Native Hawaiian Decolonization and the Politics of Gender

Unbeknownst to most Americans—and even those within American studies—there is a thriving independence movement taking place in the Hawaiian Islands today. It was borne out of an unlawful U.S. backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, and is currently in opposition to a proposal for U.S. federal recognition of a Native Hawaiian Governing Entity, which would transform Hawaiians' political status in damaging ways. U.S. senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI) first proposed the legislation in 2000 to recognize Hawaiians as "Native Americans" with a political trust relationship to the United States—similar to that of American Indians.¹ Akaka's initiative followed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Rice v. Cayetano that found Native Hawaiian–only voting in trustee elections for the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs to be unconstitutional.² Even though the ruling was made only on the basis of the Fifteenth Amendment, state programs and federal funding targeting Native Hawaiians are under threat by lawsuits challenging their legitimacy on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection. But none of those suits has met with success in the courts; what they have managed to do is terrify Native Hawaiians, especially the poorest—some of whom live on Hawaiian Home Lands (congressionally allotted homesteads), while others survive on the beaches. Senator Akaka and proponents of the federal proposal argue that this status change would offer protection against these constitutional challenges and afford Native Hawaiians the rights currently accorded other indigenous peoples in the United States, albeit precariously. However, the legislative proposal paves the way for the global settlement of outstanding Hawaiian land claims and further undercuts the right to self-determination under international law protocols for decolonization.

When one looks at the history of U.S. federal recognition for indigenous domestic dependent nations, it is clear that there are some guarantees that would come along with the passage of the bill. These include extinguishing the Hawaiian people's title to the Hawaiian Kingdom Crown and Government Lands—a title that heretofore has not been relinquished, as acknowledged in the U.S. Apology Resolution (Public Law 103-150), in which the U.S. government apologized to the Native Hawaiian people for its complicity in the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani.³ The Apology Resolution includes a finding of fact that states that "the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum." At stake are 1.8 million acres of former crown and government lands of the Kingdom of Hawai'i—lands that Hawaiians can currently claim title over since these lands were stolen by those who orchestrated the 1893 overthrow and who then ceded them to the U.S. government.

Not only have state-financed supporters and representatives, along with all of the media in Hawai'i, silenced pro-independence voices, but they have misrepresented opposition to the bill as hostility to Native Hawaiian rights rather than protection of them. Given that the Hawaiian Kingdom's sovereignty was not lost via conquest, cession, or adjudication, those rights to self-determination are still in place under international law. Native Hawaiian people lost the ability to be self-determining through unilateral political processes—the 1898 U.S. annexation and imposed 1959 statehood—but at no time did that amount to a legal termination.

Within this nationalist context there exist two opposing self-determination projects that provide the backdrop to my focus on decolonization in relation to Hawaiian gender and sexuality. These are the pursuit of indigenous self-determination within U.S. federal policy on internal self-determination, and the right to full self-determination under international law. Each of these entails different political goals and strategies. Within this fraught political context, I focus in particular on the construction and deployment of cultural discourses of reclamation in the area of gender and sexuality within Hawaiian nationalist projects. These are politicized cultural projects of reconstruction that are concerned with assessing and accessing sources...