Iosepa, a Hawaiian Plumeria in the Utah Desert

Ah, the Plumeria Tree, a tree right from the heart of paradise. My grandmother used to pick its white and yellow flowers in her Hawaiian backyard to make leis for me when I visited after a long absence. They grew almost like weeds there. I wanted such a symbol of Eden in my front yard on the Mainland. Despite putting porous rock underneath it and watering sparingly, the tree, alien to Southern California, just didn’t grow much the first couple of years. It wanted to grow, I could tell, but the forces of nature conspired against it and one winter day it finally died, a victim of my ignorance.

The Hawaiian colony of Iosepa in Utah is like that Plumeria tree of mine – a breath of paradise in a hostile land, having well intentioned gardeners, but with a superficial knowledge of its nature. That partial knowledge is no better symbolized than in Iosepa’s very name. But I am getting ahead of myself. First of all, what is the colony of Iosepa and what’s it doing here? This is how Utah’s government describes the history of this colony.

Iosepa, (pronounced Yo-SEH-pa) the Hawaiian word for Joseph, was founded in August 1889 under the direction of then Mormon apostle Joseph F. Smith. The town's colonizers were devout converts to the Mormon faith who came to Utah in order to build Zion and worship in the soon to be completed Salt Lake Temple. Certainly these tropical Polynesians were out of their element in the bone-dry desert of Utah and battled to adapt to the new climate, new language, and new foods, but in time they prospered and even made Skull Valley appear hospitable…More important to the pious colonists, however, were their 77-mile treks to Salt Lake City. They made the pilgrimage as often as possible to worship in the temple, which remained their primary motivation for staying in Utah…The Polynesian settlers were not accustomed to the harsh Utah climate; they baked in the dry desert summers and shivered in the cold white winters. Such challenges took their toll, and at times it seemed that the cemetery grew faster than the town.

The deadness of the ghost town indicates that all is not what it seemed in Iosepa. It was a showcase of faith that hid away secrets. The first was its bogus prosperity. There were also unmentionables such as the West’s prejudice against a brown skinned people that was cut out. And there were gross misperceptions. The surrounding community couldn’t even get the Hawaiian name right.

Information about Iosepa typically reads like propaganda. For example, Utah historian J. Cecil Alter wrote in 1911:

"Iosepa is perhaps the most successful individual colonization proposition that has been attempted by the Mormon people in the United States…There are 1,120 acres practically all in use and half as much more is being brought under the magic wand of the Hawaiian irrigator."

It may have looked successful, prosperous and self-sufficient but it wasn’t. According to historian Leonard Arrington, “The extent of Church aid, of course, was not known”. The colony was losing money but the LDS church quietly put in more to support the Hawaiians.

There are mysteries here. Why were they assigned such a hostile place to colonize? And for a small colony of saints ranging from 50 to 230, how come there are so many graves from just 25 years of settlement? Moreover, Hawaiians were a highly literate people as were the Caucasian church leaders who oversaw the colony. So how come the graveyard has so many unknown adults? A group of faithful Hawaiian saints moved from the islands to Salt Lake City to be close to and help build the SL temple. Church history is silent from here to the point in which a colony is appointed for them in Skull Valley a few years later. The question I had is if they wanted to be as close as possible to the temple of God, why were they moved from SLC to 75 miles away in the middle of some of the harshest country in Utah?

PREJUDICE & MISUNDERSTANDING
One historian says that Salt Lake City residents had problems "socializing" with the Hawaiians in the decade or so that they lived there. “Socializing”, eh? Yeah, we know what that means.

This misunderstanding did not just apply to the Hawaiians. A New Zealand record of a Maori saint, Hirini Whaanga Christy, who was not connected with the Hawaiian colony, described the situation.

“In 1894 he and other relatives went to Utah, where his grandparents worked in the Salt Lake Temple recording and affirming iwi genealogies. After arriving in Salt Lake City, the whanau was mistakenly thought to be a polygamous family. Since polygamy was no longer practiced, this proved to be an embarrassment to those who were unaware of the extended family of the Maori. They were moved to Kanab, southern Utah, where misplaced trust and misguided speculation saw them lose most of their funds.”

I cannot help but wonder if the outbreak of leprosy in the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1860 and 70s made Utahans suspicious of most Hawaiians for disease.So, when you are a church leader and see part of your flock not wanted by the general population, what do you do? I suppose you preach against it but in Utah there was also an option to have groups form their own independent communities. The church, with the leadership of Joseph F. Smith who had close ties to Hawaiians from his mission in Hawaii, called them to colonize a part of Utah.