Emma Kaili Metcalf Beckley Nakuina

Emma Kaili Metcalf Beckley Nakuina
Emma Kaili Metcalf Beckley Nakuina, c. 1904
Born	(1847-03-05)March 5, 1847 Kauaʻala, Manoa Valley, Oahu, Kingdom of Hawaii
Died	April 27, 1929(1929-04-27) (aged 82)
Resting place	Oahu Cemetery
Alma mater	Young Ladies Seminary Punahou School Sacred Hearts Academy
Known for	being the first female judge of Hawaii
Spouse(s)	Frederick William Beckley Sr. Moses Kuaea Nakuina
Children	Frederick William Beckley Jr. and others
Signature

Emma Kaʻilikapuolono Metcalf Beckley Nakuina (March 5, 1847 – April 27, 1929) was an early Hawaiian female judge, curator and cultural writer. She served as Commissioner of Private Ways and Water Rights from 1892 to 1907 and curator of the Hawaiian National Museum from 1882 to 1887. Her many literary works include Hawaii, Its People, Their Legends (1904).

Early life and family

Nakuina was born March 5, 1847, at her family's homestead in Kaua'ala in the Manoa Valley, at what is now the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.^[1][2][3] Her father Theophilus Metcalf, originally from Ontario County, New York, arrived in Hawaii on May 19, 1842, and was naturalized as a citizen on March 9, 1846. He worked as a sugar planter and government land surveyor during the Great Mahele. Her mother Kaʻilikapuolono was a descendant of the aliʻi lineages of Oahu associated with the Kūkaniloko Birthstones, where the highest ranking chiefs of the islands were once born, and also Nahili, a chief from the island of Hawaii and one of the generals of King Kamehameha I during his conquest of the Hawaiian Islands. Her maternal family was considered to be of the Hawaiian kaukau aliʻi class, or lower ranking chiefs in service to the royal family.^[4]

Nakuina was educated at Sacred Hearts Academy and Punahou School in Honolulu. She was later sent to the Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia, California, and was also privately tutored in many languages by her father including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, English, and Hawaiian.^[5] According to later biographies, King Kamehameha IV ordered her to be trained in traditional water rights and customs.^[6]

Emma Metcalf, photograph by Charles Leander Weed, c. 1865

On December 3, 1867, she married Frederick William Beckley Sr. (1845–1881), a part-Hawaiian noble like herself. She served as the lady-in-waiting of Queen Kapiolani, the wife of King Kalākaua, while her husband served as the Chamberlain of the Royal Household and in the Hawaiian government as a member of the House of Representatives and as the Royal Governor of Kauai. They had seven children, including son Frederick William Beckley Jr. (1874–1943) and daughter Sabina Beckley Hutchinson (1868–1935). Beckley Sr. died in 1881, leaving Nakuina a widow.^[7][8] In 1887, she remarried to the Reverend Moses Kuaea Nakuina (1867–1911). A nephew of Minister of Finance Moses Kuaea, he was twenty years her junior and also a descendant of Hawaiian nobility.^[7][9] They had two children: a short-lived son named Irving Metcalf Nakuina, who was born and died in 1888, and a daughter who contracted leprosy and was sent to the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement.^[10][11]

Career

After her first husband's death, Walter Murray Gibson, possibly at the suggestion of King Kalākaua, appointed Nakuina as the female curator of the Hawaiian National Museum and Government Library. She used the title curatrix in official documents. The salary from this governmental post help her support her children. During her tenure as the governmental curatrix, Nakuina helped expand the collection of the museum, which was located on the upper floor of Aliiolani Hale, the governmental building, and also established herself as an authority on traditional Hawaiian legends and history with a number of publications. She assisted the writers Thomas G. Thrum and William DeWitt Alexander in many of their works, serving as a cultural advisor and translator. After the downfall of the Gibson administration in 1887, funding to the museum was cut and the collections were later incorporated into the Bishop Museum.^[12]

In 1892, she was appointed Commissioner of Private Ways and Water Rights for the district of Kona, on the island of Oahu, corresponding to the capital city of Honolulu and its surrounding areas. Nakuina was chosen for this post specifically because of her knowledge of traditional water rights, and she was tasked with the duties of resolving water usage and rights issues. She held this position from 1892 to 1907, at which point the powers were reassigned to the circuit courts. During her tenure, she worked under the monarchy until the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. In order to remain in her governmental post, she took the oath of allegiance to the subsequent regimes of the Provisional Government, the Republic and the Territory of Hawaii. Although she never held the formal title, she is often regarded as Hawaii's first female judge.^{[13][14][8][15]}

