The Color of Air by
PARADE's Best Books to Read this Summer "A rich historical novel that illustrates why connection is more important and more vital than ever." -New York Times bestselling author Lisa See Daniel Abe, a young doctor in Chicago, is finally coming back to Hawai'i. He has his own reason for returning to his childhood home, but it is not to revisit the past, unlike his Uncle Koji. Koji lives with the memories of Daniel's mother, Mariko, the love of his life, and the scars of a life hard-lived. He can't wait to see Daniel, who he's always thought of as a son, but he knows the time has come to tell him the truth about his mother, and his father. But Daniel's arrival coincides with the awakening of the Mauna Loa volcano, and its dangerous path toward their village stirs both new and long ago passions in their community. Alternating between past and present--from the day of the volcano eruption in 1935 to decades prior--The Color of Air interweaves the stories of Daniel, Koji, and Mariko to create a rich, vibrant, bittersweet chorus that celebrates their lifelong bond to one other and to their immigrant community. As Mauna Loa threatens their lives and livelihoods, it also unearths long held secrets simmering below the surface that meld past and present, revealing a path forward for them all.
Cultural Memory by
How do foreign schemas and objects enter into indigenous ways of understanding the world? How are the cultural self and the cultural other constructed in acts of remembering? What is memory's role in the generation or degeneration of cultural meanings? This volume offers fruitful responses to such questions, providing insights into colonial memory and its limitations and proposing explanations that illumine cultural memory processes.
The Descendants by
"Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors were financially and culturally progressive - one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state's largest landowners." "Now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control: Ten-year-old Scottie is a smart-ass with a desperate need for attention; seventeen-year-old Alex, a former model, is a recovering drug addict. Matt's charismatic, thrill-seeking, high-maintenance wife, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident and will soon be taken off life support. The Kings can hardly picture life without her, but as they come to terms with this tragedy, their sadness is mixed with a sense of freedom that shames them - and spurs them into surprising actions." "Before honoring Joanie's living will, Matt must gather her friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation made worse by the sudden discovery that there is one person who hasn't been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an affair, quite possibly the one man she ever truly loved. Forced to examine what he owes not only to the living but to the dead, Matt takes to the road with his daughters to find his wife's lover, a memorable journey that leads to both painful revelations and unforeseen humor and growth."--BOOK JACKET.
Hawaii Pono by
Author through meticulous research, brought together the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and native Hawaiian cultural contributions and detailed the impact of American settlers - plantation entrepreneurs, teachers, missionaries - from the time they assumed control of the islands in 1893 until statehood in 1959.
The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation by
Through the voices and perspectives of the members of an extended Hawaiian family, or `ohana, this book tells the story of North American imperialism in Hawai`i from the Great Depression to the new millennium. The family members offer their versions of being "Native Hawaiian" in an American state, detailing the ways in which US laws, policies, and institutions made, and continue to make, an impact on their daily lives. The book traces the ways that Hawaiian values adapted to changing conditions under a Territorial regime and then after statehood. These conditions involved claims for land for Native Hawaiian Homesteads, education in American public schools, military service, and participation in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Based on fieldwork observations, kitchen table conversations, and talk-stories, or mo`olelo, this book is a unique blend of biography, history, and anthropological analysis.
Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous Women by
This book closes a gap in decolonizing intersectional and comparative research by addressing issues around the mass incarceration of Indigenous women in the US, Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. This edited collection seeks to add to the criminological discourse by increasing public awareness of the social problem of disproportionate incarceration rates. It illuminates how settler-colonial societies continue to deny many Indigenous peoples the life relatively free from state interference which most citizens enjoy. The authors explore how White-settler supremacy is exercised and preserved through neo-colonial institutions, policies and laws leading to failures in social and criminal justice reform and the impact of women's incarceration on their children, partners, families, and communities. It also explores the tools of activism and resistance that Indigenous peoples use to resist neo-colonial marginalisation tactics to decolonise their lives and communities. With most contributors embedded in their indigenous communities, this collection is written from academic as well as community and experiential perspectives. It will be a comprehensive resource for academics and students of criminology, sociology, Indigenous studies, women and gender studies and related academic disciplines, as well as non-academic audiences: offering new knowledge and insider insights both nationally and internationally.
The Rising Tide of Color by
The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.
Gateway State by 
Aloha Betrayed by
In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.
Dismembering Lahui by
Jonathan Osorio investigates the effects of Western law on the national identity of Native Hawaiians in this impressive political history of the Kingdom of Hawaii from the onset of constitutional government in 1840 to the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, which effectively placed political power in the kingdom in the hands of white businessmen. Making extensive use of legislative texts, contemporary newspapers, and important works by Hawaiian historians and others, Osorio plots the course of events that transformed Hawaii from a traditional subsistence economy to a modern nation, taking into account the many individuals nearly forgotten by history who wrestled with each new political and social change. A final poignant chapter links past events with the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty today.
From a Native Daughter by
Since its publication in 1993, From a Native Daughter, a provocative, well-reasoned attack against the rampant abuse of Native Hawaiian rights, institutional racism, and gender discrimination, has generated heated debates in Hawai'i and throughout the world. This 1999 revised work includes material that builds on issues and concerns raised in the first edition: Native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawai'i; the master plan of the Native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahui Hawai'i and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty; the 1989 Hawai'i declaration of the Hawai'i ecumenical coalition on tourism; and a typology on racism and imperialism. Brief introductions to each of the previously published essays brings them up to date and situates them in the current Native Hawaiian rights discussion.
