Pick A Program... #1 - First Contacts #2 - Frontier Asians #3 - Raising Cane #4 - Exclusion & Resistance #5 - Brides & Children #6 - The Post '65 Generation #7 - Refuge From War #8 - New Waves, New Storms Music Features

Hawaii was a self-contained society when Captain Cook made first contact.  Then settlers and missionaries turned Hawaiians into workers and the islands into plantations.

Produced by Robynn Takayama and Dmae Roberts with assistance by Jennifer Dunn.
Special thanks to Chris Conybeare of Rice & Roses Video

Streaming Audio Clip (opens in new window) - Pidgin English

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	Hard Labor: By 1850, the sugar industry exploded. Plantations needed cheap labor, fast. The first workers came from China. Then Japan, Korea, the Philippines. The laborers had hopes of making money quickly and returning home.
	Picture Brides: In 1900, the plantations were bachelor societies. 20 percent of workers were women. Some men married native Hawaiian women, but many Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean men asked their families to help arrange a marriage across the ocean.
	Strength & Resistance: Plantation owners exploited racial differences. They pitted workers against each other. Organized protest began along ethnic lines in the early 1900s.  Workers needed higher wages to support their families and a new strategy to beat the plantation system.
	Plantation Life: Plantation workers lived in camps next to the sugar and pineapple fields. The plantation segregated them – there was Chinese camp, Filipino camp, Puerto Rican camp and so on. Conditions were often squalid until families took steps to improve their own lives.
	Pidgin English: “Talk Story” is a term used in Hawaii for people gathering together for conversation.  On the plantations, people of different ethnicities had to find a way to communicate, so they created a common language to talk to each other.