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CONCLUSION “Ropes of Resistance” and Alternative Futures [L]iberation can only come from a praxis committed to the sufferings and hopes of the people. (Martín-Baró 1996, 32) In legal activist Mililani Trask’s view, dispossession was a key metaphor for the experience of colonialism. She wrote: Hawaiians were evicted from their land . . . that was genocide. Their ability to fish certain waters and cultivate land so that they could eat and live was taken away at the very time that Western diseases were taking a terrible toll. . . . The appropriate healing practices were almost lost because people who were oral keepers of those traditions died. Genealogies were lost, so people no longer knew who their families were. They were dispossessed of the land, they wandered, and they were not able to find their own families again.” (M. Trask 1996, 392, emphasis added) Trask’s eloquence regarding the trauma of dispossession makes clear that the colonized were affected at the level of families, and of bodies and souls, and not just in the public domains of politics and economics. Structurally and ideologically, in both formal and intimate realms, colonialism meant the erasure of the history, culture, and cosmology of Kanaka Maoli. The structures of Hawaiian society were dismembered. Dispossession from the land, which in the cosmology of ka po‘e kahiko was a familial relation, was a profound trauma that severed cycles of reciprocity that were the basis of mana and the means of achieving a thriving society. When Trask wrote that the people “wandered, and they were not able to find their own families again,” she meant that dispossession from the land was a 159 sundering of the familial relations upon which Hawaiian society in the times of ka po‘e kahiko was built. Unbound from the social and spiritual basis of being, the bodies of Kanaka Maoli were further devastated by waves of epidemics introduced by foreigners. And, intellectual traditions of healing, orature, poetry, art, and dance were demoted and dismissed as superstition. Dispossession in Hawai‘i was dangerous, degrading, and nearly fatal. POSSESSION AND DISPOSSESSION I cannot end Potent Mana without turning to the question of dispossession in its historical and contemporary iterations. Dispossession was/is an effect of global capitalist economics: the system that shapes the living and dying, and contemporary dispossession of Kanaka Maoli. There is, in fact, no possibility of achieving decolonization without “imagining a future outside of” current economic arrangements (Giroux 2005, 15–16). The story about the struggle to decolonize Hawai‘i is critical not only because it pushes forward theorizing on overcoming colonialism but also because it demonstrates the urgent relevance of the cosmology of Kanaka Maoli for theorizing and creating alternative, democratic, and sustainable futures in place of capitalism. In order to understand the cycles of dispossession that both precede and define capitalism, we must briefly examine the role of dispossession in the rise of capitalism as a social order. Karl Marx’s description of primitive accumulation— the origins of capitalism—in mid-first millennial Europe anticipates future cycles of dispossession up to the present moment. In Capital, Marx wrote that “[i]n actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short force, play the greatest part” in the origins of capitalism. “[T]he methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic” (Marx 1977[1867], 873, 874). At the end of the fourteenth century, English peasants possessed lands in common, but by the end of the fifteenth century, they were forcibly removed from the land “to which they had the same feudal title as the lords themselves” (878). Driven by the rise of wool manufacturing, land that had been suitable for subsistence farming was transformed into enclosures for sheep—the source of wool (879). During the eighteenth century, in a process that foreshadows the Māhele in Hawai‘i, “the law itself [became] the instrument by which the people’s land [was] stolen” (885). By the end of the eighteenth century, the last traces of common land had disappeared (883), and by the nineteenth century, “the very memory of the connection between [peasants] and communal property had . . . vanished” (889, emphasis added). In language similar to Trask’s, Marx described how primitive accumulation required the dispossession of the ancestors1 of the present-day working class (896). They were, he wrote, “forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and 160 POTENT MANA [18.226.177.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10:42...

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