Lessons from Hawai‘i
Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang maintain that liberal arts methodologies perpetuate the foreign occupation of Native land because “settler worldviews get to count as knowledge and research” and “are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures.”[1] In the classroom, educators are complicit in the deleterious effects of settler colonialism’s intent to permanently erase Indigenous people, thereby normalizing settler presence on Native land. To resist settler colonialism requires decolonization, acts that entail resistance to the seizure of land. One such act compels educators to acknowledge the ways in which academic disciplines benefit from and perpetuate settler colonialism. Architectural thought has long been rooted in Eurocentrism, notions of who/what constitute “civilization” and “modernity,” and the creation of racialized spaces. Thus, a critical pedagogy addressing settler colonialism and decolonization requires more than filling architectural history syllabi with Indigenous voices. It involves “an approach that is critical of the underlying structures of oppression, systematic in its inquiry into the theory and practice, participatory in involving communities members and organizations in change making, and creative in employing popular texts and people’s cultural productions to re-read society,” according to Sandy Grande (Quechua).[2] Students and faculty must do the work of producing new knowledges that recognize the spatial and temporal specificity of (de)colonization.[3]
As the title of Tuck and Yang’s work, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” indicates, decolonization is not a stand-in for social justice pursuits; neither is it a theoretical exercise in settler guilt.[4] To teach imperialism, colonialism, and decolonization we must teach Indigenous liberation in architectural history. We must critically think about built structures by Indigenous communities as acts of ingenious construction for comfort and protection and, sometimes, as an act of resistance; we must center Indigenous voices who relay narratives of the land and sea as storied places imbued with meanings garnered from the environment, genealogies, and storytelling; and, finally, we must discuss streets and public spaces as (un)controlled venues for activism.
With Tuck and Yang’s words echoing in my mind, I began the spring 2019 semester at Occidental College preparing to teach a junior seminar, Building the “American” Pacific, by asking myself two questions: what will it look like to have students do the work of developing a reading list about colonialism/settler colonialism/decolonization? And what will it mean to allow students to draft a syllabus attending to questions about Pacific Island built environments—as part of, and separate from, U.S. hegemony? I worked collaboratively with seven students to think critically about “monumental architecture” and more broadly about meanings of space that extend beyond the physicality of built structures in Hawai‘i, Guåhan (Guam), and American Sāmoa. We also selected sources with a critical eye toward Indigenous epistemologies, empire, and (de)colonization. Through the scholarship of Teresia Teaiwa (I-Kiribati, African American), K.H. Thaman (Tongan), and Michael Lujan Bevacqua (Chamorro), and the visualities of artists such as Kapulani Landgraf (Kanaka Maoli) and Rosanna Raymond (Sāmoan), among others, students bore witness to Islander resistance and self-determination through a connection to place. Fostering a liberatory learning environment by giving students autonomy over the pedagogical structure of the course re-centered architectural histories from stylistic analysis of built forms to discussions about the ongoing epistemic and physical assault of settler colonialism on land, sovereignty, and the built environment of the Pacific.
“We must critically think about built structures by Indigenous communities as acts of ingenious construction for comfort and protection and, sometimes, as an act of resistance.”
The students heard directly from Pacific Islander artists and scholars in March 2019 when we attended the Honolulu Biennial (HB19), aptly titled To Make Wrong/Right/Now. The curators brought together artists from around the Pacific, some of whom we previously considered in class, to showcase innovative expressions attesting to Indigenous knowledge inspired by the poetry of Imaikalani Kalahele (Kanaka Maoli). His “Manifesto,” engaging issues of land, identity, and struggles, reads:
The source
of
my origins
lie beneath my feet,
the breath
in my chest
originated
in Pō
the destiny
of my race
is
plunged into
my gut
and
infesting
my veins
with a new nationalism,
old spiritualism,
and a need
to make wrong
right
now.
Figure 1. Entrance to The HUB at Ward Village with the painting “Laukanaka” by Cory Kamehanaokala Holt Taum, 2019. Photograph, Tracy Chan, courtesy of HAWAI‘I Magazine.
Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) often point to the relationship between themselves and the ‘āina (land; that which feeds) to demonstrate the ways in which its physicality and intangible, yet knowable, qualities carry a host of meanings that indicate genealogical connections, historical ontologies, emotions, memories, and encounters.[5] As Manulani Aluli Meyer (Kanaka Maoli) asserts, “Land is more than a physical place. It is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing. It is the key that turns the doors inward to reflect on how space shapes us. Space as fullness, as interaction, as thoughts planted.”[6] Kānaka Maoli seamlessly blend the living with the non-living and the human with the non-human, an outlook that stands in direct opposition to the bounded geographical constructs of physical space that divide the world into political entities, racialized nations, and settler states in service of Western ideologies and empire.[7]
Figure 2. Map of Oceania by J.G. Barbie du Bocage, 1852. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia.
