Strategies of Erasure: U.S. Colonialism and Native Hawaiian Feminism

Within the many sites of teaching and learning I have inhabited, I have been consistently struck by the phenomenon of separate spheres that distorts our understanding of the relationships between race, imperialism, and indigeneity that have so profoundly shaped the development of the U.S. nation-state. American Indian history remained invisible to my best mentors in African American studies; scholars of empire and colonialism gave short shrift to the importance of the history, development, and influence of "blackness" in the United States; those focusing on the repercussions of Indian conquest did not connect it to the simultaneous moves into the Pacific and Puerto Rico. And in each of these spheres of history and analysis, feminist scholars of color have struggled to show how gender and sexuality in the United States have shaped and been shaped by race, indigeneity, and empire.

A Genealogy of the Questions

Amy Kaplan's 2003 presidential address to the American Studies Association, "Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today," pointed out the amnesia around the history of U.S. invasions and interventions that is revealed in the responses to the current war on Iraq. My contribution to the collective project Native Feminisms without Apology makes Hawai'i the locus for examining some of these commonplace erasures and distortions. My reflections are inspired by a passage from Toni Morrison's essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken":

I can't help thinking that the question should never have been "Why am I, an Afro-American, absent from [the scope of American literature]?" It is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The spectacularly interesting question is "What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence …? What are the strategies of escape from knowledge? Of willful oblivion?"¹

My essay attempts to consider Morrison's questions in a very different context in order to map out the multiple and overlapping strategies of erasure that have rendered Hawaiian women invisible, and to begin to think through sites of resistance to colonial amnesia.

Conceptual Erasure: U.S. Colonialism Is Off the Intellectual Map

Having been the only Hawaiian in almost every continental educational setting I had been in, I left my undergraduate education in Women's studies at Yale, with its decidedly weak understanding of race and empire in the United States, to go to the University of California at Berkeley to study within the newly developing graduate program of Ethnic studies. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Berkeley and San Francisco State University were important sites of pressure from students, faculty, and community members within and outside the university system who demanded that the histories of U.S. people of color be learned and taught, and who instituted ethnic studies programs and courses to that end. But in the new interdisciplinary and multiracial PhD program that grew out of that history, there was then, and I am fairly sure now, no curriculum that addressed Hawai'i, Pacific Islanders, or U.S. imperialism outside the continent as significant and foundational to understanding the development of the United States. While the paradigm of the "nation of immigrants" was disrupted by models of "internal colonialism," within our coursework, the colonial history of the takeover of Guam, "American Samoa," and the Hawaiian islands was absent. Throughout both my undergraduate and graduate education, all the knowledge I gained and shared about indigenous Hawai'i and other Pacific islands came through extracurricular research, political organizing, and community relationships.² In my substantial teaching experience with many different kinds of students at elite private institutions, public universities, and community colleges on the continent, I have found most have never been taught anything about Hawai'i or its history.

Spatial Erasure: U.S. Colonialism Is Off the Literal Map

Revealingly, the military and intelligence communities seem to be the only U.S. institutions that demonstrate consistent recognition of the existence of U.S. territories and possessions. The online CIA World Fact Book is one of the few readily available sources that succinctly and comprehensively delineate the land...