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At first glance, the traveling of identity through time seems naturally consistent, effortless, and without consequence. Its movement and collisional encounters guised, identity just “is.” Stuart Hall interrupts this seamlessness by provoking us to look again, this time with a watchful eye and a tracing finger.1 That is, we must analyze with an eye for articulated stability and a penchant for silent historical implosions of identity within and without Western colonized indigenous worlds. Beneath the face of identity, according to Hall, lies its historical production, an aspect that has already challenged cultural studies scholars to dig deeper. We hold this notion tight, that we can never understand identity expressions without looking to the social-political conditions within which they were produced, overtaken, and rehauled. Thus, in this critical-historical genealogy, I move where Hawaiian identity once did; from its early establishment to the Western upheaval of “Cook time” and its gradual incorporation into Western law and governance. In this essay, I engage several sovereignty and critically bent Hawaiian land histories and analyze the historically specific identity practices and structured identifications for “Hawaiians.”2 As such, I present this analysis as a historical genealogy with the following question in mind. How did the construction of Hawaiianness change by and through Western colonialism? I argue that Western formal policy, law, and governance—from the late 1700s to early 1900s—disintegrates an indigenous Hawaiian system and subjectivity.3 This becomes a pressured confrontation that writes out the Kanaka (Hawaiian) language through the structural exclusion of “prehumanity,”a soon to be blooded group constructed as existing outside of Western moral-political jurisdiction with its discursive tools of excision: the doctrine of discovery, the sovereign resident position, the legal principles of ultimate land use and alienation, and the A Critical-Historical Genealogy of Koko (Blood),’Aina (Land),Hawaiian Identity, and Western Law and Governance rona tamiko halualani 238 incorporation of land commissions. Tools such as these, structurally normalize “rightful”haole (foreigner) citizenry and install a legacy of (mis)recognized identity for Hawaiians. This misrecognition of Hawaiians continues and is further imprinted in the colonial rule over the islands when Hawai’i was illegally overthrown in 1893 and made a U.S. territory on a path to statehood. Understanding the historicization of the (mis)recognition of Hawaiians—the shift from a Hawaiian kinship relation to a Western technology of blood and from a Hawaiian social structure grounded in land use (’aina) to Western governance based on landownership/citizenship—reveals the complicated nature of the (mis)recognition of Hawaiians and the encoded stakes in current political struggles. Our analytical movements should note the dominant framings of Hawaiian identity and uncover the cultural material useful for identity remakings. A Blood-y History Before the misleading marker of “original Hawaiian history”—1778—the indicator of the popular memory surrounding Captain Cook, there already existed a moving cultural world of Hawaiian subjectivity. This world embodied and breathed the philosophy of ’aina (land) and land communion.4 ’Aina was not a mere physical space; it translates in Hawaiian as the act of living through land. ’Aina was a way of life, a spiritual understanding of land as the natural, deified force of Lono, the god of fertility and love, or Kane, the god of agricultural growth. Land was therefore the physical manifestation of a greater, nonmaterial power.5 You couldn’t “own” it; land was a sacred presence in your life. Through the land, these akua, or gods, among others, watched over and cared for Hawaiians , bestowing rich soil and conditions for the bountiful production of food for a thriving Kanaka (Hawaiian) population, one estimated by the historian David Stannard to be at least eight hundred thousand to a million at the time of contact , although it declined drastically, to less than forty thousand, by 1890.6 Collectively, within their own inherited social positions, Hawaiians were culturally summoned both to live through and work the land in specialized labor. Assigned different duties, the overall goal was to carefully tend the land so that it would bear enough food for all people.7 The gods ruled over and emanated from the land, which is why Hawaiians culturally never understood or expressed the principle of ownership.8 “Trustees”were those deemed to be of divine blood kinship , meaning that particular relations were honored and elevated because they were closer to the gods in birthright and thus held great mana (power, status). They were our ali’i nui...

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