Indigenous Explorers in the Pacific

FAIN: FEL-288640-23

Joshua Leonard Reid
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

Research and writing leading to a book on the lives and impacts of three Indigenous explorers of the Pacific during the nineteenth century. 

This project analyzes the explorations of three Indigenous individuals—Comekala (a Mowachaht from Nootka Sound), Ranald MacDonald (a Chinook from the Columbia River), and Kekela (a kanaka maoli from the Hawaiian Kingdom)—in the Pacific Ocean from the 1780s to 1900. They illustrate that Native peoples embarked on their own explorations and actively shaped Pacific Worlds in order to craft Indigenous futures. Their explorations and the impacts of them in their home communities demonstrate how Indigenous societies understood and shaped the global in the long nineteenth century. This project complicates the traditional characterization of who counts as an explorer and which societies explore. By analyzing the “routedness” of these three individuals, I reveal how Indigenous individuals and societies engaged with the wider world beyond their homelands while countering the debilitating stereotype of Indigenous peoples who lived static lives marked by narrow horizons and the lack of innovation.