From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Hawaiians/
Virtually all of the Hawaiians of the first generation who produced families did so by an Indian woman or possibly a half-Indian daughter of a fellow Hawaiian or other male immigrant. One of the few exceptions was an indigenous Hawaiian woman, Teresa Aponi, who arrived in New Westminster in the 1860s with her half-Polynesian, half-Spanish husband. It has been extremely difficult, even for descendants, to determine precisely who most of these local Indian women were. Mothers were sometimes no longer part of the family by the time children became conscious of their surroundings. Many of the households in the early manuscript censuses comprised an Hawaiian man with one or more offspring, sometimes already adults with families of their own.
Marriage patterns in the second and subsequent generations were remarkably similar to those of other British Columbia settler families in which the father had arrived from elsewhere and the mother was Indian. In general, sons found it more difficult than their sisters to be accepted within the dominant society. Some wed another part-Indian, possibly part-Hawaiian, person like themselves; many married an Indian woman. Owing partly to the paucity of women within British Columbia’s non-Indian population and partly to women’s inferior status in general, daughters had more marital options. A few wed another mixed person or an Hawaiian of the first generation, but many married men of European descent. Some of these women and their offspring eventually became absorbed into the dominant society.
Hawaiian families were Catholic, perhaps because of early missionary activity among fur-trade labourers or because of the influence of Indian wives and mothers who were themselves converts. It was an Hawaiian, George Kamano, who assisted the Oblates in constructing a mission on Harbledown Island off Fort Rupert in 1863. Hawaiian families were a mainstay of St Paul’s Church on Saltspring, for which William Naukana donated the land. Its very first event was the baptism on 27 December 1885 of grandsons of Naukana and of fellow Hawaiian William Mahoi.
Members of the first generation – both the Hawaiians themselves and their Indian wives – were with one or two exceptions illiterate; however, their offspring, so far as geography permitted, attended local schools alongside neighbours’ children. From 1874 to 1875, when Emma Palao from Saltspring headed off at the tender age of four, several island daughters boarded at St Ann’s Convent School in the Cowichan valley. Education continued to be prized over the years; a treasured photograph of 1905 celebrates the presentation of the roll of honour to a fifteen-year-old Saltspringer of the second generation.