The main locale for the Biennial was an 18,000-square-foot venue featuring twenty-four artists and installations located at Ward Village (The HUB), a structure located on sixty acres sandwiched between downtown Honolulu and Waikiki (Figure 1). This land was once filled with marshlands, salt ponds, and fishponds cultivated by Kānaka Maoli. Under a singular roof and through the open plan of the temporary gallery space, The HUB brought to the fore the complexities of Pacific identity. The architectural layout reflected long-held cultural and social practices of Oceanic connectedness, a visual approach that operated in stark juxtaposition to eighteenth– and nineteenth-century Western cartographies that created artificial distinctions between Pacific Islanders based on race, phenotype, and geography: Polynesia (many islands), Micronesia (small islands), and Melanesia (dark islands/islands of black [people]) (Figure 2). Racializing Pacific Islanders within the settler colonial state erroneously reinforces the positionality of white settlers as the “rightful owners and occupiers of the land.”[8] Such Western articulations negate Oceania as a sea of connected islands where Pacific Islanders are “brothers” and “sisters.”[9] It further belies the argument put forth by Joyce Pualani Warren (Kanaka Maoli) that Hawaiians challenged anti-Black rhetoric by embracing a “figurative blackness” associated with “genealogical connections to Pō, the cosmogonic blackness which began the universe.”[10]
Figure 3. Kamehameha V commissioned Ali‘iolani Hale (1871-1874), Honolulu, Hawai‘i, March 13, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Kelema Lee Moses.
Hawai‘i as both the host for HB19 and storied place for Kanaka Māoli resonated in the biennial’s public programing. My students gathered on the atrium steps of Ali‘iolani Hale (1871-1874) in downtown Honolulu to listen as Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) and Bernice Akamine (Kanaka Maoli) discussed the significance of the Hawaiian language (Figure 3). This experience helped them to understand Hawaiian autonomy and opposition to U.S. colonialism. It was here in the atrium that Akamine also presented KALO, an installation of eighty-seven individual kalo plants consisting of a pōhaku (rock/stone) at the base, text from the Hui Aloha ʻAina Anti-Annexation Petitions, and hand-drawn maps of Hawai‘i’s land divisions (Figure 4). Ali‘iolani Hale’s arched entryway, wide verandas, and Tuscan columns not only exhibited mastery by the mō‘ī (chief), Kamehameha V, over Western architectural motifs in the sovereign Kingdom of Hawai‘i (1795-1893) but also served as the appropriate venue for Akamine’s exhibition. The building that once functioned as the kingdom’s administrative center provided physical context for explaining the moment when Western settlers declared the establishment of the Provisional Government of Hawaii, marking the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. Thus, Akamine’s visualities effectively tied together the importance of ‘āina, Indigeneity, and resistance. The conversation and artwork housed within a distinctly Hawaiian edifice made non-Indigenous presence in a settler state acutely apparent. So, the question for my students became: what might decolonization within a settler state look like within the context of (educational) tourism? Hōkūlani K. Aikau (Kanaka Maoli) offers one strategy: “we say, ask permission first. If you are welcomed onto the land, then you proceed, with gifts in hand to share with the land and the people. If [not], then you humbly walk away.”
“As Black Lives Matter protests have sparked a racial reckoning in the United States, the dehumanization and devaluation of all Black life, including those in the Pacific, can no longer be ignored.”
Figure 4. Bernice Akamine, Kalo at Ali'iolani Hale, March 13, 2019. Photograph courtesy of Kelema Lee Moses.
Decolonization remains at the forefront for many Indigenous communities and has sparked discourses about why it should not be absorbed within anti-racism, human rights, and social justice actions.[11] Aligned with this sentiment, poet and educator Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshallese) retweeted a comment from Dr. Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro) on June 29, 2020: “Anti-racism is not the same as anti-colonialism. Civil Rights are not the same as Indigenous Rights.” The sentiment is correct, and to effect justice in each of these realms, we must acknowledge their distinctions while simultaneously asserting a level of nuance about multifarious systems of white supremacy that perpetuate oppression. As Black Lives Matter protests have sparked a racial reckoning in the United States, the dehumanization and devaluation of all Black life, including those in the Pacific, can no longer be ignored. Artist Joy Enomoto (Black, Kanaka Maoli, Japanese, Scottish, Punjabi) clearly articulates the relationship between decolonization and race, while also moving us toward action: “The first people of the Pacific were Black. Hawaii belongs to the Pacific. And so we must act against the genocide that is happening in West Papua being imposed by the Indonesian Army to protect mining interest, we must support Kanak liberation struggle of New Caledonia as they continue their struggle for independence from France, and we cannot forget the islands threatened by climate change in Vanuatu, Fiji, the Cook and Solomon Islands. BLACK LIVES MATTER IN OCEANIA.”
Notes
1. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 2.
2. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, eds., “Introduction,” in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (New York: Routledge, 2018), xv. See also, Sandy Grande, Red pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 25.
3. Smith, Tuck, and Yang, xiii.
4. Tuck and Yang, 3, 9.
5. Sydney L. Iaukea, The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawai'i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 14.
6. Manulani Aluli Meyer, “Indigenous and Authentic: Hawaiian Epistemology and the Triangulation of Meaning,” Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, ed. N.K. Denzin, Y.S. Lincoln, and L.T. Smith, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. (2008): 219.
7. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Milking the Cow for All It's Worth: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Imperialist Resentment in Hawai‘i,” in Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, ed. Carole McGranahan and John F. Collins (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 47.
8. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 12.
9. Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 16. See also, Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994): 148-161.
10. Joyce Pualani Warren, “Reading Bodies, Writing Blackness: Anti-/Blackness and Nineteenth-Century Kanaka Maoli Literary Nationalism,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, no. 2 (2019): 50-51.
11. Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 9.
