Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (review)

When identity and authenticity is presumed to be a measurable quantity, a factor of "blood" in whatever way that is understood, what kinds of cultural meanings, patterned behaviors, and social arrangements come about? Although written from an historian's perspective, J. Kehaulani Kauanui's book Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity may be easily read as a kind of historical ethnography on how people who self-identify as Kanaka Maole, Native Hawaiian, responded to an intrusive colonial, and later on, neocolonial state authority. This work is an ambitious and carefully argued account of how the peoples of Hawaii moved across multiple modes of being: from a self-ruled polyglot community to becoming conquered United States colonial subjects and, eventually, transformed into culturally and legally segmented "American" citizens made to submit to "blood quantum" rules. Kauanui suggests that the various iterations of "blood" or descent-based legal formulations of individual and group identity that have consumed many generations of Hawaiians, broadly defined, are ultimately tied to disputes over land and the kinds of claims that can be made over its cultural meanings, its use, and its alienability. The book, therefore, addresses multiple theoretical domains: the history and anthropology of law especially when applied to the contemporary jural claims of native/indigenous peoples; the intersection of everyday genealogical practices—such as what the author refers to as Polynesian/Oceanian modes of using kinship as expressions of "world enlargement" (12)—with more restrictive colonial and neocolonial social and political systems; and the social construction of an ostensibly unchanging or authentic centuries-old indigenous identity, in this case the Native Hawaiian, and its implications on social movements that advocate for Hawaiian sovereignty.

The author takes us through this narrative starting out with a substantial introductory chapter that unpacks the implicit meanings of blood quantum as an organizing principle in the Hawaiian context. She explores the crucial connection between identity and territory in situations of colonial expansion, where the ostensibly noble objective of "returning Hawaiians to the land" is privileged over the more logical but economically inconvenient objective of " returning land to the Hawaiians" (8). This is followed by an account of the key time period that is marked by the enactment of the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) along with subsequent events that, for purposes of discussion, culminated in Hawaiian Statehood in 1959. Thus, the second and third chapters present not only how the HHCA came about as one of several stages of legal disenfranchisement of Hawaiians historically linked to analogous experiences of American Indians in the United States mainland in the late 19th century, but also the underlying assumptions of native and non-native leaders about the strength and viability of a Native Hawaiian culture. This culture is believed to be endangered and, consequently, in need of rehabilitation. Written from the point of view of the subaltern, and with abundant examples of policies that demonstrate the rupture between the legal and the moral, the author nevertheless provides an interpretation of the developments in US law and government policy that reveal no easy villains. More importantly, she presents the kinds of transformations that took place among Native Hawaiian elites and non-elites, as well as among other well-established settler communities from Asia, Europe, and the Americas who participated in Hawaiian social and economic life. Her account of what transpired during the hearings of the 1920 House Committee on Territories is especially telling. Proponents of homesteading laws travelled from Hawaii to Washington DC and had made no prior mention of blood-based entitlements to land. Kauanui points out that if they had originally operated under the assumption that all Hawaiians were entitled to land, by the end of the debates, the working assumptions have fundamentally shifted—only some Hawaiians with 1/32 blood quantum had any claims. Careful framing of the shifts in implicit meanings about Hawaiian-ness, especially with regard to the impact of federal policies and...