Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies

1. Questions about the Question of “Authenticity”: Notes on Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i and the Struggle for Pono

1 Questions about the Question of “Authenticity” Notes on Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i and the Struggle for Pono Paul Lyons We know that we are a distinct people that was once protected by its own government. We know that once that government was removed there was nothing to prevent the Americans from defining us however they wished, and nothing to keep us Hawaiian except our own determination. —Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, “What ‘kine Hawaiian Are You?” Democracy and “Authenticity” in Occupied Hawai‘i The democracy of colonies. For the foreigner, romances of “Aloha,” For Hawaiians, Dispossessions of empire. —Haunani-Kay Trask, “Dispossessions of Empire,” in Night Is a Sharkskin Drum 19 20 Native Authenticity Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i (literature, stories, histories) by those with mo‘okūauhau (Hawaiian genealogy) connecting them to the ‘āina (land, environment) participates in an enduring social movement that asserts the distinctiveness of Hawaiians as a lāhui (race, peoplehood, nation) and that is implicitly or explicitly involved in the pursuit of pono (righteousness, justice, well-being), one dimension of which is a call for self-determination or ea (sovereignty, independence, life, breath).1 From the nineteenth century to the present, mo‘olelo and the arts (in particular, mele [song, poetry, chant] and hula [dance]) have played a vital role in the lāhui’s struggle, in the face of U.S. noho hewa (wrongful occupation), to perpetuate its values and maintain its convictions about distinctiveness —convictions upon which political claims are arguably grounded. Virtually every politically engaged kānaka maoli (Hawaiian) writer asserts that kānaka maoli look at the world from a different vantage point than settlers, one secured by the vertical narrative of genealogy rather than the horizontal presentism of U.S. blood-quantum definitions. The struggle to nurture a distinct space of articulation—seen as central to a reintegrated lāhui-to-come—has marked kānaka maoli political and cultural expression since the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom in 1893.2 At that time Hawaiian difference was emphasized putatively by haole (foreigners, Caucasians); assumptions about kānaka fitness for self-rule provided “moral” justification for seizing the Islands. In one sense, then, it is both an irony and a fraught legacy of the history of U.S. Empire that, since the resurgence of nationalist claims in the 1970s, Hawaiians have had to engage civil and uncivil questions about the “authenticity” of the mo‘olelo of kānaka maoli as a people from both inside and outside of the lāhui. (These questions resemble those about “authenticity” raised in relation to other indigenous peoples, but take forms specific to the political situation of Hawaiians inside and outside of the Islands on identity/authenticity issues for Hawaiians in the diaspora, who currently make up roughly forty percent of the lāhui, see Halualani [195–243].) In another sense, for the occupying power there is no irony in questioning Hawaiian claims to distinctiveness as politically meaningful. The ideology of U.S. Empire requires a delegitimatization of the “authenticity” of indigenous claims to special relation to fellow kānaka maoli and ‘āina through genealogy; U.S. law divides Hawaiian culture (decontextualized aspects of which the state invests in for militouristic purposes) from political claims, without regard for the consent of those “democratically” included. Empires (in seeming opposition to colonial systems with dual 21 Questions about the Question of “Authenticity” systems and center/periphery models) seek to fully incorporate lands, offering the encapsulated indigenes the right to join and prove loyalty by identifying with the occupying force as its borders expand: settler scholarship narrates this as not only for Hawaiian good, but as understood to be such by Hawaiians. However, the remarkable extent of Hawaiian resistance following the overthrow and occupation, including kū’ē petitions by different Hawaiian political parties that collected the signatures of nearly every adult Hawaiian, has been fully documented by Noenoe Silva (1998, 2004). This kū’ē (protest, resistance), which delayed annexation , was occluded within settler scholarship, little of which had any regard for Hawaiian perspectives as recorded in the extensive Hawaiianlanguage archive (including roughly one million pages of newspapers). From annexation through the Statehood Drive, U.S. public discourse mystified the events surrounding the overthrow, ultimately coming to romanticize Hawai‘i as a realized example of what the United States as a whole (cleansed of black/white tensions) aspired to be: a...