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1 results

  • 3 - Bird and Sovereignty Conservation in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, 1898–1911

  • Paul Kreitman, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    Japan's Ocean Borderlands
    Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023, pp 88-126

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the Hawaiian archipelago, c.1898–1911, newly annexed to the US as part of the sudden irruption of American empire in the Pacific. American ornithologists and naval officers discovered that Japanese bird-hunters were regularly operating on otherwise uninhabited atolls in the outlying Northwest Hawaiian group. Inspired by a mixture of concern for animal welfare, geopolitics (the islands were potentially valuable as cable-landing stations) and ambient racial anxiety about Japanese immigration, US colonial administrators deployed nature conservation as a means of asserting sovereignty over uninhabited space. Key to this process was the scientist William Alanson Bryan, who had witnessed the Marcus Island Incident at first hand and was determined to protect both American birds and territory from Japan’s advance into the Pacific. To this end, he successfully lobbied Theodore Roosevelt to establish the Hawaiian Islands Reservation, forerunner of today’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.