The most perfect natural laboratory in the world: Making and knowing Hawaii National Park

Introduction

In early 1911, Territory of Hawaii Governor Walter F. Frear advocated for a new U.S. national park in his domain, one that would preserve Hawai‘i’s natural wonders for American science and tourism. The proposed area of the park included two tracts of land about twenty miles apart on Hawai‘i Island, the largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago. ¹ The somewhat awkward design, Frear explained, was due to the desire to encompass “the world’s two greatest active volcanoes,” Kīlauea and Mauna Loa. Although the park would also contain novel climactic, botanical, and ornithological features, the governor boasted that the volcanoes were undoubtedly “the main features of interest, both to the mere sight-seer who would behold nature’s foremost wonder, and to the geologist who would study earth’s internal mysteries.” Both Kīlauea and Mauna Loa had long been of interest to the traveling American scientist and, unlike other active volcanoes, were safely observable. Frear insisted the volcanoes were “of the open, free-working, and non-explosive type, and may safely be studied at close range even when in their most violent moods.” To U.S. settlers like Frear, these features – recognition and docility – betrayed the volcanoes’ sparkling potential for two complementary settler colonial pursuits: methodical, long-term scientific research, and nature tourism. The park promised to be, as Frear put it, “a veritable paradise for geologist, botanist, ornithologist and meteorologist, as well as tourist and every lover or student of nature.” ²

U.S. scientists who were working and living in the islands agreed wholeheartedly – the creation of a national park would provide scientists with unparalleled access to an environment in which they could protect and study Hawai‘i’s nature. The area’s natural features were threatened by industry, subsistence practices, visiting ‘vandals’, and wild pigs and goats. Biologists were charmed by the area’s native birds and fern forests, which were ‘rapidly vanishing’ but could be saved by regulations against grazing and deforestation. Geologists, scandalized by visitors’ casual destruction and theft of volcanic specimens, found solace in the idea that visitors might be educated to appreciate nature in a more passive way. If the management of the area was left unchanged, both the scientific world and the nation at large would lose the chance to take advantage of what volcanologist Thomas A. Jaggar called “the most perfect natural laboratory in the world.” For Jaggar and his colleagues, Hawai‘i’s volcanic landscapes were sites where scientists could “take the pulse and breath and temperature of new rock when it is a-borning,” and places where white, upper-class American visitors could stand in awe of the sublime nature of an exotic yet domesticated Hawai‘i. ³

Convinced by these logics, U.S. Congress established Hawaii National Park as the tenth national park in August 1916 (Figure 1). ⁴ Passed just months before the National Park Service itself was created, the act affirmed the park system’s commitment to recreation and natural resources. Like the nation’s existing parks, Hawaii National Park was to serve as “a pleasure ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people of the United States,” and its “timber, birds, mineral deposits, and natural curiosities or wonders” were to be retained “in their natural condition as nearly as possible.” ⁵ Congress had awarded Frear and other prominent settlers their fledgling tourist site, creating, notably, the first national park in an overseas U.S. territory and initiating what was, at the time, the largest single transfer of Native Hawaiian lands to the U.S. federal government. ⁶ However, left out of the actual language of the act was the fact that Congress had also heard and answered the calls of Jaggar. The foundation of the park and the transfer of the volcanoes to the ownership of the Department of the Interior had secured him a permanent “natural laboratory” for colonial science, where he would continue his volcanology practice, uninterrupted, for nearly three decades.

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Figure 1.

The locations of Haleakalā National Park and Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park in Hawai‘i are shown in gray. From 1916 to 1960 the two parks were joined together and called Hawaii National Park.

Jaggar’s conception and use of Hawaii National Park as a “natural laboratory” for U.S. scientific research is a story that has much to offer scholars of environmental history and the history of science. Specifically, the case of Hawaii National Park challenges two well-known historical interpretations of U.S. national parks. In the first story, environmental historians have created a compelling narrative about the creation and use of U.S. national parks as spaces for recreation and natural resource conservation. ⁷ Scholarship that emphasizes scientific research in certain European and African national parks has served as a foil for the U.S. context, further affirming the narrative that U.S. parks were founded for public enjoyment rather than for science. ⁸ Although recreation and natural resource conservation were undoubtedly significant motivations for U.S. national parks, this article gestures at an alternative genealogy. ⁹ Hawaii National Park demonstrates that some U.S. parks, especially in places deemed to be colonial or peripheral, were created and used for a third, often overlooked, reason: to preserve permanent, state-sanctioned spaces for scientific knowledge production. Arguing that the area of the proposed park in Hawai‘i was explicitly imagined as a space of scientific research, I trace the arguments of U.S. volcanologist Thomas A. Jaggar, who believed the area of the park was “the most perfect natural laboratory in the world,” too valuable to U.S. scientific pursuits to leave in the hands of natives and locals. ¹⁰

In the second story, environmental historians have made a convincing case for exploring the ‘dark side’ of the conservation movement. According to this narrative, creating national parks meant dispossessing Native Americans of their land and criminalizing the subsistence practices of rural populations, usually poor immigrants. ¹¹ Although this work has provided path-breaking critiques, these scholars have yet to consider the other half of the story: the parks not only barred certain peoples and their ways of life, but also provided scientists with special access to park lands. This meant elevating a set of actors whose work was deemed more complementary to conservationist goals than the activities of Native Hawaiians, and it meant marginalizing indigenous epistemologies. In Hawaii National Park, settler scientists used their work to establish expertise over nature, perverting or sidelining Native ways of knowing. Thus, investigating the role of science in our environmental histories has ramifications for how we think about issues of access and justice. The question so often asked in environmental history, “Who is nature for?” might be supplemented by a question far more concerned with the history of science, “Who has the power to know nature?”