In 1897, she was mentioned in an article by Janet Jennings, of the Chicago Times-Herald, about the important role and status of part-Hawaiian women, which described her as "a clever and accomplished woman, whose scholarly attainments make her a unique figure in political and social circles in Honolulu."^[16]

Later life

In later life, Nakuina returned to writing. She became one of the first female members of the Hawaiian Historical Society and joined the civic organization Daughters of Hawaii.^[17] In 1904, she wrote her only book, Hawaii, Its People, Their Legends, published by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee. It was meant to introduce tourists to the culture of Hawaii, but was also imbued with her own sense of pride for her Hawaiian heritage and bitterness at the negative effects of foreign influence in the islands.^[18] According to Cristina Bacchilega, this publication was a covert example of feminine defiance against the Western world.^[19]

In 1917, Nakuina hosted a party for Almira Hollander Pitman, a leading suffragist from the mainland United States, and her husband Banjamin Franklin Pitman. The gathering attracted many upper-class Honolulu suffragists including Wilhelmina Widemann Dowsett, president of the National Women's Equal Suffrage Association of Hawaii, and Emma Ahuena Taylor, who asked Almira Pitman to espouse the cause of the women of the Territory of Hawaii. This meeting and subsequent meetings with the Honolulu Women's Club prompted Almira Pitman to write to her connections back home, which helped push a bill through Congress authorizing the Hawaii Territorial Legislature with the power to legislate on the issue of women's suffrage. A local bill was planned in 1919 to enfranchise the women of Hawaii. It was superseded before it could be adopted when, in the following year, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting all women in the United States the right to vote.^[20][21]

Nakuina died on April 27, 1929, in her son's house, at the age of eighty-two.^[22] She was buried at the Oahu Cemetery with her second husband, Moses Nakuina.^[11] In 2017, Hawaiʻi Magazine listed Nakuina among the most influential women in Hawaiian history.^[15]

Publications and works

List below are the known works of Emma Kaili Metcalf Beckley Nakuina in chronological order:^[23]

See also

• List of first women lawyers and judges in Hawaii

References

Bibliography

• Bacchilega, Cristina (2007). "Emma Nakuina's Hawaii: Its People, Their Legends: Out of Place Stories II". Legendary Hawaiʻi and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 102–136. ISBN 0-8122-0117-5. OCLC 759158207 – via Project MUSE. (Subscription required (help)).
• Charlot, Jean (2005). Moses Kuaea Nakuina: Hawaiian Novelist (PDF). Laie, HI: Pacific Institute, Brigham Young Brigham Young University–Hawaii. ISBN 978-0-939154-71-5. OCLC 64686034.
• Day, Arthur Grove (1984). History Makers of Hawaii: a Biographical Dictionary. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing of Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-935180-09-1. OCLC 11087565.
• Harper, Ida Husted, ed. (1922). History of Woman Suffrage: 1900–1920. VI. New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association. OCLC 10703030.
• Hopkins, Jaime Mew Chin (August 2012). "Hānau Ma Ka Lolo, For the Benefit of Her Race: a Portrait of Emma Kaʻilikapuolono Metcalf Beckley Nakuina" (PDF). Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa. hdl:10125/100964.
• Peterson, Barbara Bennett (1984). Notable Women of Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-0820-4. OCLC 11030010.
• Scanlon, Jennifer; Cosner, Shaaron (1996). American Women Historians, 1700s–1990s: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-29664-2. OCLC 154243868.
• Taylor, Albert Pierce (1922). Under Hawaiian Skies: A Narrative of the Romance, Adventure and History of the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: Advertiser Publishing Company, Ltd. OCLC 479709.
• Taylor, Albert Pierce (1926). Under Hawaiian Skies: A Narrative of the Romance, Adventure and History of the Hawaiian Islands, a Complete Historical Account. Honolulu: Advertiser Publishing Company, Ltd. OCLC 1547523.
• Yasutake, Rumi (2017). "Re-Franchising Women of Hawaiʻi, 1912–1920: Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific". In Choy, Catherine Ceniza; Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Gendering the Trans-Pacific World. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-33610-0. OCLC 976394366.

External links

• Media related to Emma Kaili Metcalf Beckley Nakuina at Wikimedia Commons