Hawaiian Blood by
In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined "native Hawaiians" as those people "with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778." This "blood logic" has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai'i. Hawaiian Blood is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains how blood quantum classification emerged as a way to undermine Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty. Within the framework of the 50-percent rule, intermarriage "dilutes" the number of state-recognized Native Hawaiians. Thus, rather than support Native claims to the Hawaiian islands, blood quantum reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority, reinforcing a system of white racial privilege bound to property ownership. Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai'i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects. With the HHCA, the federal government explicitly limited the number of Hawaiians included in land provisions, and it recast Hawaiians' land claims in terms of colonial welfare rather than collective entitlement. Moreover, the exclusionary logic of blood quantum has profoundly affected cultural definitions of indigeneity by undermining more inclusive Kanaka Maoli notions of kinship and belonging. Kauanui also addresses the ongoing significance of the 50-percent rule: Its criteria underlie recent court decisions that have subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and brought to the fore charged questions about who counts as Hawaiian.
Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty by
In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty J. Kēhaulani Kauanui examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. She theorizes paradoxes in the laws themselves and in nationalist assertions of Hawaiian Kingdom restoration and demands for U.S. deoccupation, which echo colonialist models of governance. Kauanui argues that Hawaiian elites' approaches to reforming and regulating land, gender, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism today, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) people. Problematizing the ways the positing of the Hawaiian Kingdom's continued existence has been accompanied by a denial of U.S. settler colonialism, Kauanui considers possibilities for a decolonial approach to Hawaiian sovereignty that would address the privatization and capitalist development of land and the ongoing legacy of the imposition of heteropatriarchal modes of social relations.
Restoring the Kingdom of Hawaii by
In 1993, the United States Congress enacted a solemn Apology for the United States invasion of Hawaii, admitting one hundred years later 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". It thereby admitted the illegality of its incorporation of Hawaii into America as its 50th state, opening the door for Hawaiian Independence and the restoration of the Kingdom of Hawaii. This book chronicles the legal battle waged toward that end by international law expert Francis A. Boyle on behalf of his Kanaka Maoli clients and friends that spans almost two and a half decades. As of this publication, that struggle has reached a decisive turning point which, if pursued following Boyle's strategy, will lead on to the victory of restoring the 1893 Kingdom of Hawaii by the Kanaka Maoli. This book serves as a guide for the pursuit of self-determination by occupied nations and indigenous peoples who can no longer claim numerical majorities over the whole of their native lands. It incorporates insights derived from legal work Boyle has done for Palestine, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Puerto Rico, Ireland and elsewhere around the world. Francis Boyle outlines what the Kanaka Maoli have done and must do to restore their state's independence, de facto and de jure. He details the arduous process of self-organization by disempowered peoples necessary to replicate the sovereign status of governments and states in today's world, from setting up governing structures and an economic system, to the sophisticated process of embarking on establishing relationships with and gaining recognition by states. There is much to learn here on how to create a state for peoples who don't have one yet. This book is of critical importance to those scholars, leaders, and activists working in the fields of International Law, Human Rights, Indigenous Peoples, Oppressed Nations, and Nation-Building. There is no other such book in print synthesizing expertise in all these areas into a coherent whole for the benefit of oppressed nations and persecuted peoples all over the world
Voices of Social Justice and Diversity in a Hawai'i Context by
This book presents nuanced small-scale studies and reflective essays, and is about voices of contemporary grandparents and grandchildren living in the State of Hawai'i which is rapidly going through economic, social, educational, and cultural transformation ushered in by forces of globalization and McDonaldization of society. Hawai'i is generally known as a great tourist destination that is no less than an imagined paradise. Hawai'i is more than solely a site for tourism; it has a culturally and socially diverse population, and has a contested social history. In this context, in a deeper sense, the book gives the reader glimpses of family members at the level of intimacy among themselves in their place based situated interactions in today's Hawai'i. In its real essence, this book is an authentic collection of research papers, short stories, anecdotes, memories and reminiscences; of aloha (love, compassion, kindness) and mahalo (thanks, respect, and praise); of longing and search for legacy by diasporic elders, immigrants, settlers, American citizens, hyphenated Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders; by grandparents and grandchildren of diverse and multiple ethnicities, cultures, and races who have struggled hard through many decades to make Hawai'i their permanent and beloved home and place, or long-term residence to live and raise their families. The set of self-narratives in this book may have significant implications for understanding the process of aging in the State of Hawai'i; for social aging is both an individual and a social process in the sense that an individual's biography is intimately related to her/his society's biography. For "doing" roles such as being grandparents and grandchildren are heavily defined and structured by prevailing social and cultural processes. The book may be useful for educators and students who are working and studying in areas such as education, sociology of family, social work, local and global social change, indigenous cultures and societies, alternative modernities and indigenizing social movements, race and ethnic relations, settler societies, social justice, health care, social gerontology, diaspora and immigration studies, and those working with youth in communities.