By drawing together the issues of science, national parks, and settler colonialism, the history of Hawaii National Park teaches us that both environmental historians and historians of science could pay more attention to so-called ‘natural’ places as spaces defined and shaped by colonial science. We might start by interrogating what our historical actors really meant – and what they really effected – when they called certain places “natural laboratories.” Inherent to this category is a power differential between scientists and nonscientists, between humans and nonhumans, and between different kinds of landscapes and geographies. In scientists’ eyes, natural places in colonies, especially islands in extreme climates like the tropics or the Arctic, were empty, available lands particularly suited to experimentation, and the ideal models or bellwethers for global processes. ¹² Precisely because the area was conceptualized as a “natural laboratory,” Hawaii National Park, like areas of the Galápagos and New Zealand, was created for outside tourists and scientists, and according to national and international visions of science. ¹³

My examination of Hawaii National Park, therefore, engages with works not only in the ‘dark side’ of conservation and national park histories, but also with histories of field science and colonial laboratories. Robert E. Kohler and other historians of field science have explored scientists’ use of outdoor sites as “lablike” spaces for experimentation and for the development of universal theories. ¹⁴ However, in my own examination of Hawaii National Park as a settler colonial entity, I move away from internalist accounts like Kohler’s and follow more recent histories of field science that have pointed us to the importance of social histories of place and questions of access in negotiating a research site. ¹⁵ I also build on postcolonial works that investigate the colonial laboratory as a site of hybridized and contaminated knowledge making. ¹⁶ Although studies of colonial laboratories have tended to examine indoor spaces rather than outdoor ones, scholars like Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Pratik Chakrabarti have crucially demonstrated that, regardless of scientists’ claims to universality and “placelessness,” laboratories are inseparable from the complex social, political, and economic realities of the colonies they are either located in or get their raw materials from. ¹⁷ Together, Laveaga’s and Chakrabarti’s considerations of colonial power dynamics and Kohler’s attention to the “lablike” use of field sites help reveal how so-called “natural laboratories” encompass both the universalizing practices of science and the specifically place-based, violent acts of colonial powers. As geographer E. Hennessy has recently written about the Galápagos, the metaphor of the “natural laboratory” has done more than denote the value of scientific field sites, it has also served as “a powerful way of understanding space” that has profoundly shaped the places it describes. ¹⁸

I build upon these works in the following pages in order to deconstruct Jaggar’s conception and use of Hawaii National Park as a perfect “natural laboratory” for his volcanology practice. The idea of Hawaii National Park as a “natural laboratory” was – and still is – a settler colonial conception of the islands’ volcanic areas, one that was tied not only into changing epistemologies of the area’s natural features, but also into the actual construction of the area as a park owned, occupied, and managed by a foreign imperial power, the U.S. federal government. Making and knowing Hawaii National Park went hand in hand, and at the center of these processes was a scientist named Thomas Jaggar.

Constructing a “natural laboratory”

Hawaii is the most perfect natural laboratory in the world. Here new land is being made, wind and weather act upon it, ocean and rivers sweep down the rubbish, and under all the crust of the globe is lifted . . . here in Hawaii you can take the pulse and breath and temperature of new rock when it is a-borning. ¹⁹

In 1934, American volcanologist Thomas Jaggar reported a new eruption of the volcano Kīlauea, remarking on the unique advantages Hawai‘i offered his field of study. He was situated on the rim of Kīlauea’s crater on Hawai‘i Island, where he had founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in 1911 as a well-connected professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From his perch, for nearly three decades, Jaggar observed and photographed Hawai‘i’s volcanoes. He recorded their ever changing “lakes of fire” and took the “pulse and breath and temperature of new rock.” ²⁰ For Jaggar and other Euro-American scientists of his time, Hawai‘i, like the Galápagos or Krakatoa, was one of the world’s finest “natural laboratories,” where the formation of the earth and the development of life in all its stages could be studied.

