Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives (HMH) is pleased to announce the next installment of its Archives and Inquiry Virtual Speaker Series – “Connecting the Kingdom: Sailing Vessels in the Early Hawaiian Monarchy” by Dr. Peter Mills of University of Hawaiʻi - Hilo.
The lecture is slated for TUESDAY, October 15, 2024 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time. It will be held via Zoom. Dr. Mills will examine a wealth of insight into the emergence of the Hawaiian nation-state from sources mostly ignored by colonial and post-colonial historians alike. By examining how early Hawaiian chiefs appropriated Western sailing technology to help build their island nation, Mills presents the fascinating history of sixty Hawaiian-owned schooners, brigs, barks, and peleleu canoes. While these vessels have often been dismissed as examples of chiefly folly, Mills highlights their significance in Hawaiʻi’s rapidly evolving monarchy, and aptly demonstrates how the monarchy’s own nineteenth-century sailing fleet facilitated fundamental transformations of interisland tributary systems, alliance building, exchange systems, and emergent forms of Indigenous capitalism.
The Hawaiian Mission Houses' Virtual Speaker Series Archives and Inquiry, is an hour long presentation beginning with the guest speakers and end with Q& A from the audience.
Join the Zoom lecture here
Meeting ID: 834 5996 6594
Passcode: archives
The Hawaiian Mission Houses Library and Archive is home to more than 80,000 digital documents including historical letters, journals and publications. It also has one of the largest collections of Hawaiian language printed material in the world. The Archives and Inquiry Virtual Speaker Series highlights the discoveries and work of history and humanities scholars who work within HMH’s extensive archives, and whose work informs our contemporary world.
Peter Mills was born in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York in the same small town where Hawaiian philanthropist Charles Reed Bishop was born (Glens Falls, NY). Mills's early anthropological career involved fieldwork in New England, Alaska, the Northwest, American Southwest, and California. While working on his PhD at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, he began delving into issues of colonialism in the Pacific, where Pacific maritime history is inseparable from terrestrial histories. Peter's first book, "Hawaiʻis Russian Adventure" (2002, UH Press), uncovered how a site previously referred to as a "Russian Fort" on Kauaʻi was never occupied by Russians, but instead built and occupied by Hawaiians, and named Pāʻulaʻula. He has been teaching anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo for the last 27 years and resides off-grid in Laupāhoehoe with his wife, Phoebe, where they have raised a daughter. He received the Frances Davis Award for undergraduate teaching at UH Hilo, and the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology's 2022 Public Archaeology Award. He has held board positions with the Paniolo Preservation Society, Laupāhoehoe Train Museum, and Hawaiʻi Historic Places Review Board.
For more information about the lecture, contact HMH Director of Education Mike Smola at (808) 447-3914 or msmola@missionhouses.org.
