Remembering Iosepa: History, place, and religion in the American West

In 1889, a small group of Hawaiians emigrated from rural O'ahu to the arid and isolated Skull Valley, seventy miles southwest of Salt Lake City, to form their own community. They christened it Iosepa. Iosepa remained their home until 1917, when the town was abandoned and nearly all of its residents returned to Hawai'i. At its zenith in the first decades of the twentieth century, more than 200 Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders called Iosepa home.;The converts who settled in Skull Valley followed a long line of Hawaiians who traveled to the western United States both as sojourners and as settlers in the nineteenth century. "Kanaka" laborers and settlers were common throughout the Pacific Northwest and coastal California from the early 1800's onward. American and British trade and the consolidation of the Hawaiian archipelago under a single political authority put Honolulu and Lahaina at the crossroads of a vibrant Pacific trade network. This trade network connected California, China, Peru, Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, and Russia with even more distant financial centers. Hawaiians from the poorest citizens to the wealthiest chiefs availed themselves of the possibilities this new world offered. While those who landed in Vancouver, San Francisco, or San Diego pursued jobs in the fur trade or gold fields, the Hawaiians who traveled to Utah did so primarily for religious reasons. They seized the opportunity provided by their newfound faith to participate in the gathering of those who considered themselves God's chosen people.;My dissertation connects the global and ideological forces that linked individuals and communities in Hawai'i and the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In addition, I look at the ways that narratives of race and religion shaped Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in Utah during the same period. I also examine the ways that these same narratives shape the public memory of Iosepa, and forge strong bonds of peoplehood and place for many Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Mormons in Utah and Hawai'i today.