Before settling at Kīlauea, Jaggar traveled extensively to study the world’s greatest volcanoes. He crisscrossed the Pacific to visit Japan, California, and Indonesia, stopping in Hawai‘i on the way. In 1906, on one of these visits, settler businessman Lorrin A. Thurston approached Jaggar with a proposal to create a national park in Hawai‘i. Born in Hawai‘i to two of the first Christian missionaries to arrive from New England, Thurston had played a major role in the 1893 overthrow of the last Native Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani. He helped establish the provisional government, the Republic of Hawaii, through which American settlers sought annexation to the United States. Considering himself a “public-spirited citizen” of the islands, Thurston then joined forces with Jaggar to lobby the U.S. Congress for ten years. The two men wished to create a national park surrounding the “three great volcanoes of Hawaii”: Haleakalā, Mauna Loa, and Kīlauea. ²¹ They succeeded in 1916.

In their proposals for a national park in Hawai‘i, Thurston and Jaggar framed the area as the perfect laboratory in which U.S. experts could study ‘curious’ flora, fauna, and geological processes. They aimed to give U.S. scientists in the islands a permanent place for their research, specifically in the biological and earth sciences. This was to be a state-sanctioned space for scientific knowledge production, a place for scientists to study the raw materials of nature and shape them into knowledge that could travel beyond the islands in the form of charts, maps, photographs, models, and theories. ²² The formation of the park, therefore, reaffirmed two transformations that it was dependent on: there was to be a redefinition of the area, as a “natural laboratory” for Euro-American scientists; and there was to be a new use of Hawai‘i’s volcanoes, land, and nonhuman life – for scientific research.

In some respects, Jaggar belongs to a particular genealogy of scientists (mostly biologists) who thought about national parks and preserves as spaces of scientific value and necessity. Other scholars, especially historians of ecology, have traced how this movement sought to preserve the United States’ “pristine” spaces explicitly for scientific research. ²³ Identifying this genealogy as the “preservation for science” movement, historian of science Gina Rumore distinguishes this from the more mainstream “science for conservation” movement. Whereas the latter involved scientists recommending sustainable ways in which to use or preserve land, natural resources, and species; by contrast, Rumore explains, “preservation for science” sought to “protect representative tracts of land in their natural state for scientific study, which generally meant protecting the land from human interferences such as logging, hunting and development.” During the interwar period, ecologists lobbied for preservation because they “regarded the study of natural conditions in the field as the basis of their fledgling science.” ²⁴

Using the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions for Scientific Study (1917–45), as a vehicle for their ideas, scientists like Victor Shelford believed that pristine nature was necessary not only as a space to perform their work in, but also as a standard necessity to serve as an ecological benchmark or baseline. ²⁵ In the 1930s and 1940s, Aldo Leopold echoed this impulse in his assertion that wild spaces were absolutely necessary for the “science of land-health.” ²⁶ After all, the thinking went, how were scientists supposed to discover the principles of nature if they could not observe ecosystems in their untouched, ideal states? How could one learn to bring nature back into “balance,” if there were no examples of balanced nature to work from? ²⁷

Although Jaggar’s conception of Hawaii National Park as a “natural laboratory” and his desire to make knowledge from pristine spaces both speak to this broader history of the preservation of science, he also doesn’t quite fit. Thurston and Jaggar were certainly concerned with the quickly “vanishing” botanical and zoological “treasures” that the proposed area of the park contained (and used this as a partial justification for the park). ²⁸ However, Jaggar’s primary interest was in understanding the habits of volcanoes, rather than bringing Hawai‘i’s ecosystem back into balance. Moreover, his proposals for Hawaii National Park are notable because they began a decade earlier than the movement associated with the ESA, and they asked that the federal government use the national park designation to set aside a “natural laboratory” in a colony.

Jaggar’s case also asks us to decenter ecology as the only type of science that played a part in preservationist movements. Geology was crucial to the early history of the U.S. national parks. ²⁹ The creation of the National Park Service agency in 1916, and its preference for what historian Richard West Sellars had termed “façade management,” obscures the fact that many of the first dozen national parks in the United States were created around notable geological features and with the help of geologists. ³⁰ The professional discipline of geology matured much earlier than ecology, and its field of study was becoming tied to the government in the 1870s, just as the national park movement was taking shape. ³¹ Geologists and the United States Geological Survey of the Territories (the precursor to the United States Geological Survey) helped explore the areas of potential national parks and articulate their value and form, and then utilized them as sites of scientific research. To give just a few examples, geologists F. V. Hayden and Arnold Hague helped survey and then advocate for a national park at Yellowstone, with Jaggar performing some of his first field work as an assistant to Hague later, during surveys of northwest Wyoming in the 1890s. ³² Citing its remarkable “objects of interests for the scientific men . . . of the entire world,” Hayden lauded legislators for establishing Yellowstone National Park; he wrote that the “noble deed may be regarded as a tribute from our legislators to science, and the gratitude of the nation, and of men of science in all parts of the world, is due them for this munificent donation.” ³³ In 1914, a major eruption event brought attention to Lassen Peak in northern California, the sensational documentation of which resulted in the foundation of Lassen National Park a couple of years later. ³⁴ In addition, although the legislation creating Grand Canyon National Park in 1919 denoted the park was for public “benefit and enjoyment,” Theodore Roosevelt’s proclamation naming the area a national monument eleven years earlier was clearly motivated by the fact that the canyon was “an object of unusual scientific interest.” ³⁵ That the parks in the western territories and Hawai‘i were partly articulated by geologists and explicitly imagined as spaces for geological research challenges the idea that U.S. national parks were intended merely as places of recreation and natural resource conservation.

