Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: On 17 January 2007, a bill was re-introduced in the U.S. Senate to grant tribal sovereignty to Native Hawaiians as the indigenous people of Hawai`i, a similar status afforded Native American tribes on the continental United States. The difference, however, is that Native Hawaiians were citizens of an internationally recognized sovereign State, whereas Native Americans were a dependent nation within a sovereign State. Great Britain and France were the first to recognize Hawai`i's sovereigntyin 1843 by proclamation and the United States in 1849 by treaty. This paper questions the hegemonic assumptions about the history of law and politics in the Hawaiian Islands by providing an analysis and comparison between Hawaiian State sovereignty and Hawaiian Indigeneity and its use and practice in Hawai`i today.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In 2001 the Hawaiian Kingdom was able to have a case heard at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Lance Larsen v. The Hawaiian Kingdom confirmed that Hawaiian State sovereignty was still an unresolved legal issue between the United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom. This event has marked a major discursive shift in identity formation in Hawaii and a large scale recovery of both a Hawaiian national identity and State centered Hawaiian form of nationalism. These identities stand in contrast to the indigenous, anti colonial Hawaiian identities constitutive to the political struggles in Hawaii of the past thirty years. Amidst this resurgence has been a criticism and fear by many invested in an indigenous, anti colonial analysis of politics in Hawaii of an inevitable set of repressions immanent to any possible State-centered identities including race-chauvinism, class oppression and misogyny. This paper will explore the arguments made regarding gender oppression as a constitutive component of the 19th century Hawaiian State. It will take a closer look at laws, court cases and writings from the Hawaiian Kingdom in light of feminist critique, and will offer a feminist critique of its own on the modern Hawaiian nationalist movement currently in progress.

Publication Type: Work in Progress
Abstract: Across the continental United States, thousands of Hawaiians have migrated from Hawai’i, or the ancestral homeland of Hawaiians and have created a burgeoning diaspora, and thousands more have been born on the continent in between the defining (and dominating) memory of Hawai’i and the everyday contexts of the mainland. In this paper in progress, I share some preliminary insights from approximately 300 qualitative in-depth interviews that I conducted with diasporic Hawaiians over the last eight years. I frame these interview accounts as diasporic stories of identity and belonging. The stories by these Hawaiians are rich tales of how and why they depart, leave, and break away from what they have known as “home” in Hawai’i and then become mainland Hawaiians, and for those in the mainland Hawaiian generation, how they grow up away from ‘aina (land) and develop an uniquely different kind of Hawaiianness

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Although the significance of countermovements is widely acknowledged in the social movement literature, the study of their emergence and interaction with both social movements and the state has received comparatively little academic attention. In recent years, a number of social movement scholars have highlighted this deficiency in the literature and called for a more extensive analysis of countermovements. The state is traditionally a central actor in influencing movement-countermovement dynamics; while the battles between movements and countermovements continue to directly involve the state, for instance as epitomized by legal battles brought before courts, the political competition between movements and countermovements is increasingly bypassing the centrality of the state. Nowhere is this more clearly exemplified today than by the contests being waged between movements and countermovements on the Internet. The use of the Internet by social movement and countermovement organizations highlights the interaction between opposing groups while frequently rendering the role of the state less important than in more traditionally fought movement-countermovement battles. This paper examines movement-countermovement dynamics and the role of the state using the political competition between the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement and its organized opposition as a lens through which to view the interaction between rival parties. I question how the relationship between the sovereignty movement, its organized countermovement, and the federal government has shaped the development of the movement and its impact thus far. I begin by briefly reviewing the literature on movement-countermovement dynamics and the role of the state. Next, I document the rise of the sovereignty movement, discuss the emergence of its organized countermovement, and describe the relationship of the movement and countermovement to the federal government. In the sections that follow, I demonstrate that while an active competition between the sovereignty movement and countermovement is currently being waged on the Internet that the role of the federal government continues to remain paramount in shaping the direction and impact of the sovereignty movement.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Indigeno-Anarchism has created a political space for indigenous people to envision social change in the course of establishing solidarity and consensus based spaces. It’s simultaneously deconstructing systemic genocidal integration of the hegemonic state and is relational in the Native Hawaiian educational processes. This paper will engage indigeno-anarchism as a foundation of cultural essentialism for social change in the current Hawaiian immersion education movement. In order to conceptualize the broader social movement of anarchism as both a traditional Hawaiian social practice and renewed western convention and how that can be deployed to decolonize the Hawaiian education movement. Which is, I argue, in need of a systemic overhaul of current governance practices, as they currently continue to employ colonial violences that undermine the Hawaiian language movement.