The story of Wānanalua: Stranded whales and contested marine sovereignties in Hawai‘i

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862090143
Author(s):  
Max Ritts ◽  
Sarah M Wiebe
Keyword(s):  
Marine Mammal ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Case Files ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Hawaiian Women ◽  
Interspecies Relations

This paper considers how systems of interspecies knowing and care in Hawai'i push against state-supported frameworks of liberal biopolitical governance. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a citation suing two Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) women under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, for unlawfully “tak[ing] and/or or transporting” a stranded melon-headed whale (“Wānanalua”). In the lawsuit, prosecutors deliberated on the legality of the traditional sea burial situating it within a broader context of cultural accommodations granted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. From our examination of the lawsuit, we develop the argument that marine mammal care operates in Hawaiʻi as a regulatory device for ordering interspecies relations and for pacifying Indigenous demands for greater marine political authority. To combine these claims, we consider the relation between two governance logics: liberal “recognition,” wherein accommodations regarding culture are extended to previously disenfranchised social groups, and biopolitics, pertaining in the present case to care practices governing more-than-human actors and environments. Our arguments are supported by detailed case files and interviews with local informants, including the Kanaka women accused of mishandling Wānanalua. The “ruptures” marking the Wānanalua case suggest a liberal recognition framework whose failures are connected to the biopolitics it embraces, but with an added detail: The present story reflects on how an interspecies biopolitics—an attempted management of Kānaka-whale care practices—structures strategies of liberal recognition.

Papakū Makawalu and grounded theory: a combined and collective analysis for Hawai’i land stewardship—Honuaiākea

2021 ◽  
pp. 117718012110583
Author(s):  
Huihui Kanahele-Mossman ◽  
Marina Karides
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Grounded Theory ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Sacred Site ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Land Stewardship

Kia’i (protectors) opposed to the building of a Thirty Meter Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, a profoundly sacred site and ecologically vital one, impeded its construction to date. The sanctity of Mauna Kea and its implications for Hawai’i’s sovereignty and land ownership are central to the struggle, yet what are the Indigenous ecological laws of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) that ground opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope? To construct a land stewardship policy, the Edith Kanaka’ole Foundation leadership bridged Papakū Makawalu, a Kanaka Maoli methodology, with grounded theory. Edith Kanaka’ole Foundation leaders organized a series of events where experts collectively and individually merged the two methods to analyse chants. Our article presents a discussion of (a) the struggles over land use on Mauna Kea, (b) the processes for merging methodological traditions, and (c) reflections on Kīho’iho Kānāwai (restoring Kānāwai for Island Stewardship), the final document of Honuaiākea (Earth in Expanse).

scholarly journals Surrounded by Spirits: Hauntings of Identity in Waimea Summer by John Dominis Holt

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Alexander Casey
Keyword(s):  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Queer Identity ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Sodomy Laws

In 1976, John Dominis Holt published what would be considered the first novel by a Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] author in English, Waimea Summer. This coming-of-age narrative set in 1930’s Hawai‘i follows fourteen-year-old Mark Hull, a half White, half Kanaka Maoli boy who experiences a series of hauntings on his uncle’s farm, all the while grappling with a burgeoning queer identity and conflicted cultural loyalties. In the post American-occupied Hawai‘i, the teachings of Christian missionaries and anti-sodomy laws have all but eradicated the aikāne [homosexual] relationships practiced by the ali‘i [royals] of Marks’ genealogy, and yet the boy’s queer desires refuse to die. In this paper, the novel is interpreted through Laura Westengard’s theory of the queer Gothic, in which concepts of the American nuclear heterosexual family are challenged by the burgeoning past, thus returning the narrative and agency to the queer Indigenous subject.

Productive narratologies of convergent sf

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-426
Author(s):  
Ida Yoshinaga
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Indigenous Media ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Media Interventions

This article examines how a Native Hawaiian activist’s inventive self-representational tactics, deployed within corporate mass media, have enriched North American pop-culture discourses on the Kanaka Maoli independence movement. Analysis focuses on the convergent (that is, transmedial or purposefully cross-medial) self-representational efforts of Dennis ‘Bumpy’ Pu‘uhonua Kanahele, who rose to fame as one of several notable organisers in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement during the 1990s. Several film and television texts became targets of Kanahele’s indigenous media interventions into commercial cinematic genre storytelling across different narrative platforms beginning in the 2010s. Applying a utopian reading that brings out Kanahele’s Indigenous Futurist interventions, this article offers readings of the theatrical feature film Aloha (2015) and a 2017 episode of Hawaii Five-o. Both texts visually focalise Pu‘uhonua o Waimānalo, the land base of Kanahele’s sovereignty movement known as the Nation of Hawai‘i, which gets positioned within these narratives as a Kanaka Maoli utopia providing refuge for indigenous Hawaiians away from the predation of both rampant capitalism and Western empire.

scholarly journals Moving Birds in Hawai'i: Assisted Colonisation in a Colonised Land

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-64
Author(s):  
Thom Van Dooren
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Endangered Species ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Avian Species ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

In September 2011, a delicate cargo of 24 Nihoa Millerbirds was carefully loaded by conservationists onto a ship for a three-day voyage to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The goal of this effort was to establish a second population of this endangered species, an “insurance population” in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change and potential new biotic arrivals. But the millerbird, or ulūlu in Hawaiian, is just one of the many avian species to become the subject of this kind of “assisted colonisation.” In Hawai'i, and around the world, recent years have seen a broad range of efforts to safeguard species by finding them homes in new places. Thinking through the ulūlu project, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of assisted colonisation in this colonised land. What does it mean to move birds in the context of the long, and ongoing, history of dispossession of the Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people? How are distinct but entangled process of colonisation, of unworlding, at work in the lives of both people and birds? Ultimately, this article explores how these diverse colonisations might be understood and told responsibly in an era of escalating loss and extinction.

Contraceptive decision making among native Hawaiian women

Contraception ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-395
Author(s):  
R. Soon ◽  
J. Elia ◽  
N. Beckwith ◽  
B. Kaneshiro ◽  
T. De Ver Dye
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Hawaiian Women

Depression and Help-Seeking Among Native Hawaiian Women

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Van M. Ta Park ◽  
Joseph Keawe’aimoku Kaholokula ◽  
Puihan Joyce Chao ◽  
Mapuana Antonio
Keyword(s):  
Help Seeking ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Hawaiian Women

Defiant Indigeneity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Nohelani Teves
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
The Face ◽  
Hawaiian Literature ◽  
The Way

"Aloha" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kānaka Maoli people, the concept of "aloha" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the "hula girl" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kānaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.

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