The settler colonial status of the western territories of Arizona, Wyoming, and Hawai‘i, and their ‘peripheral’ position in U.S. political and economic thinking is important here. This case forces us to expand the scope of our studies of U.S. national parks beyond national or even transnational dimensions, and investigate them as settler colonial spaces. ³⁶ Hawai‘i was an overseas colony, with a Native population thought to be “vanishing,” which made it easy and tempting to siphon off its land for use – be it agricultural, touristic, or scientific – by the metropole. ³⁷ The redefinition of the volcanic areas of Hawai‘i and its wildlife as a “natural laboratory” was intimately tied to Hawai‘i’s political status as a colony and to the islands’ environmental status as being tropical and volcanic – exoticized, mystified, racialized, and rendered isolated and vulnerable. ³⁸ Scientists played an important role in constructing Hawai‘i as a place of lush tropicality, ongoing seismicity, and unparalleled isolation – the perfect location for studying evolutionary biology, biogeography, and volcanology. With these elements mingling in their minds, Jaggar and Thurston sought to transform Hawai‘i’s volcanoes, land, and nonhuman life into a park not only for the enjoyment of tourists, but also for the work of scientists.

Discursively, making the park meant creating new symbolic and political geographies for Hawai‘i that effaced the ones Native Hawaiians had previously employed. The settler conception that Hawai‘i was a “natural laboratory” depended on specific interpretations of the place of the proposed park: its significances, its history, and its connections. In their proposals, Thurston and Jaggar deployed three geographies – one colonial, one transnational, and one global/universal – to redefine the space of the park as simultaneously an extension of the American West, a node in a transnational network of scientific knowledge, and a microcosm of the earth and its lifeforms.

First, they employed a colonial geography that wrote Hawai‘i into the story of the American West, replete with its notions of national progress, the frontier, religious sublimity, and the necessary but lamentable extirpation of the noble Indian. ³⁹ Thurston compared Hawai‘i to the United States’ most symbolic natural spaces, noting that Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Sequoia National Parks may have geysers, grand precipices and peaks, and big trees, but “the volcano of Kilauea has its lake of molten lava, its islands of rock, its natural sulphur factories.” ⁴⁰ Jaggar’s comparison was even more explicit:

There is the same justification for creating a national park about the three great volcanoes of Hawaii that there was for setting aside the wonders of the Yellowstone geyser district, the Big Trees of California, and the Great Canyon of the Yosemite. The Hawaiian volcanoes are truly a national asset . . . The crater at sunrise is the grandest volcanic spectacle on earth. ⁴¹

The two men claimed that the land in question should be put under federal control for the benefit of American tourism and spirit, effectively tying the exotic Hawaiian landscape into the sublime nature of the American West and normalizing the massive transfer of indigenous lands to the federal government. ⁴²

Second, Jaggar and Thurston used a transnational geography to argue that a park could make Hawai‘i a permanent and central node in a transnational network of scientific knowledge production. Employing the words “earth” and “world,” Jaggar stressed the unparalleled seismic characteristics that made it an ideal home laboratory for him. He told Congress that the volcano Haleakalā has “one of the greatest craters on earth,” and that the volcano Mauna Loa was “the greatest mountain mass on earth…and the most active volcano in the world in the amount of lava that has been poured during the last century.” The Hawaiian volcanoes were “wholly unique of their kind, the most famous in the world of science, and the most continuously, variously, and harmlessly active volcanoes on earth.” ⁴³

Further, Hawai‘i’s volcanic features were notable for their specific geographic location on earth. In his documentation of earth processes all around Asia, the United States, South America, and Oceania, Jaggar placed Hawai‘i at the center of a seismically active Pacific (Figure 2). Hawai‘i, and even more specifically, his observatory at the rim of Kīlauea, was the center of his world, the center of his well-known volcanic experiments and observations and, therefore, a center of volcanology and U.S. science more generally. Although Hawai‘i may have occupied a marginal position politically or even economically to most Americans, in Jaggar’s sense of place, in his undeniable terrestrial situatedness, Hawai‘i was the point from which his locally produced knowledge might emanate outward and link up to a transnational network of scientists. ⁴⁴ Hawai‘i was attractive to Jaggar as a settler scientist with a transnational practice.

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Figure 2.

Volcanologist Thomas Jaggar imagined Hawaii at the center of the “volcanic wheel of the Pacific.”

