Demilitarizing Hawai‘i’s Multiethnic Solidarity Decolonizing Settler Histories and Learning Our Responsibilities to ‘Āina (original) (raw)
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From Hawaiʻi to Okinawa Confronting Militarization, Healing Trauma, Strengthening Solidarity
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2021
(roundtable discussion and photo essay): Three women of color activists from Hawaiʻi discuss their participation in the Ninth International Women's Network Against Militarism (IWNAM) gathering in Okinawa in 2017. IWNAM began twenty years ago in Okinawa and now includes delegations from South Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guåhan, Hawaiʻi, Japan, and the United States. Kasha Hoʻokili Ho, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, and Kim Compoc reflect on the trip and how Okinawa, site of one of the most vibrant peace movements in the region, has influenced their work for a free and independent Hawaiʻi. Th ey discuss how their families have been both victims and perpetrators of US militarism, the pleasures and the difficulties of doing demilitarization work, and the profound lessons they learned about war and peace in Okinawa. They offer this conversation as an example of decolonial feminist world-building, particularly as women in the Pacific build transnational solidarity for more peaceful and sustainable futures.
Pacific Moves Beyond Colonialism: A Conversation from Hawai'i and Guåhan
Feminist Studies, 2017
Recognizing the tensions between decolonial and postcolonial frameworks, this essay argues that a combined post/decolonial approach can illuminate colonial processes and reassert indigeneity. Writing as a Chamorro and a haole scholar, we weave together examples from Guåhan and Hawai'i to illustrate how a joint mobilization of decolonial and postcolonial approaches expose settler colonial processes and resistances. This essay also considers how combining these frameworks rearticulates and positions identities—in similar and distinct ways—to recenter indigeneity. Our conversation engages intersectional theorizing and resistive practices to perform Pacific moves beyond colonialism.
Mourning the Land: Kanikau in Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i
Anne Keala Kelly’s Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i is a filmic narrative and testimony organized around and about Native Hawaiian resistance to three different (and all too similar) abuses of the land: US military occupation of Hawai‘i, settler colonialism, and corporate tourism. Kelly brings together different aspects of these issues in a meaningful way to form a coherent testimony that contradicts the colonial and neocolonial reimagining of Hawai‘i as a peaceful Paradise. By depicting Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) struggles in a format that layers auditory truth telling over backgrounds that visually represent the issues being discussed, Kelly has created something akin to a contemporary multimedia kanikau (mourning chant). My analysis of Noho Hewa examines the ways in which mourning acts as a central cohesive element that relates many of the issues portrayed in the film. The theme of mourning speaks to intergenerational trauma from which many Native Hawaiians suffer in the aftermath of the US-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Kelly draws upon elements of the kanikau to create a documentary that tells the story of the US occupation of Hawai‘i through the desecration and destruction of sacred sites.
Embattled Stories of Occupied Hawai'i
I was a part of panel titled "Occupied Hawai'i: Issues of Nationhood and Colonialism" held at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies. It was an eve ning talk at the center's open-air auditorium that blends Hawaiian architectural designs, anticolonial artwork, and modernist building materials. Both the panel and the center were products of the Hawaiian sovereignty and decolonization movements that had dramatically reshaped po liti cal, cultural, and academic discourse in Hawai'i since the 1970s. Whereas the transnational tourism industry sells an image of happy natives and white sandy beaches, cultural nationalist discourse foregrounds Kānaka 'Ōiwi (Indigenous Hawaiian) re sis tance to the illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Trask 1999; Sai 2008). Indeed, the title of the larger symposium of which our panel was a part was "The Place of Hawai'i in American Studies," which was really more a question than a statement. Most of the audience was well aware of the contested status of Hawai'i as a U.S. state. As the organizers wanted to reach a broader audience, they also arranged for 'ŌLELO, the local cable-access station, to record the event.
Noho Rewa: The wrongful occupation of Hawai'i
2015
The colonisation of the Hawai’ian people is a story shared with Māori and other Polynesian peoples. It is a story of shame, desecration, loss of land and loss of life. The commonality of the historical Pacific experience, however, can too easily mask the variety of outcomes of the decolonisation process, and for Māori and Pakeha New Zealanders, the present-day lived experience of the Hawai’ian people can come as a shock to those who have never ventured beyond the hotels of Waikiki. In this interview with filmmaker and Auckland University of Technology lecturer Christina Milligan, indigenous Hawai’ian filmmaker and activist Anne Keala Kelly discusses her 2010 documentary Noho Rewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i . For Kelly, the making of the film was not only a lonely and tough five years, It was also an emotional struggle to document the pain suffered on a daily basis by those of her community who evidence the ongoing struggle of a people who remain tenants in their own land.
Kuleana Lahui: Collective Responsibility for Hawaiian Nationhood in Activists’ Praxis
Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, 2011
Previous studies of “the Hawaiian sovereignty movement” have compared different groups’ positions, elucidating complex constellations of Hawaiian sovereignty organizations yet remaining bound by the limits of state sovereignty discourse. In this article, I reflect on conversations between activists and on specific actions, so as to explore the spaces beyond or beneath the surface of state-based models of Hawaiian liberation. Rather than assuming the state to be the center of political life, I am interested in the ways people enact new relations and forms of social organization. ?Kuleana’ and ‘l?hui’ are presented as indigenous concepts for thinking about and practicing collective autonomy. This article provides a beginning for exploring how aspects of contemporary Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) social movement organizing, particularly among independence advocates, may contribute to the development of alliances around anarcha-indigenist principles.
Genealogy
This study examines a historical trauma theory-informed framework to remember Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and/or māhū (LGBTQM) experiences of colonization in Hawai`i. Kānaka Maoli people and LGBTQM Kānaka Maoli face health issues disproportionately when compared with racial and ethnic minorities in Hawai’i, and to the United States as a whole. Applying learnings from historical trauma theorists, health risks are examined as social and community-level responses to colonial oppressions. Through the crossover implementation of the Historical Loss Scale (HLS), this study makes connections between historical losses survived by Kānaka Maoli and mental health. Specifically, this manuscript presents unique ways that Kānaka Maoli describe and define historical losses, and place-based themes that emerged. These themes were: the militarization of land; the adoption of christianity by Kānaka Maoli ali`i; the overthrow of the sovereign Hawaiian ...