Definition of "kanaka" in English

noun

1. A person of Hawaiian descent.

2. (historical) A South Pacific Islander, especially a labourer in Australia or Canada.

   • 1933, Cambridge History of the British Empire, Part I, Volume VII, Cambridge University Press, Reissued 1988, Ernest Scott (editor), Australia, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, page 313, So long as the Kanakas remained, white labour in Queensland went into the mills, from which the Kanakas were excluded, rather than into the cane brakes. Slowly, however, the change proceeded. […] The gentleman planter, owning broad estates worked by Kanaka gangs, crushing and refining his own sugar after a fashion in the plantation mill, was by that time obsolescent. Though the small farmers into whose hands the plantations were divided might employ a Kanaka or two, no Kanaka might own land.