Finally, Jaggar and Thurston also employed the words “earth” and “world” to write Hawai‘i into a global/universal geography. For these men, Hawai‘i was not just a specific geographic location in a transnational network of knowledge production; it was also a placeless, or generalizable model of earth and its nonhuman life as a whole. Hawai‘i was valuable because it was a particularly convenient and suitable place where observations about the “a-borning of new rock” and the successive stages of life’s development on that rock could be turned into universal theories about earth and life processes everywhere. The area of the proposed park was to be a microcosm of earth processes and the evolution of life globally. ⁴⁵ Thurston pointed out that the area of the proposed park contained “three active volcanoes . . . [with] innumerable . . . volcanic structures with every possible diversity in form, color, and detail, making a fascinating study of the world in the making as is found nowhere else in the world.” ⁴⁶ Jaggar added, “There is no place on the globe so favorable for systematic study of volcanology and the relations of local earthquakes to volcanoes as in Hawaii, and for this reason alone, if for no other, it would be appropriate to set aside a national park in this wonderland of volcanic activity, where the earth’s primitive processes are at work making new land and adding new gases to the atmosphere.” ⁴⁷

Using these three geographies, Thurston and Jaggar constructed a “natural laboratory” out of the area of the proposed park. Hawaii National Park was to be a specific locale owned and operated by the U.S. federal government, where universal knowledge could be made and linked into a transnational network of scientists. With these arguments, Thurston and Jaggar successfully persuaded U.S. legislators to create the first national park in an overseas U.S. territory, despite the legislators’ concerns over issues of securing neighboring settler lands and the use of federal funds. In 1916, the government of the Territory of Hawaii transferred its lands – the stolen Crown Lands of the Native Hawaiian monarchy – to the U.S. Department of the Interior, under the administration of the newly created National Park Service. ⁴⁸

You can’t fool around with Pele

She is Pele-honua-mea, Pele of the sacred land. She is Pele-‘ai-honua, Pele the eater of land, when she devours the land with her flames. She rules the volcanoes of Hawai‘i, and mankind has no power to resist her. When Pele is heard from, her word is the final word. ⁴⁹

In conjunction with the major land transfers to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the creation of the park dismissed Native and local ways of interacting with the land. Native Hawaiian homesteaders were kicked off their plots, and Japanese and Filipino plantation laborers who lived off the park lands during strikes were repeatedly chased out of the park’s borders in the 1910s and 1920s. ⁵⁰ In their place, Jaggar and other scientists working in the National Park Service gained exclusive access to the area, and their work became the central way humans interacted with the nonhuman elements of the park. They took the raw materials of Hawaiian nature and shaped them into a universalized scientific knowledge, materialized in maps, charts, photographs, and other publications. Thus, the construction of Hawaii National Park as a “natural laboratory” not only affected the land claims and subsistence practices of Native Hawaiians and settlers of color, but also marginalized the Native epistemology in favor of a Western scientific way of knowing and working. ⁵¹ Nonetheless, this new interpretation of Hawai‘i’s nature was not an easy fit, and Native accounts persisted in cases in which scientists failed to provide adequate explanations.

In Native Hawaiian cosmology, volcanoes are the realm of the goddess Pele, her younger sister Hi‘iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele, and their various relatives and assistants. Pele’s divine companions, traditionally five brothers and eight sisters, have their own special responsibilities, including creating steam “explosions, thunders and rains of fire, moving and keeping the clouds in place, breaking canoes, fighting with spears of flame, [and] hurling red-hot masses of lava.” ⁵² Although Pele is considered especially powerful, religious studies scholar John Charlot explains that in traditional Hawaiian belief there is no formal hierarchy of gods. Instead mana (power, energy) comes from many things; “all things enjoyed their own intrinsic powers.” ⁵³ Pele is not only related to other gods, however, she is also related to Native Hawaiian people, specifically those clans residing in places of volcanic activity, like the Ka‘ū district on Hawai‘i Island. ⁵⁴ Herb Kawainui Kāne explains, “this relationship is regarded as genealogical, the relationship of an ‘aumakua (ancestral spirit) who may take an active role in the affairs of the living. And Pele is indeed active.” ⁵⁵ To understand this Pele–human relationship, it is necessary to understand the centrality of genealogy to Native Hawaiian identity. Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa explains,

Hawaiian identity is, in fact, derived from the Kumulipo, the great cosmogonic genealogy. Its essential lesson is that every aspect of the Hawaiian conception of the world is related by birth, and as such, all parts of the Hawaiian world are one indivisible lineage. Conceived in this way, the genealogy of the Land, the Gods, Chiefs, and people intertwine with one another, and with all myriad aspects of the universe. For if someone were to ask a Hawaiian, “Who are you?,” he or she could only meaningfully answer by referring to his or her beginnings, to his or her genealogy and lineage, which is like a map that guides each Hawaiian’s relationship with the world. ⁵⁶

Pele, and to a lesser extent, Hi‘iaka, wield a power that is unpredictable and specifically female. In one mo‘olelo (orally transmitted history), Pele tells Hi‘iaka: “aohe ou mea nana e hoopilikia o ke alanui, nau ka make na ka wahine, aohe make a na kane” (“You will have no one to make your way troublesome; death is by you, by the female; there is no death by the males”). Pele and Hi‘iaka, whose descriptor is often no‘eau (wise), possess a keen intelligence and expert knowledge of places. ⁵⁷ In Pele’s famous encounter with the pig god Kamapua‘a, she is the only one who can see the truth behind deceitful Kamapua‘a’s many lies. Pele recognizes him in his many forms, including his human one: “Don’t you all mistakenly think, my younger sisters, that he’s a real man. That is not a man, but a pig.” Even more impressive, she knows his name chant and, therefore, his genealogical roots and the basis of his identity. ⁵⁸

