OFFSHORE

In 1881 — less than a week after King David Kalakaua left Hawaii for a yearlong tour around the world — a ship arrived in Honolulu carrying laborers sick with smallpox. The decisions that Hawaii’s future queen made to keep people safe – and the pushback she received from angry citizens and frustrated business owners who didn’t want to quarantine or halt business activity – should sound familiar to people today. Which is why some teachers are using the story of Lili‘uokalani to help students face the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

How do you practice Hawaiian culture when you’re thousands of miles from Hawaii? And what happens when Hawaiians abroad finally get a chance to go home?

Nearly half of all Native Hawaiians now live outside of Hawaii. And while many have cited Hawaii’s high cost of living as the main reason for leaving, it’s really just a piece of a much larger story.

After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, hundreds of disenfranchised Hawaiian musicians would journey to the continental U.S. in search of fame, fortune, or just a chance to make a decent living. Some would die in poverty and obscurity. Others would change American music forever.

Two decades after Hawaiians helped build a fort for John Sutter in California, another group of Hawaiians would find themselves stranded in Massachusetts. And take up arms in America’s bloodiest war.

This is the story of a group of Hawaiians who ended up in California more than 160 years ago — back when Hawaii was an independent nation. And how their descendents are still connected to the islands in unexpected ways.

Nearly half of all Native Hawaiians now live outside of Hawaii. It’s a staggering number that raises questions about what Hawaii will be like in coming years, and how Native Hawaiians will carry their islands with them to far flung places.

This season, Offshore is taking a deep dive into the Hawaiian diaspora. Join journalist Ku?u Kauanoe, as she digs into what is driving Hawaiians from the islands today. And tells some amazing stories about Hawaiians who left long ago.

Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument covers 583,000 square-miles of the Pacific — an area larger than all of America’s national parks combined. But while millions of visitors flock to America’s national parks each year, access to Papahanaumokuakea is highly restricted. Many people — even in Hawaii — don’t know that this special place exists. Don’t know what it looks like. What it sounds like. What will be lost if rising seas continue to wash away its low-lying islands, or politicians chip away at the laws protecting its borders. Experience this remote and wild place with Civil Beat’s environmental reporter, Nathan Eagle, and his wife, videographer Alana Eagle, on a trip that opened their eyes to the beauty — and fragility — of island life. And changed their outlook on the world in unexpected ways.

When we started reporting this season, we expected it to be a story about troubling adoptions that happened in the 1990s. But it quickly became clear that issues with Marshallese adoptions were never fully resolved, they simply moved. To new counties. States. Adoption agencies. So we’ve continued chasing leads while producing this season. In this final episode, we’re going to get some answers for London Lewis about his birth mother, and and share some pretty big developments about adoptions happening today.

There’s an entire generation of Marshallese adoptees like London Lewis asking questions about who they are and where they come from. And there are plenty of parents searching for the children they gave up, too. These reunions aren’t always easy. Many families have been separated for years by not only distance, but also language and culture. Finding their way back to each other is a complicated journey that can lead to places no one expects. But right now, our biggest challenge with London’s family is helping a reunion happen at all.

London Lewis had to get back to work in Florida, so we’re continuing the search on his behalf — journeying to the Marshall Islands to where his story began, to try and find his birth father and his siblings. And get a sense of why women are still being recruited to leave the Marshall Islands and place their children with American families. It’s a search that will lead to dead ends, heartbreak, and completely unexpected moments of serendipity.

We started reporting for this season of Offshore last June, but we’re still chasing down leads and new developments. It’s been a busy few weeks for us. Which means we’re going to be publishing Episode 6 on Monday, May 18. In the meantime, we wanted to share a poem with you by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. She’s from the Marshall Islands, and you’ll be hearing more from her in upcoming episodes. You can find more of Kathy’s work at kathyjetnilkijiner.com. If you have thoughts on this season, or have a tip to share, email us at producer@offshorepodcast.org.  

London Lewis’ biggest worry when he arrived in Springdale was how he would be received. Would other Marshallese people recognize him? Accept him? It didn’t take long for him to form instant connections with people who want him to know that he not only belongs in the Marshallese community but he is needed in the Marshallese community. But acceptance and belonging are not the same thing. London is just at the beginning of a long and complicated journey to figure out where he fits into the Marshallese diaspora. And Springdale is about to get him a lot closer to solving one of the biggest questions about his past.

In Springdale, London Lewis begins to experience Marshallese culture for the first time. He’s going to meet people he’s only read about in World War II textbooks. Hear a language he’s never heard except for on YouTube. Get a little closer to finding his birth family. But we’re not just in Springdale for London. We’re also here to try and find out exactly what’s happening with Marshallese adoptions today. To speak with private adoption lawyers, adoptive families, and Marshallese birth mothers about the adoption process. Adoptions are big business. As international adoptions have dropped off, there are still hundreds of thousands of adoptive parents vying for an increasingly small pool of healthy babies. Many of them are turning to this small community in Arkansas where private adoption lawyers and their Marshallese liaisons – or fixers – are household names for quickly matching them with Marshallese birth mothers.

More migrants from the Marshall Islands now live in Springdale, Arkansas, than any other place in the world. It’s a surprising choice for them, moving en masse to a small Midwest town that is about as different from their island homeland as you can get. London Lewis was born in the Marshall Islands, but he doesn’t have the resources to make that trip any time soon. So if he’s going to have a chance of finding someone who knows his family, he has to start here. In 1986, as part of a treaty between the U.S.and three Micronesian nations, Marshallese were given the right to travel to this country with little if any immigration restrictions. But nobody anticipated the wave of migration that would follow. Or that the treaty would contribute to an adoption explosion from the islands. Now, the migration has taken root in this quiet corner of Arkansas — where local judges say as many as nine out of 10 adoptions are of Marshallese children.

Susette Lewis was excited when she arrived in Honolulu in 1992. And like most new moms, nervous. Uncertain of what to expect. She didn’t know that picking up her adopted son would be an alarming experience. Her son, London, says he had a happy childhood, growing up in a big house in a town just past the Everglades. But he’s spent a lot of time searching for a connection to a culture thousands of miles from where he was raised. And while he did a lot of research in college on American military history in the Marshall Islands, he wants a sense of what’s missing from Western textbooks.

International adoptions were a rarity in the Marshall Islands until the mid-’90s. Then came an adoption boom of such intensity that the remote island nation suddenly had one of the highest per-capita adoption rates in the world. In just a few years, hundreds of children were adopted from the far-flung atolls — so many that it seemed like an entire generation was disappearing. Now, two decades later, some of these children are beginning to search for answers about who they are and where they come from. Some, like 25-year-old London Lewis, have never known a single person from their native country. Adopted as an infant from the Marshall Islands, London’s journey home would begin with a Facebook post.

A young man on a quest to find his birth family. An adoption market that rocked an island nation. A culture in danger of disappearing — and the desperate fight to save it. Join Offshore for an unforgettable eight-episode season this spring. www.offshorepodcast.org

Hawaii’s false nuclear alarm scare sends Offshore reporters on a trip back in time to 1962, when Hawaii had a very different kind of brush with nuclear weapons. Just a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hawaii witnessed a nuclear explosion so massive that darkness briefly turned to daylight. Instead of inspiring fear, the detonation sparked celebrations.