annul the marriage contract." "I do humbly petition the Board of Health in their kindly parental affection to consent that I live with my wedded wife, as a kokua (helper), for these reasons: On the 3rd day of August, 1843, I took my woman to live with me as wedded wife .On this day I swore before God to care for the wife in time of health and in sickness, and that only death would separate us...I am now sixty years old and the remainder of my days in this life are not great. In these short days I and my wife wish to remain together. "I am denied the helping hand of my wife, and the cord of my love for her is to be cut, and I am commanded to break my sacred promise before God and live alone in a strange land; the power of man has severed the blameless ones whom the power of God has joined has one." |
"I fail to see that you have a rule that the white man only is privileged to come in here, and they only are privileged to go from here, as if it is a white man's country. It is not. This is a Hawaiian Government, with a Hawaiian people and Hawaiian rules and it should follow that the interests of Hawaiians should be looked after. Therefore, if they are permitted to enter and to leave this settlement for a short time, why not my wife...receive the same privilege?
-Josiah Haole, in a letter to the Board of Health (1888)
"Rules were enforced to maintain segregation between patients and non-patients...they had the clear effect of teaching patients to know their place...The fundamental rule was that non-patients and kokuas could not mingle outside of work...Although these rules had their beginnings in an attempt to prevent contagion, they became part of a system of social control, a system by which the patients were taught that they were inferior and were to submit to authority." |
Interview with Kalaupapa resident Boogie Kahilihiwa on the familial separation of patients. Courtesy of ExploreTeam via YouTube (2011).
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Photo courtesy of "Kalaupapa 2002-2005: A Summary Report of the Kalaupapa Ethnographic Project" (2008).
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"Wherever we went in Kalaupapa...there were signs telling us where we could or could not go and what we could not touch or whom we must not touch. Once we were declared a patient, our minds became the property of the system." "You were a leper, they made sure you never forgot it...Many of our people learned over the years to keep your mouth shut...You never criticized, never talked back, and I could never live that way so I was always in the doghouse. I got into a hassle with one of the nurses about not crossing the line to the doctor's office and I was told, 'When are you patients gonna learn your place?'" |
Patients' Rights Advocacy
By 1880, a distinctive community began to form in Kalaupapa as patients petitioned to the Board of Health for life necessities.
Photo courtesy of John Tayman's The Colony (2006).
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"To me the duty of the Government...appears to be plain. To the incurable Leper, who is a dying man, nothing more can be expected than expense, but everything should be done to ameliorate his sufferings and administer to all reasonable comforts and finally allow him to pass away in peace. To the healthy part at the community of whom the country expects to live and prosper, the government should pay the greatest attention." |
Table courtesy of Pennie Moblo's "Defamation by Disease: Leprosy, Myth and ideology in Nineteenth Century Hawai'i" (May 1996).
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Personal photo courtesy of document from the Hawai'i State Archives.
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"The bath tubs intended for the use of lepers are made of wood, do not hold water and have no waste pipe attached. The result is a rotten floor and a stinking stagnant pool underneath the bath house. The tubs should be lined with zinc and waste water pipes attached, long enough to conduct the waste water outside the yard." “Our people fought with the government for better medication, a better way of life, and better understanding. They fought for our human rights and, above all, our dignity. And through it all, our people have endured and persevered through the many obstacles they had to encounter because of the confinement and the stigma of discrimination.” "The patients are struggling with the pain of their disease, and...it is heartbreaking to witness the sores and redness of the skin, and especially the loss of fingertips...These are the big needs of [Kalaupapa,] the lack of a church and for the little children there is no school." |
Table courtesy of Noenoe Silva and Pualeilani Fernandez's "Mai Ka 'Aina O Ka 'Eha'eha Mai: Testimonies of Hansen's Disease Patients in Hawai'i, 1866-1897" (2006).
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