A Breath of Ea: Submergent Strategies for Deepening the Hawaiian Diaspora (original) (raw)
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2008
The decolonial archive is a theoretical apparatus for approaching structures that alternately invest Asian settlers in an American-Hawai'i, tense against U.S. hegemony, and recuperate those tensions into attachments to America. I task this archive with creating a place of pausing. Outside of the prescriptive and diagnostic temporalities that are usual to politics, this locale paces un-thinking intimate attachments to colonial orders. Here, "un-thinking" hosts a double valence. As an adjective, it describes those attachments as unconscious directives of hegemony in everyday movements. As a verb, it acts on those attachments in material things that are inclusive, and in excess, of thought. Things like inheriting a family name, "everyday life," and feelings have political and economic rhythms that suffuse relationships to the colonial state (government, U.S. militaries, juridical institutions) and society (plantation owning elites, the health sector, academia, a...
Sovereign Embodiment: Native Hawaiians and Expressions of Diasporic Kuleana
Hūlili Journal , 2019
This article highlights the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Recognition between Ka Lāhui Hawai'i and the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation, ratified in 1992. Engaging in sociopolitical forms of recognition, such as treaty making, which acknowledge other Indigenous people and the traditional tribal territories on which they reside, diasporic Native Hawaiians living in California can also be understood as embodying a praxis of kuleana. Maintaining reciprocal relationships with land and people is an essential quality of being Indigenous. However, as displacement is a specific modality of settler colonialism, around 50 percent of Native Hawaiians now live outside of their homeland, with the largest populations of the displaced residing in California. This work reveals that trans-Indigenous recognitions actively regenerate social and political futures for Indigenous communities and are thus invaluable in combatting settler colonial institutions that continue to displace both California Indians and Native Hawaiians from their own lands and resources.
2011
PAGE The debate over the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898 was fraught with tensions between race, nation, and empire. Nowhere was this more evident than in the experience of the Hawaiian diaspora during the nineteenth century, and yet neither their role in the expansion of the United States nor their presence on the mainland was mentioned during the debate. Shedding light on the diasporic experience revealed how the processes of creating race and nation, and then distinguishing between the two in matters of state, occurred during the era of American expansionism. The pivotal cleave between the two occurred in Oregon Territory in 1850, when a seemingly minor bit of legislation banning Hawaiians from the region marked a significant shift in the relationship between Hawaiians and Americans , a shift that culminatied in the annexation of the Islands at the end of the century. This study traces the arrival of Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, interrogating the descrioptions o...
Rebirth of an Archipelago: Sustaining a Hawaiian Cultural Identity for People and Homeland
Can Hawaiians achieve well-being without sustaining their cultural identity? This research examines the very foundations of Hawaiian existence and the underlying basis and principles that shape Hawaiian identity. In particular, it looks at the historical roots of aloha ÿäina (love for the land) and the genesis of Hawaiians' spiritual and emotional attachment to the land revealed in a genre of accounts dealing with the "birthing of the archipelago." This article seeks to reintroduce the original island names of the distantly remembered region called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Through the examination of relatively unexplored traditional sources of information, the unique meanings of these island names-and their genealogical relevance to our ancestral past-begin to emerge.
Making 'Aha: Independent Hawaiian Pasts, Presents & Futures
We use Hawaiian methods of knowledge production to weave together contemporary and historical instances of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) political resistance to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism. Our departure point is the summer of 2014, when hundreds of Kānaka came forward to assert unbroken Hawaiian sovereignty and reject a U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) proposal to create a pathway for federal recognition of a reorganized Native Hawaiian governing entity. This essay situates testimonies from these hearings within a longer genealogy of Kanaka assertions of "ea" (sovereignty, life, breath) against the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Hawaiʻi that began in 1898 and extends to the present.
Decolonizing the Light: Reading Resistance in Native Hawaiian Poetry
By reading metaphors of light and darkness through the opposing lenses of colonial racism and indigenous activism, this essay argues that poetry is key to understanding the nuances of Native Hawaiian nationalism. Haunani-Kay Trask is a Native Hawaiian poet, activist and professor whose radical politics has attracted criticism from the white American community whose economic influence she vocally opposes. Trask’s work as a poet is inextricable from her political activism and her poetry will be read alongside critical work on the intersection of colonialism, racism and gender that has contributed to the devastation of indigenous people, culture and land in Hawaiʻi. The acquisition of land for plantations in the nineteenth century and resort development in the twentieth has resulted in the dispossession of Native Hawaiian people, whilst global mass tourism has deeply affected the portrayal and consumption of Native Hawaiian culture. Trask’s poetry is a lyrical but unsparing look at the effects of globalization on the delicate ecology of her home. For those willing to brave the severity of her indictment there are valuable messages about what constitutes native belonging and indigenous activism in Hawaiʻi.