Part of Pele’s extraordinary knowledge of places comes from her remarkable mobility and her ancient roots in Tahiti. From Tahiti, Pele first traveled to the northern islands of the Hawaiian archipelago. At each island, Pele attempted to dig a home for herself, but her older sister Nā-maka-o-Kaha‘i (water) thwarted her efforts, chasing her down the island chain all the way to Hawai‘i Island. Through this process of being “torn apart” by her sister, Pele was elevated to godly status, making her a goddess native to the Hawaiian archipelago. Although she made her home in Mauna Loa, dwelling in “the fiery abysses” of the volcano, she moved freely from one volcano to another at her pleasure. ⁵⁹ Thus, Pele exemplifies a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) geography, different from the geographies imposed by Jaggar and Thurston. ⁶⁰ She represents Hawai‘i as its own center, intimately connected to the rest of Oceania, and a volcanic force that is mobile and dynamic. ⁶¹

Religious studies scholar John Charlot notes that, whereas other Hawaiian gods can, to some degree, be tempered by offerings and prayers, “Pele stays wild, Noho Pele i ke āhiu” – you can’t fool around with Pele. Pele’s “power like her personality is essentially uncontrollable,” and will, therefore, “always work against . . . the continuing attempt to bring all aspects of the universe into an ordered whole . . . The Pele vision is based on the experience of the volcano: any evolved or constructed order can be overturned in the flash of an explosion.” ⁶² No one knows Pele’s motivations for activating the volcanoes, with eruptions interpreted variously as signs of Pele’s approval, rage, or jealousy, or simply as a function of her restless energy. ⁶³ Pele’s complexity is exemplified by the fact that she is simultaneously a destructive force and a creative force, as she has both the power to destroy land and the power to build “new landscapes of stark, massive beauty.” ⁶⁴ The fact that Pele’s power cannot be assuaged or reasoned with, however, means that Hawaiians have traditionally respected the inevitability and routes of her lava flows. This is as true today as it was a century ago. Herb Kawainui Kāne explains,

‘Tūtū’ is an affectionate term for grandparent, and Hawaiians regard ‘Tūtū Pele’ not with fear but with filial respect; and with a touching resignation should a lava flow consume their homes. In December, 1986, lava destroyed part of the village of Kalapana. A Hawaiian resident, interviewed while loading his possessions into a truck, said: “I love my home; live here all my life, and my family for generations. But if Tūtū like take it, it’s her land.” ⁶⁵

Opinions differ among individual Native Hawaiians, of course, but the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) attitude toward Pele has traditionally been one of respect and actual kinship. Pele is powerful but her mana is only realized through her cooperation with her siblings. She is a creator in addition to being a destroyer. Representing Hawai‘i’s historical connections to Oceania, her force is mobile, dynamic, and unpredictable.

The Native Hawaiian way of knowing the volcanoes through mo‘okuauhau (genealogy) and mo‘olelo about Pele differed fundamentally from how Jaggar and other Western scientists came to know the volcanoes. Whereas the former relied on ideas of kinship and orally transmitted knowledge, the latter relied on instruments to turn the raw materials of the volcanoes into information and order. ⁶⁶ In the process of measuring the “pulse and breath and temperature” of Hawai‘i’s volcanoes – in other words, through his scientific work – Jaggar created a hybridized knowledge that simultaneously treated the volcanoes and their products as inanimate matter to be mastered, according to his mechanistic view of nature, while also adopting distilled elements of the Pele lore to explain the volcanoes’ stubbornly unpredictable animus. ⁶⁷

Jaggar had an important precedent in James Dwight Dana, a U.S. geologist and professor at Yale University. Dana became the first to know Hawai‘i’s volcanoes scientifically through several expeditions in the 1880s, which resulted in a foundational publication in volcanology. ⁶⁸ However, Jaggar was responsible for instituting long-term, systematic record keeping, including through photography, and the establishment of seismographs in the islands. ⁶⁹ His scientific work consisted of two tasks: classification and prediction. For both tasks, Jaggar relied on his instruments, which gave him the illusion that he could erase his subjectivity (his “scientific self”) and, instead, take on the disinterested eye of the scientific observer. ⁷⁰

For the task of classification, Jaggar took individual specimens of a nonhuman nature and transformed them into types, often with the help of his camera. His regular use of rulers and placement of men in the frame of his photographs gave him a standard of scale, so that he could measure volcanic features that were fixed in places far away from each other (Figure 3). The regularity of his photographs, photographing at specific intervals and during both daytime and nighttime, allowed him to track changes in the levels of lava lakes or the width of fissures over time, often for decades. In these ways, he used photographs to make comparisons across time and space, creating his own catalogs of volcanic features. Jaggar transformed the rocks he found into “stalactites, stalagmites, and other phenomena of crystallization or incrustation,” and he turned the sites he encountered into “lava tubes, caves, steam vents, or spatter cones.” ⁷¹

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Figure 3.

