Talk:Leper War on Kauaʻi

Leper war is a made-up name
I can't find any uses of "Leper War" other than this article. Calling it a WAR is misleading. Only one man resisted; all the other lepers went off to Kalawao. The Provisional Government may have sent soldiers but that doesn't make it war, any more than sending the National Guard into a tense situation turns that into a war.

Furthermore, I gather than Hansen's Disease/leprosy activists prefer not to use the term leper, which has all sorts of icky connotations. Hansen's Disease sufferer or patient is usually preferred.

I'm too busy to engage in an extended battle over this, but some day, when I get a round tuit, I'm going to move this article to a more descriptive name, such as Koolau of Kalalau Valley. Zora (talk) 18:55, 22 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It is an actual term used by three books here which can and should be used for sources.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 06:59, 29 December 2011 (UTC)


 * It is NOT the term used by mainstream historians. One of the books you mention, the Encyclopedia of Pestilences, has it completely wrong. It implies that there was a mass movement of resistance, culminating in armed resistance by "a small band of determined rebels". Not one guy, his wife, and their child. This is not a well-researched book and not a major scholarly reference. Another book, Imagining Our Americans, says it is the "so-called Leper War" but doesn't say who calls it that. The Imagining book is a very political, left-ish, po-mo book ... it is proposing a new term, not using an established one. The Battles Involving Hawaii looks like opportunistic Wikipedia-scraping. Probably copied from this very mis-titled article.


 * You've convinced me that there is a determination on the part of some leprosy/Hansen's Disease activists to conflate the leprosy quarantine with Hawaiian sovereignty issues and to inflate and celebrate anything that looks like resistance. BUT ONE MAN DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A WAR. Otherwise we'd have to elevate every police shootout to the status of a war. Calling Ko'olau's resistance a war is Hawaiian sovereignty special pleading and an offense against the English language.


 * I'd be OK with retitling the article to something more neutral (Ko'olau the Leper, say) and then adding a para explaining that some Hansen's Disease and Hawaiian sovereignty activists would prefer to call his resistance the Leper War. That gets your point across without claiming it as fact in the very title of the article. Zora (talk) 07:44, 29 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't really care, but Ko'olau the Leper won't work since it would imply a biographical article which this isn't? It's an event.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 08:36, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Although a seperate article can be create for him.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 08:43, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

There's no point in creating a separate biography article, since he's famous only for his act of resistance. Ko'olau the Leper is the title of the grotesquely misleading Jack London story, and that's what most people will be searching on. I would be OK using the term Battle of Kalalau (as used by historian Frances Frazier), even though it was just ONE guy on the defending side, since a company of soldiers and artillery were involved. Set up redirects from Ko'olau the Leper, Kaluaiko'olau, and Leper War to point to Battle of Kalalau. I would also rewrite the article to remove the claim that "a revolt broke out in Kalalau", since the resistance consisted of a letter of protest, discussions about refusing to board the ship, and then everyone BUT Ko'olau going on board. That's not a revolt.

If you want to discuss resistance to forced relocation to Kalawao, it might be useful to take a wider approach, rather than focusing on this one act. Hawaiians DID resist the quarantine, but passively. They concealed their condition; families helped them conceal it; if reported to the authorities they fled and hid. Ko'olau was the one person to resist violently. It's a mistake to see him as typical, but there's an article to be written about the widespread passive resistance. One could rightfully argue that this resistance was sparked by the stringency of the quarantine rules and the complete disregard for the comfort and health of the quarantined lepers. We see this now as discrimination against Native Hawaiians, the people most afflicted by the disease -- though you'd have to document any claims that people THEN saw it this way.

I don't think there's any coverage of such widespread passive resistance on WP, but perhaps I'm missing the relevant article. Zora (talk) 09:46, 29 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you understand I am not the writer of this article and I do not have the time to edit this article except to add some sources and images for other editors to work off of? You can if you want, and I would support the Battle of Kalalau title.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 09:56, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

To User: Zora: I think you are allowing your preconceptions of "war" to affect your opinion. Many events have been called "war" with few or no battles or few or no battlefield casualties; see Toledo War, Cold War, and Potato War, also see Bloodless war for a list of such "wars". If there are sources that call this event the "Leper War", then it should remain as is. Boneyard90 (talk) 14:49, 27 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Boneyard, even the Cold War involved millions of people, dozens of nations, and lasted for many years. You are right that people use the term for events not involving heavy artillery (such as the War on (some) Drugs) but people do not use the term for a police operation tracking down a murderer/kidnapper/escaped convict whatever. That's certainly how the Provisional government saw the issue, as a police operation that was difficult due to remote mountainous terrain, and not as a war on lepers or Native Hawaiians. To repeat myself, Leper War is also not the term of choice for mainstream historians of Hawai'i. It's a politically loaded term used by a few sovereignty advocates and it violates NPOV. I just haven't had time to fight this one out. Especially not now, when I'm recovering from surgery. Zora (talk) 17:50, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

This should be rewritten to be an incident/event rather than a military conflict, which is an overexaggeration of what occurred. It is like calling the hunt of Julian Assange (best example I can think of, right off the bat) a military conflict.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 00:50, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Using the term leper to describe a leprosy victim
The term leper has a negative connotation. I'm thinking about changing each reference to "leprosy victim." Let me know what you think. --alicekim53 (talk) 08 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The complete censored version would be Hansen's Disease patient. --KAVEBEAR (talk) 00:33, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I actually just learned in a disability studies class that using the term "victim" implies the person afflicted with a disease is helpless and pitiful. I'm not sure if "Hansen's Disease patient" is the best term as the Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary defines it as "a person who receives medical care or treatment," and I don't think all of the people with leprosy at the time received medical care. However, the term "Hansen's Disease patient" still seems to have a less negative connotation than "leper." Not a bad suggestion KAVEBEAR. --Alice Kim (talk) 01:34, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
 * That wasn't a serious answer, you know. That term is out of date; I don't think anybody in the world still call it Hansen's Disease. Leprosy patient would be a less insensitive term.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 08:16, 26 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Umm... I was asking a serious question?Alice Kim (talk) 11:06, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Resource for Improvement
I just found this collection of digitized historic newspaper articles related to this topic and it looks to be possibly useful:  https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home/historical-feature-articles/koolau-the-leper DaKine (talk) 13:27, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

"The Wind & the Reckoning"
The press kit for "The Wind & the Reckoning" describes it as "a story inspired by real-life events." It is not a documentary. The closing credits include all the standard disclaimers about combined characters, changes in chronology, and imaginary events and imaginary conversations. For instance, the real-life Ko'olau never confronted Captain Larsen and challenged Larson to shoot him, and Ko'olau's wife, Piilani, did not save Ko'olau's life by killing Larson with a long-range rife shot. Therefore, saying that "The Wind & the Reckoning" is "about" the incident is factually incorrect. 2603:800C:3944:BC00:964:AFC5:7AF3:8D59 (talk) 01:11, 27 October 2022 (UTC)