Betsey Stockton and Portraits of Pioneering Women in the Black Pacific, 1898- 1948

Born into slavery in 1798, Betsey Stockton is the first known African American woman to travel to and live for an extended period in the Hawaiian Islands. In 1816, she joined the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton and was freed shortly after by her owner, Reverend Ashbel Green, who would later support her application to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions to join their second delegation in 1822 to Hawaii, known at that time as the “Sandwich Islands.” Betsey Stockton kept a journal of her five-month ocean journey and this surviving written evidence documents the extraordinary agency of one freed black woman in the United States at a time when only twenty-stars graced the American flag. She died six months after the end of the Civil War in 1865 and a photographic portrait of Stockton, from 1863 or 1864, is currently held in the Collections of the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives. This enduring visual evidence prompts a discussion of representations
of blackness in Oceania, the role of the United States in shaping those representations, and the ways in which women of African, Pacific, or mixed descent, exert agency in the Black Pacific. This paper examines the portrait of Stockton, along with other images of pioneering African American women in Hawaii from 1898 to 1948, to theorize Black Pacific Art, or art that explores in visual and material form the possibilities that occur when the lived experiences of blackness and Pacificness meet.