Men were a tool of measurement for Jaggar, so that he could compare the size of volcanic features across the park. Jaggar’s original caption reads, “Schollendome or lava swelling in pahoehoe on floor of Kilauea crater.”

These careful classifications were integral to Jaggar’s second task: creating patterns of volcanic activity in an effort to predict the timing and paths of eruptions. His purported aim was to use prediction to protect human life and property around the volcanoes. Again, Jaggar used visualizations of data to facilitate comparisons between various eruptions that had happened at different times and in disparate locations. He mapped the paths of new and historical lava flows on Hawai‘i Island, presenting them on the same surface to compare their direction, size, and duration (Figure 4). He made visible the changing depth of Halema‘uma‘u crater using cross-section drawings to denote distinct layers of cooled lava rock (Figure 5). Using his seismograph, firsthand observations, and various scales of “intensity” and “duration,” Jaggar charted volcanic eruptions to produce a record of the volcanoes’ “habits,” or behavior. In tracking and visualizing these eruptions, he altered the temporal and spatial scales of volcanic eruptions. Jaggar isolated volcanic features and events from their historical and geographical specificity by transforming them into photographs, charts, and maps. In Hawaii National Park, he was mimicking the controlled space of the laboratory by playing with scale and isolation. ⁷²

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Figure 4.

Maps were one way Jaggar recorded the lava flows, old and current, in the area of the park. Jaggar’s practice of mapping flows across decades served as data for him to try to predict future flows.

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Figure 5.

Thomas Jaggar’s cross-section drawings collapsed space and time, to make his observations more digestible in a single glance.

This scientific practice – of collapsing the time and space of disparate eruptions into recognizable patterns – led him to believe the volcanic behavior was predictable. Based on his act of record keeping, Jaggar could claim that the flow of Kīlauea’s lava, “from a scientific point of view, follows a system,” enough so that he could predict whether lava would flow down the north side or the south side of the volcano. ⁷³ He told Congress,

[Y]ou can not change the outbreak of the volcano any more than you can stop an earthquake . . . But you can protect populations from both by various engineers’ devices and by prediction . . . In the case of the lava flow here in Hawaii, there is more hope of handling it than any other land I know of, because of the habit of these flows. ⁷⁴

Jaggar’s attempts to predict the behavior of volcanoes eventually led him to actively intervene in their flows. In 1935, with the assistance of the U.S. Army, he dropped twenty 600-pound bombs on to the volcano Mauna Loa to try to divert its lava flows away from the neighboring town of Hilo. Celebrating his “intellectual and practical victory over Nature,” Jaggar philosophized that his scientific work in the national park was actually a “war on volcanoes.” Like the world wars, this was a war “demanding services of intelligence, scouting expeditions, mapping, photography, and supply, while the main base is essentially a listening post with all the resources of science, invention and industry brought to bear on detection of the strategy of the enemy.” ⁷⁵ Jaggar was relying on his instruments to observe the “habits,” or “strategies,” of volcanoes so that he could actively reengineer them.

Indeed, in his search for types and “habits,” and even more strikingly by bombing the volcano, Jaggar was attempting to impose order on features and forces that, to his Native Hawaiian contemporaries, possessed an uncontrollable wildness and unpredictability. He was attempting to understand and master a nature he believed was in binary opposition to mankind – both in the sense of humanness and in the sense of civilization. His Judeo-Christian, patriarchal, and mechanistic view of nature differed remarkably from the Hawaiian notions of kinship with Pele and respect for her agency. Whereas many Native Hawaiians saw a familial, creative force, Jaggar saw only a destructive force that threatened human life and property.

And yet, Jaggar’s relationship to Hawaiian knowledge is – in practice – more complicated than that of binary opposition. He and other settlers attempted to impose a Western scientific way of knowing on the land of Hawaii National Park, but the fit was uneasy. The local particularities of the place, its Native people, and their mo‘olelo persisted where settler science failed to provide adequate explanations. Jaggar and his colleagues could not ignore the evidence of Native wisdom about the volcanoes. Instead, Jaggar’s knowledge became hybridized, and references to Pele became a shorthand way of explaining what science could not. Most immediately, unexplainable phenomena included those features and events that did not fit neatly into Jaggar’s scientific types or habits. However, it also included the staggering affective experience that the volcanoes gave settlers. Jaggar and other settlers used the language of mysticism and the figure of Pele – modified significantly from her original form in mo‘olelo – as a lubricant to help settler science fit in cases in which it otherwise might not have.

