Indigeneity in the Diaspora: The Case of Native Hawaiians at Iosepa, Utah

The literature on indigenous immigrants in the diaspora tends to focus on their continued relationship to the homeland focusing in part on generational issues that emerge when subsequent generations, born in the "host" country, makes sense of their connection to an imagined homeland. My investigation of a Polynesian Mormon community at Iosepa, Utah asks how Native Hawaiians maintain our indigeneity not only in relationship to home, Hawai'i, but also to the native peoples upon whose lands we dwell, the Skull Valley Goshutes. When the analytical gaze shifts from the homeland to alternative contact narratives, we must recalibrate the way we see and understand how settler-colonialism is articulated with indigeneity. What responsibilities do diasporic indigenous people have to the indigenous people upon whose land they now occupy? The example of two waves of Mormon Polynesian migration to Utah, which occurred a century apart, offers an evocative case for interrogating these linkages.