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Grace Kamaikui
Grace Kamaikui
Grace Kamaʻikuʻi Young Rooke (1806 -1866) was a Hawaiian high chiefess being the daughter of John Young Olohana, the British advisor of Kamehameha the Great, and foster mother of Queen Emma of Hawaii. Grace was fair-complexioned and blessed with fine features.
Marriage to Rooke
Grace had a fair command of the English language and was acquainted with British ways. She probably felt socially equal, if not superior, to her husband for he had come from a family of commoners. Yet he was "a man of rare cultivation and refinement", with an outgoing and cheery disposition that complemented Grace’s natural bashfulness. At time of their marriage, Dr. Rooke operated a dispensary in a one-storey, part-adobe structure on Union Street in Honolulu. As one of the three only Western doctors in the Kingdom of Hawaii, he had more business than he could handle. The Rookes’ friendship with the royal court made them secure and comfortable. But there was one sadness in their otherwise happy life. Both Rookes desperately wanted a child; but Grace was unable to give birth. She and Dr. Rooke decided upon hanai, adoption. Hanai was a common custom in native Hawaiian culture, even if both natural parents of the adopted child were still living, despite missionaries’ stern opposition to giving away children. All classes, especially the ali’i, practiced hanai. Adoption generally occurred in the same ʻohana, or family. The Rookes, therefore, could easily choose between the children of Grace’s sisters, Jane and Fanny. Why, in the end, they chose Fanny is unknown; it may have been because Fanny was a more serious stable person and a Christian, while Jane tended to be "clever as well as a little frivolous." According to Hawaiian custom, a child could not be adopted without the full consent of both natural parents. Fanny and George Naeʻa consented fully, promising the child before its birth. As soon as the baby was delivered, the Rookes "immediately" wrapped her in soft tapa cloth and took her to their home nearby, a two-storey, frame building on Union Street facing Fort Street in Honolulu. One should not take the word, "immediately", too literally, for it was customary to preserve the pike or umbilical cord, to bathe the infant and perhaps oil it lightly, to wrap it snugly in its tapa-cloth receiving blanket, to allow the
Early Life and Marriage
She was born circa 1808 or 8 September 1806, in Kawaihae, in Kohala District, on the Island of Hawai’i. Her aging father was John Young the royal advisor of Kamehameha the Great from Lancashire, England. He mother was the High Chiefess Kaʻoanaʻeha, the niece of Kamehameha the Great. She was probably name after her grandmother Grace who was John Young’s mother from England. She was raised on her father’s homestead situated on a barren hillside overlooking the Kawaihae Bay, on a piece of land Kamehameha had parcel out to her father on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. She grew up with her two sisters, Fanny and Jane, and her brother, John. Fanny was eldest, she was second, John was third, and Jane the youngest. She had two elder half-brother by her father’s first marriage, to Namokuelua, and they were Robert and James. She and her siblings were hapa-haole or part Caucasian but still of a aliʻi (royal) status. At a tender age, probably in 1821[1], in her teenage years, she married to High Chief Cox Kahekili Keeaumoku the Governor of Maui. Her husband was Queen Kaahumanu’s, the regent of Hawaii, younger brother. He was 20 years the senior of his wife. She was left a young widow, when she was 14 or 15 when Cox died at Honolulu, Oahu in 1823. She remarried to Dr. Thomas Charles Byde Rooke, a British man and physician to king Kamehameha III in 1830. She was the only royal Hawaiian chiefess to married a white man in her generation. Her sisters, Fanny and Jane, had married Hawaiian ali’i.
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mother to nurse it, and then to perform the hanai ceremony. When a child was handed to the adoptive parents, the natural parents would seal the act with words "Nau ke keiki kukae a naʻau", meaning, "I give you this child intesines and all". (In Hawaiian tradition, the intestines were regarded as the seat of emotion, intelligence, and character.) The ceremony of hanai constituted a solemn promise, a spoken contract that was as binding as any modern legal instrument: this doubtless is why the Rookes did not sign a written deed of adoption until December 30, 1851, fifteen years after.
Grace Kamaikui
Hawaii. His wife died in 1866 and was buried in Mauna Ala the Royal Mausoleum.
Ancestors
4. Robert Young
2. John Young Olohana 5. Grace
Emma
Their foster daughter was Emma, who took the surname of her foster parents, Rooke. Grace and her husband moved into their new and spacious wood-frame mansion, Rooke House, shortly after Emma’s birth. While Dr. Rooke raised Emma to be very British, Grace raised her to be Hawaiian as well. Emma learned about the world from her scholarly father, with the help of many letters from her paternal grandmother in England who instructed Dr. Rooke on how to raise Emma properly. The British did not spoil their children, while Hawaiians did (especially aliʻi children, who were given their hearts’ every desire), and Dr. Rooke did his best to constraint Grace’s indulgence of Emma. She loved Emma, and her daughter called her Kiawai. English grew up speaking both Hawaiian and English (the latter "with a perfect English accent"). Grace sent her daughter to the Chiefs’ Children’s School at five years of age, to began her formal education.[2] After living in the Hawaiian Islands for nearly thirty years, the fifty-two-year-old Dr. Rooke died on November 28, 1858, at Kailua,
1. Grace Kamaʻikuʻi Young 6. Prince Keliʻimaikaʻi 3. High Chiefess Kaʻoanaʻeha 7. High Chiefess Kalikoʻokalani
Notes
[1] Grace Kama’iku’i YOUNG [2] Biography of Queen Emma
References
• Kanahele, George S.. Emma: Hawai’i’s Remarkable Queen : a Biography . University of Hawaii Press, 1999.
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