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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 2 21 1 This Land is My Land: The Role of Place in Native Hawaiian Identity SHAWN MALIA KANA‘IAUPUNI AND NOLAN MALONE Some critiques of contemporary geographic growth patterns point out the rise of placelessness across U.S. landscapes. Relph (1976), in a provocative analysis of this phenomenon, argues that place has been a critical foundation of human cognition and identity throughout history. He reviews how contemporary urban and suburban (and most recently, exurban) growth patterns have diminished the unique, historical, and cultural meanings of place to human society today. This point may bring no argument from most Americans, who may not feel any overwhelming ties to a particular place, who are quite mobile in today’s global society, and who, in fact, may be quite accustomed to the increasing standardization of places, such as strip malls, retail, food, and service chains. Add to this the relative homogeneity of most suburban architectures and the constantly shifting topography of metropolitan landscapes. The objective of this essay is to expand our understanding of the significance of place to racial and ethnic diversity and to demonstrate how place continues to be an unequivocal focal point in the identity processes of some social groups and individuals today. Specifically, we examine these processes in the context of Native Hawaiians, the aboriginal people of the Hawaiian Islands.1 Our study builds on prior studies indicating that place — the consciousness of land, sea, and all that place entails — is fundamental to indigenous identity processes (Battiste, 2000; Kame‘eleihiwa, 1992; Kamakau , 1992; Mihesuah, 2003; Allen, 1992; Meyer, 2003; Kana‘iaupuni and Liebler, 2005; Memmott and Long, 2002). Although this analysis of the relationship between place and identity centers on Hawaiians, it offers important insights that may extend to other indigenous groups or cultures whose members are highly intermarried and mobile, whose language is endangered, and whose culture is known more in its commercial tourist, rather than authentic, form. Under these conditions, place is critical to the cultural survival and identity of a people, as we illustrate in the case of Native Hawaiians. Place is intertwined with identity and self-determination of today’s Native Hawaiians in complex and intimate ways. At once the binding glue that holds Native Hawaiians together and links them to a shared past, place is also a primary agent that has been used against them to fragment and alienate. Yet, place, in all of its multiple levels of meaning, is one light that all Hawaiians share in their spiritual way finding to a Hawaiian identity; one that is greatly significant to their existence as a people and culture, both past and present. And so begins our exploration into the various meanings of place to Hawaiian identity today. In addition to indigenous theories of place, this study is informed by other perspectives on the role of place in racial identity and ethnicity. For example, certain geographers view place as the context within which racial partnering, residential choices, and family identification processes are differentially distributed across spatial categories (e.g., neighborhoods, cities, metropolises) (Wong, 1999; Peach, 1980). By “spatializing” household patterns of family formation, mobility, and other behavioral characteristics, we can understand where (and why) they survive and flourish. Research shows that Hawai‘i, for instance, is one of those places in North America that is spatially significant for its flourishing intermarriage rates (Lee and Fernandez, 1998; Root, 2001). 288 Shawn Malia Kana‘iaupuni and Nolan Malone Perspectives in anthropology add to our understanding of the concept of identity as it relates to place. Saltman (2002) defines the relationship between land and identity as the dynamic arena within which social realities are acted out in individual cognition and perception. For example, identity may be the shared understandings between persons of the same culture that enable them to rally together for a political cause. In relation to place, Saltman argues, “identity achieves its strongest expression within the political context of conflicting rights over land and territory” (2002, p. 6); evidence of the latter is certainly found in the story we tell here. Our study draws on indigenous perspectives of place and identity that interweave the spiritual and the physical with sociocultural traditions and practices. As Memmott and Long (2002) explain, whereas Western explanations view places purely in terms of their geomorphology (with little human influence), indigenous models view people and the environment as overlapping and interacting. For example, unlike the way “Western thought classifies people and their technology...

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