Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific

7. Spectacles of Citizenship: Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Gets a Makeover

In October 2006 the Japanese real estate tycoon Genshiro Kawamoto announced that he would “give away” multimillion-dollar houses in a rich O‘ahu suburb to eight “deserving” Native Hawaiian families.1 He solicited Native Hawaiian families’ stories of hardship, and in response received more than three thousand letters . Kawamoto’s actions were accompanied by a certain kind of welfare spotlight that popular media has turned on Native Hawaiians in recent years. His stated motivation was pure altruism, as the New York Times reported: “He said it gave him great joy to provide places to live to hard-working people who had fallen on tough times, which is why he chose Native Hawaiians.”2 Soon after Kawamoto’s announcement, the New York Times also published an article on homelessness in Hawai‘i. The article announced that thousands of predominantly Native Hawaiian homeless were living in tents on beaches, a long-overlooked fact that became a local and national news story as complaints from beach and park visitors increased. Honolulu’s city park director Lester Chang commented , “I think all communities have to deal with this situation, but Hawai‘i is unique because it’s an island. . . . There’s no place to push them off to.”3 While Chang’s comment classically reveals local officials’ Chapter 7 Spectacles of Citizenship Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Gets a Makeover Maile Arvin maile arvin 202 annoyance with the “homeless problem” and their lack of concern about the underlying causes, it also encapsulates the rhetoric of Hawai‘i’s island singularity when compared with the rest of the United States. Today Hawai‘i’s distinction is being put to use in another market besides tourism. Socioeconomically disadvantaged Native Hawaiians are conveniently placed to become the new causes of so-called philanthropists and network executives alike, fueled by the hyperbole of reality television’s tropes about exotic locales, stiff competition, and riveting authenticity. Of course, Native Hawaiians , though statistically overrepresented, are not the only ones among Hawai‘i’s growing homeless population. However, they are often represented as the most culturally distinct; for the purposes of Kawamoto’s “giveaways,” for example, the Native Hawaiian homeless were singled out as likely having the “best” stories. Native Hawaiian arts, language, epistemology, and more have certainly seen a renaissance since the 1970s, and this all continues to be a significant source of pride for Native Hawaiians. Yet in the reigning multicultural discourse of the late twentieth and early twenty- first century, this cultural difference is simultaneously lauded and depoliticized by mainstream discourse. To the American and Japanese mass media and tourism industries, the recognition of Native Hawaiian cultural difference has always been marketable. In this essay I argue that Native Hawaiian socioeconomic difference is also increasingly represented in popular media, often in spectacular displays of philanthropy, in ways that position Native Hawaiians as “good citizens” who work hard in the American immigrant tradition to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Such narratives require critical attention because they use the rhetoric of multiculturalism to depoliticize and deny Native Hawaiians’ status as a historically colonized, indigenous people. Native Hawaiians are thus continuously saddled with the burden of performing their cultural and socioeconomic difference while at the same time performing good American citizenship. When these simultaneous performances are carried out successfully, from the spectator’s perspective, the response can be like Kawamoto’s: it spectacles of citizenship 203 gave him great joy to help people who have fallen on hard times. When some part of the performance is not as convincing, usually the failure to demonstrate good citizenship by, for example, not maintaining a job and housing and thereby becoming a taxpayer’s “problem,” the response is more likely to be the impatient, dehumanizing retort of Lester Chang, the city park director. Echoing the central problem of American settler colonialism assessed by Fredrick Jackson Turner in 1893 as he pondered the significance of the western frontier’s close, Chang laments the lack of further unsettled lands: there is nowhere to push the Native or homeless off to.4 Into this sociopolitical scene in Hawai‘i, critical projects of Native Hawaiian sovereignty thus emerge on a stage fraught with contentions about citizenship and distribution of rights, in the United States as well as any alternative Hawaiian nation. How does one speak as a Native Hawaiian when public discourse writes Native Hawaiians as always doubly “other”: as also American, if struggling...