We can see this use of indigenous knowledge in the oft-repeated story of Princess Ruth, a descendant of the famous Native unifier of the Hawaiian archipelago, King Kamehameha. Although the details of this story vary according to the source, all agree that in 1882 Princess Ruth halted a lava flow with her prayers to Pele, who supposedly looked favorably upon the Kamehameha family. As the lava flow was nearing the village of Hilo, Princess Ruth erected a makeshift altar, made offerings to the goddess, and stood facing the flow, which stopped just in front of her. Writing in 1887, American missionary Rollin M. Daggett attempted to draw a distinction between the white settler interpretation of this event and the Native Hawaiian interpretation:

The stream of fire ceased to move . . . “A remarkable coincidence,” explained the whites. “The work of Pele,” whispered the natives . . . Without discussing the cause – a natural one beyond doubt – it may be remarked that the result has been something of a renewal with the natives of faith in the discarded gods of their fathers. ⁷⁶

Daggett dismissed Native understandings of Pele in this passage as fantasy, believing instead that the lava stopped flowing because of a ‘natural’ cause. But, like other settlers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hawai‘i, his belief in Pele was, in fact, much more ambiguous. In that same publication, he wrote,

Within [Kilauea’s] lurid depths, in fiery grottoes and chambers of burning crystal, dwell Pele and her companions, and offerings are still thrown to them by superstitious natives. Do they yet believe in these deities after more than sixty years of Christian teaching? After their temples have been leveled and their gods have been destroyed? After their tabus have been broken and their priesthood has been dethroned and dishonored? The only answer is, “The offerings are still made.” ⁷⁷

Perhaps in a move to entertain his white American audience, Daggett leaves the possibility of Pele’s existence and power open to interpretation. He confirms her existence and Princess Ruth’s story as “the last public recognition of the powers of Pele,” while still holding on to his belief that the volcanoes worked according to natural processes rather than according to divine agency.

Like Daggett, Jaggar maintained a primarily Western scientific view of the volcanoes, but made innumerable references to Pele to explain the spectacular and strange things he encountered in the area of the national park. In his bid for the park, Jaggar commented on the story of Princess Ruth. After hearing the summary of events, Arizona congressman Carl Hayden asked Jaggar, “What is your opinion, as a scientific man?” To which Jaggar replied, “There are mysteries that are even beyond the realm of science.” ⁷⁸ In the same vein, Jaggar published images of lava rocks that resembled Pele, and captioned them as such (Figure 6). Mixing his desire to classify with a kind of wonder the strange volcanic features he uncovered, Jaggar named types of rocks after Pele, including “Pele’s hair” and “Pele’s tears.” Thus, he freely attributed volcanic forces or features to Pele, but struggled to keep them within the bounds of his own scientific work and worldview.

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Figure 6.

Despite Jaggar’s Western scientific perspective, Pele references abound in his images in written publications. Jaggar’s original caption for this photograph was: “Lava drip resembling statuette of Hawaiian goddess Pele. From Kilauea crater and identical with many of the wall stalagmites of the caverns.”

In utilizing the figure of Pele to aid his imposition of science upon the land, Jaggar adapted her to his liking. He perverted the Hawaiian conception of Pele, removing her from the genealogical and geographical contexts that formed the very basis of her Native Hawaiian identity and power. When Jaggar attributed volcanic forces or features to Pele, he did so without acknowledging her brothers and sisters, companions essential to the realization of her powers. He also dismissed the direct genealogical ties that human members of the Pele clan claimed. Instead, he viewed the Pele–human relationship as a simple binary between God and subject, and one of subjugation rather than kinship. Paternalistically, Jaggar wanted to ‘save’ Native Hawaiians from Pele’s destruction, but to these Hawaiians, Pele was their ‘aumakua, their beloved ancestor.

Jaggar’s construction of Hawaii National Park and his scientific practice within its bounds worked against Native Hawaiian ways of knowing the land, but could not ignore them completely. Native Hawaiian knowledge of Hawai‘i Island was too strong to be cast aside and, instead, through the symbol of Pele, it seeped into settler explanations of the volcanoes in the national park.

Conclusion

Hybridized by indigenous knowledge, Thomas Jaggar’s scientific practice in Hawaii National Park confronts the narratives we so often see in environmental history about U.S. national parks and the conservation movement. His conception and use of the area as a “natural laboratory” for the study of volcanic habits destabilizes the notion that the national parks were created for the primary purposes of recreation and natural resource conservation. Furthermore, deconstructing his practice of volcanology and showing how it interacted with Native Hawaiian ways of knowing the land forces us to acknowledge another dimension to the ‘dark side’ of the conservation movement: the marginalization or perversion of indigenous epistemologies.

More generally, Jaggar’s construction of Hawai‘i’s volcanic areas as a “natural laboratory” and his powerful access to knowledge production asks all of us to pay more attention to natural spaces as sites of knowledge making. Deconstructing this metaphor challenges historians of science to think more about access and place, and asks environmental historians to think more about knowledge. Jaggar’s reference to Hawaii National Park as his ideal laboratory helps us see how the changing epistemologies of these places are interlinked with their changing political, proprietary, and social definitions. National parks and other such places have been thought of explicitly as permanent places for scientific research, and this fact has had immense cultural influence on the way we view and use these spaces, as well as on who gets to own or manage them. If nothing else, historians of science and environmental historians might remember these colonial power dynamics the next time they encounter the phrase, “natural laboratory.”