In 1881 — less than a week after King David Kalakaua left Hawaii for a yearlong tour around the world — a ship arrived in Honolulu carrying laborers sick with smallpox. The decisions that Hawaii’s future queen made to keep people safe – and the pushback she received from angry citizens and frustrated business owners […]

How do you practice Hawaiian culture when you’re thousands of miles from Hawaii? And what happens when Hawaiians abroad finally get a chance to go home?

Nearly half of all Native Hawaiians now live outside of Hawaii. And while many have cited Hawaii’s high cost of living as the main reason for leaving, it’s really just a piece of a much larger story.

After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, hundreds of Hawaiian musicians would journey to the U.S. in search of fame, fortune, or just a decent living. Some would die in obscurity. Others would change American music forever.

Two decades after Hawaiians helped build a fort for John Sutter in California, another group of Hawaiians would find themselves stranded in Massachusetts. And take up arms in America’s bloodiest war.

In the mid-1800s, hundreds of Hawaiians lived in what is now Canada and California. In 1847, Hawaiians made up 10 percent of San Francisco’s tiny but growing population. This is the story of a group of Hawaiians who ended up in California more than 160 years ago — back when Hawaii was an independent nation. And how their descendents are still connected to the islands in unexpected ways.

Nearly half of all Native Hawaiians now live outside of Hawaii. It’s a staggering number that raises questions about what Hawaii will be like in coming years, and how Native Hawaiians will carry their islands with them to far flung places.

This season, Offshore is taking a deep dive into the Hawaiian diaspora. Join journalist Kuʻu Kauanoe, as she digs into what is driving Hawaiians from the islands today. And tells some amazing stories about Hawaiians who left long ago.

The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands is one of the most remote places on Earth. Now, it’s threatened by climate change, pollution and politics.

When we started reporting this season, we expected it to be a story about troubling adoptions that happened in the 1990s. But it quickly became clear that issues with Marshallese adoptions were never fully resolved, they simply moved. To new counties. States. Adoption agencies. So we’ve continued chasing leads while producing this season. In this […]

There’s an entire generation of Marshallese adoptees like London Lewis asking questions about who they are and where they come from. And there are plenty of parents searching for the children they gave up, too. These reunions aren’t always easy. Many families have been separated for years by not only distance, but also language and culture. Finding their way back to each other is a complicated journey that can lead to places no one expects. But right now, our biggest challenge with...

London Lewis had to get back to work in Florida, so we’re continuing the search on his behalf — journeying to the Marshall Islands to where his story began, to try and find his birth father and his siblings. And get a sense of why women are still being recruited to leave the Marshall Islands […]

We started reporting for this season of Offshore last June, but we’re still chasing down leads and new developments. It’s been a busy few weeks for us. Which means we’re going to be publishing Episode 6 on Monday, May 18. In the meantime, we wanted to share a poem with you by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. She’s […]

London Lewis’ biggest worry when he arrived in Springdale was how he would be received. Would other Marshallese people recognize him? Accept him? It didn’t take long for him to form instant connections with people who want him to know that he not only belongs in the Marshallese community but he is needed in the Marshallese community. But acceptance and belonging are not the same thing. London is just at the beginning of a long and complicated journey to figure out where he fits into the...

In Springdale, London Lewis begins to experience Marshallese culture for the first time. He’s going to meet people he’s only read about in World War II textbooks. Hear a language he’s never heard except for on YouTube. Get a little closer to finding his birth family. But we’re not just in Springdale for London. We’re also here to try and find out exactly what’s happening with Marshallese adoptions today. To speak with private adoption lawyers, adoptive families, and Marshallese birth mothers...

The biggest population of Marshallese in the U.S. isn’t in Hawaii. Or even a coastal state. It’s in Springdale, Arkansas - a small, unassuming midwest town that 12,000 Marshallese now call home. London Lewis doesn’t have the time or the means to go to the Marshall Islands right now. So if he’s going to have a chance of finding someone who knows his family, he has to start here.

Susette Lewis was excited when she arrived in Honolulu in 1992. And like most new moms, nervous. Uncertain of what to expect. She didn’t know that picking up her adopted son would be an alarming experience.

International adoptions were a rarity in the Marshall Islands until the mid-'90s. Then came an adoption boom of such intensity that the remote island nation suddenly had one of the highest per-capita adoption rates in the world. In just a few years, hundreds of children were adopted from the far-flung atolls -- so many that it seemed like an entire generation was disappearing. Now, two decades later, some of these children are beginning to search for answers about who they are and where...

A young man on a quest to find his birth family. An adoption market that rocked an island nation. A culture in danger of disappearing — and the desperate fight to save it. Join Offshore for an unforgettable eight-episode season this spring. www.offshorepodcast.org

Hawaii’s false nuclear alarm scare sends Offshore reporters on a trip back in time to 1962, when Hawaii had a very different kind of brush with nuclear weapons. Just a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hawaii witnessed a nuclear explosion so massive that darkness briefly turned to daylight. Instead of inspiring fear, the detonation sparked celebrations.

More than 100 people are suing Guam’s Catholic Church, saying they were sexually abused by priests in cases that go back decades. Sex abuse within the Catholic church is a well-known issue on the mainland, but this is the first time Guam has had to come to grips with it. And it’s a huge deal. Not just because of the abuse, but because the outpouring of accusations that directly confront the church is a sign of huge societal changes in Guam. An island where, after centuries of colonization,...

A trip to a neighborhood bar in California leads Offshore to some unexpected places, as reporter Paola Mardo dives into the history of America’s fascination with all things Tiki. Offshore looks at the history of tiki bars, why they’re popping up all over the country and even the world today, and finds out more about the immigrants who served up the first tiki cocktails.

When we started out our journey to Mauna Kea for Offshore, we were looking at this story as a clash of science versus culture. What we’ve discovered is a whole lot more complex than that. But where does that leave things? Is there room on Mauna Kea for both the observatories and Native Hawaiian practitioners? Does one side have to push the other out, or is there room to coexist? And if what we’re seeing across the country at places like Oak Flat and Standing Rock is a clash between...

Why are Native Hawaiians facing charges for protests in South Dakota? Why are Apache from Arizona coming to sing their sacred songs to Mauna Kea? Offshore visits the Standing Rock Sioux and spends time with an Apache leader in Arizona to get a better understanding of why Native Hawaiians fighting the Thirty Meter Telescope say they are part of something much bigger. A growing movement that is uniting indigenous people across the globe to fight for the future of not just sacred places, but...