"I be home": Childhood Belonging and Un/becoming in Hawai'i

In this article, I juxtapose two coming-of-age narratives, Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996) and Matthew Kaopio's Written in the Sky (2005), analyzing how these texts inscribe onto their young protagonists the complex and competing ontologies in the Hawaiian Islands. This article contends that children's literature produced in settler societies and intent on participating in efforts of decolonization can productively resist the impulse to home the settler child on Indigenous lands and instead radically question the ways in which we construct home and belonging through the figure of the child