How Leprosy Was Used as a Weapon Against Hawaii’s Indigenous Population

Father Damien was a dirty man. Everyone agreed on that. Dirt would accumulate under his fingernails; he rarely washed his hands. His clothes—his habitual cassock and wide-brimmed hat—were worn for days on end; he saw no reason to clean his hut in Kalawao, the leprosy colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. His detractors claimed he lacked elegance too: burly with a “piggish” head, they complained, he squinted from behind a pair of wonky wire-framed circular spectacles. He was eager to learn Hawaiian, it was noted sniffily, but otherwise he had little enthusiasm for languages. His Latin came only by official requirement, his English was sparse; a native Flemish speaker, even his French was stilted. The prose of his letters lacked refinement whatever their language: “coarse…headstrong and bigoted” was one particularly vitriolic posthumous assessment.

None of this worried Damien. Hawaiian did him fine. From that messy home, built in sight of Kalawao’s cemetery, Damien wrote to his brother Auguste, also a priest, to say that Molokai was exactly where he wanted to be.

"We eat what Providence sends us. The calabash of poi is always full; there is also meat; water in quantity, coffee and bread sometimes, wine or beer never. As I have had to work all week and cook on Sunday, you will excuse me if my hands are not as clean as yours, which do nothing, I suppose, but turn the pages of books. Sometimes the plates are not well washed either. But what matter. Hunger and habit make us eat just the same. For dessert, we smoke a pipe. That finished, quickly back on the horse."

In the saddle, Damien would cross Molokai’s mountains; his parish over two thousand square kilometers, he rode down the island’s valleys beyond Kalawao itself, across water and through fields to find the most remote of his parishioners. Today it is a national park, wild garlic growing in fragrant profusion, its white flowers poking up between ferns, yellow hibiscus and amid the ki-tree, the roots of which were used to brew a potent beer. Across this paradise the finch-like honeycreeper flits, feeding off the red spindly flowers of the evergreen ‘ōhi‘a lehua tree. Damien would haul building material and basic medical supplies with him, eager to provide practical as much as spiritual comfort (though he never left without an ad hoc altar of four sticks and a plank). Sometimes he had to abandon the horse and mules to scale by hand and foot the sheer cliff faces which routinely stood between him and his flock. For Damien dirtiness brought him closer to godliness, the grime evidence of his graft.

For his colonial masters, those disdainful of his personal habits, the priest’s life was alien at best and an affront to Western order at worst; religion was supposed to be a cleansing antidote to indigenous habits, a washing-away of the idolatry and idleness they projected onto the population, be they sick or healthy. Yet here was Damien, adopting their ways, it would seem, along with their language. His body and the leprous bodies of his parishioners were dangerously entangled even before he himself succumbed to the disease. This was 1872, and the pious (and patronizing) commentators of the time muttered that Damien’s unvarnished personality was due to his simple farm upbringing in rural Belgium. “It is absolutely beyond doubt that he contracted the disease through his careless ministrations and uncleanly personal habits,” a representative of the Hawaiian Board of Health tutted, though not without something approaching admiration, noting the priest “would have leper boys at work in his kitchen so that he could give more time to his ministrations for others, being busy from peep of day until long after dark.” Dirty of body, dirty of mind, would be the eventual assumption: sexual proclivity was whispered. Damien’s brother, reading Latin scripture in a clean cassock 12,000 kilometers away, faced no such danger and no such accusations of moral lapse.

Damien was never supposed to achieve the fame he did, a symbol of global imperial paranoia and catalyst of religious fetish: a bronze statue, in which he wears his wide-brimmed hat, stick in hand, now represents the state of Hawaii in the US Capitol building’s Hall of Columns. He was never supposed to be the subject of culture wars in his lifetime and long after: in 2020, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried the choice of a white man as Washington’s symbol of the Polynesian fiftieth state. Damien was supposed to stay working in his parents’ fields in Tremelo, a dull village in a duller part of Belgium. The fact that celebrity landed upon him, plucking him from the obscurity of his mission to represent the burgeoning discourse on the disease, says more about the world that orbited him than his actions on the island or his own political nous. There were plenty of other missionaries, in plenty of other colonies, with plenty of other health issues, spreading religion and the soft arm of imperialism. Leprosy, however, had become totemic of a moral depravity or sexual freedom that Europeans had long imagined pervaded the South Seas. The leprous, lascivious body was a perversion that Western proselytizing could fix.

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For indigenous Hawaiians, leprosy arrived as Damien did, an unwanted visitor from across the sea. The disease may have stowed away as early as Captain Cook’s colonial voyage, but it only became regarded as a public health issue eighty years later. “The commander manifested a laudable humanity, in endeavouring to shield the population from the evil effects which so inevitably result from connection between foreign seamen and the native females,” wrote one sympathetic European account of Cook’s trip. The evil effects weren’t just moral turpitude, but disease too. “But his efforts were in vain. If the discipline of his own crew could have been strictly enforced, the eagerness of the women was not to be repressed.” Historically, this genesis, regardless of whether the women were actually consenting, inextricably linked sickness with sex in the minds of Hawaiian and colonialist alike, with the former’s lack of conformity to Western and Christian mores taking the brunt of the responsibility in the minds of the latter.

The haole—the white incomers—dodged blame from among Hawaiians for leprosy too. As cases multiplied, the disease became known as ma‘i pake, the “Chinese sickness,” named after the thousands of Chinese laborers who arrived on the islands at the invitation of American traders endeavoring to create an export market in sandalwood (a precursor to the sugar industry that would dominate the economy in years to come). “There seems but one way to prevent the whole of Oceania from becoming leprous, and that is the exclusion or the rigid control of all Chinese coolies,” a Scottish physician warned. Wherever it came from, contact was devastating for the indigenous Hawaiian population, which plummeted from the healthy 683,000 people Cook first encountered to just under 40,000 Polynesian islanders left after a century of colonial enterprise and disease.

by Oliver Basciano, Literary Hub |  Read more:

Image: Kalaupapa, Molokai