Hawaiian Quilts

Giving voice for over two hundred years

Na Kihapai Nani Lua ʻOle O Edena a Me Elenale (The Beautiful Unequaled Gardens of Eden and of Elenale), before 1918. Wikimedia Commons.

The 56-year-old widow wasn’t the first woman – — nor the first queen for that matter — to be imprisoned and she wouldn’t be the last. Sentenced to five years of hard labor for treason, her sentence had been softened. It was commuted to imprisonment in what had been, in more serene times, her bedroom. She described the small apartment on the second floor of the palace. There was “one single common chair, an iron safe, a bureau, a chiffonier…and a cupboard, intended for eatables…a bath-room, and also a corner room and a little boudoir…” The windows were of frosted glass, installed to replace those broken in an earlier attack on the palace.

Liliuokalani before she became queen. Photograph by Menzies Dickson, between 1874 and 1882. Wikimedia Commons.

The year was 1895. The Queen was Liliuokalani and the place was Honolulu. Outside, life continued, but under the control of American interests. Hawaii was too juicy a plum to leave in the hands of the indigenous people. Not only did it offer the sweetness of its sugar industry, it was also an incomparable perch for military power in the vast, mostly empty, Pacific Ocean. Over the decades since Captain Cook landed in 1778, the United States had been steadily pushing their influence over Hawaii’s land and people. Missionaries had done their frosty best…