Chapter 5 EMBODYING KULEANA Negotiating Black and Native Positionality in Hawaiʻi For me, it’s not specifically a Black thing. It offends me that all of our disparate minorities—like whether it’s Hawaiian or Asian or Black—it offends me that this colonization of the mind has been so successfully adopted. Our struggles are the same. The individual stories are different, the geography is different, but it is the same kind of aggression over and over, and over again. That’s why I’m so invested and want to learn more about my [Black and Mexican] heritage because, unless you’re White, people are really sensitive to you taking on struggles that you don't have a genetic connection to. Black Mexican long-term resident Tweet by Patrisse Khan- Cullors, co-founder of #BLM. The process of decolonization must also advocate antiracism, just as antiracist activism must also be a decolonial project. However, the positions people take on matters of importance often emerge from their positionalities. Said otherwise, identities inform priorities and politics. What would it mean were the obverse to be the case? Angel, the Black Mexican long-term resident quoted in the epigraph above, seeks out knowledge of her histories to better understand how they link to others. In the second epigraph, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of #BLM, reveals her support for Maunakea protectors and connects the struggles of Native Hawaiians to the Movement for Black Lives. What would it mean to exceed our standpoints and to consider “our people” expansively rather than through identity and exceptionalism? After all, communities have not only been forged as divided and distinct but also as related and intertwined—as will be our futures. What do Black residents tell us about Hawaiian pathways for self-determination— and what is their role? Their imaginings of the future do not align with native/settler binaries, do not prioritize Black liberation over others, and do not depend upon claims to greater oppression. However, they do take race and responsibility into account, especially through their consideration of the Islands. By offering an ethnographically informed 313 analysis that decenters both Whiteness and Asians in Hawaiʻi, this project shows how people who cross multiple boundaries, including those of race and indigeneity, Nativeness and Blackness, inform new ways of being and belonging. A significant and internationally recognized example of Kanaka political and cultural strength is the movement around the kiaʻi (protectors) of Maunakea who are resisting the development of a Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on sacred land. Hawaiians on Maunakea have developed Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu (place of refuge) mentioned in the epigraph by #BLM’s Khan-Cullors, which includes a university with a Kanaka based curriculum teaching Hawaiʻi’s history, hula, and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. This resurgence of Hawaiian practices and practitioners presents an opportunity to reconsider theories of power and dispossession and to reflect upon who “our people” are. What if the Hawaiian practices of kuleana, kapu aloha, and knowledge of the past motivated an ideological shift back to pre-colonial notions of Blackness, to the esteem of Pō, the original darkness? The proposed TMT is already motivating some reflection. For instance, Hawaiian language professor, Larry Kimura and Doug Simons, the director of an observatory on Maunakea took part in a discussion on the “Physics of Pō.” They explored “the intersection of astronomy and Hawaiian culture” through an examination of the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant.1 Can a similar approach inspire people of Hawai‘i today to take the same stance toward African-descended people that Hawaiians took during the Hawaiian Kingdom? Hawaiians in the nineteenth century accepted people of African descent, including those who were enslaved on the continental US, and cultivated a society that recognized their full humanity. Integration—rather than the exclusionary practices of the US nation-state—was a principle foundational to belonging and citizenship in the Hawaiian Kingdom. While contemporary scholarship focuses on the distinctions and parallels between Black and Native peoples, the historical record shows centuries of engagement and intersection between them. This refers both to the historical systems of oppression (colonization, enslavement), as well as to social formations and relations on the ground. Dispossession is not a thing of the past, nor is African-descended people’s particular vulnerability to premature death; equally, Indigenous people face dispossession, displacement, and racism, as—in differential yet overlapping ways—have Africans.2 As one Black Hawaiian reflects on his coming of age in the 1970s, “Back then, it wasn’t a good thing to be Black, and it wasn’t a good thing to be Hawaiian.” The denigration of both Hawaiianness and Blackness ties to their distinct racialization and role in the US expansionist market. While Whites constructed Native peoples as being outside of the domain of “useful” (or cooperative) labor and as those who needed to be eradicated or removed for their resource (land), people of African ancestry have been more closely bound in the New World to their labor in a growing capitalist market.3 The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of the 1920s mandating that one be at least fifty percent Hawaiian to be eligible for certain benefits works to eliminate Native peoples, thereby “freeing” Hawaiian land and resources for colonial settlers.4 On the other hand, the much older one-drop rule, stating that any person with a “drop” African “blood” is Black, is part of a legal regime that categorized the children of Black and White unions as Black and, thus, enslaveable. The continental US privileges a Black and White conception of race, leading some Americans to learn, for instance, how White settlers forged Whiteness in contrast to Blackness. This binary perspective is dependent upon Native erasure and is central to justifying the continuing settler state as “settler colonialism obscures the conditions of its own production.”5 Foregrounding settler colonialism reveals how, hand in hand with Native erasure, the “native” is pivotal to constructs of race and nation from its initial 314 colonization. Evelyn Nakano Glenn summarizes, “While acknowledging the centrality of enslaved blacks to the formation of white racial identity…the Founders’ first Indian policy ‘was the inaugural step in defining a White racial identity for the United States as a nation.’”6 As Australian Goenpul scholar, Moreton-Robinson summarizes, “Native American dispossession indelibly marks configurations of White national identity.”7 Black enslavement and Native genocide and dispossession, along with nativism, exploitation, and exclusion of Asians and Latinos, co-constituted the formation of the US nation-state. These processes were justified through White settlers’ distinct racialization of Black and Native people, both subjected to inferiority under White supremacy. Yet, “[g]iven the transformation of Native Americans as ghosts [through elimination/erasure], it is not surprising that everyday conceptions of race came to be organized around a black- white binary rather than a red-white binary.”8 What happens when Black people raised in a society in which this binary is dominant come to the Hawaiian Islands where neither “black-white” nor “red-white” are hegemonic binaries? And how does centering Black people within Hawaiʻi similarly disrupt accounts of Hawaiian history as an encounter between Hawaiians with haole? Studies on Black and Native relations in North America focus on the relationship between settler colonialism and antiBlackness.9 Some scholars articulate overlapping histories of oppression to cultivate shared visions for self-determination or discuss the “proximities” of Native and Black colonization. Others remind us of the tense ties between Black and Native people.10 These debates presume these to be distinct groups, thereby ignoring the indigeneity of African-descended people. This includes the Native American ancestry of many African Americans and Africans’ indigeneity to Africa.11 On the other hand, scholars of Hawaiʻi have focused less on race in their analysis of indigeneity and ethnicity.12 Kauanui argues that considering “Hawaiian” as a race denies their indigeneity and limits their political and legal rights as Natives.13 Does applying a racial framework to Hawaiians contribute to the “logic of elimination” which, according to Patrick Wolfe (who was familiar with Hawaiʻi), feeds further on Indigenous assimilation through intermarriage, cultural absorption, and US citizenship?14 No. Rather, analyzing race and indigeneity together reveals how colonizers deployed the logic of elimination to decrease the numbers of Indigenous people and “clear” the land for colonial settlement—including the establishment of racist ideologies. “Racialized knowledge and white possession,” writes Moreton-Robinson, “work in tandem. These are white possessory acts, heavily invested in maintaining control and domination, that in our daily lives we experience as a form of racism, in which parts of our humanity are stolen and denied.”15 Moreton-Robinson pulls together indigenous dispossession with racism: “Racism is inseparably tied to the theft of Indigenous lands.”16 Viewing Black and Native as discrete groups may lead to abstract theorizing that does not play out on the ground. For instance, Afro-pessimist scholars argue for the irreducibility of Blackness and the priority