J. Kehaulani Kauanui. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. J. Kehaulani Kauanui. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politicsof Sovereignty and Indigeneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.241 pp. When identity and authenticity is presumed to be a measurablequantity, a factor of "blood" in whatever way that isunderstood, what kinds of cultural meanings, patterned behaviors, andsocial arrangements come about? Although written from anhistorian's perspective, J. Kehaulani Kauanui's book HawaiianBlood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity maybe easily read as a kind of historical ethnography on how people whoself-identify as Kanaka Maole, Native Hawaiian, responded to anintrusive colonial, and later on, neocolonial state authority. This workis an ambitious and carefully argued account of how the peoples ofHawaii moved across multiple modes of being: from a self-ruled polyglotcommunity to becoming conquered United States colonial subjects and,eventually, transformed into culturally and legally segmented"American" citizens made to submit to "bloodquantum" rules. Kauanui suggests that the various iterations of"blood" or descent-based legal formulations of individual andgroup identity that have consumed many generations of Hawaiians, broadlydefined, are ultimately tied to disputes over land and the kinds ofclaims that can be made over its cultural meanings, its use, and itsalienability. The book, therefore, addresses multiple theoreticaldomains: the history and anthropology of law especially when applied tothe contemporary jural claims of native/indigenous peoples; theintersection of everyday genealogical practices--such as what the authorrefers to as Polynesian/Oceanian modes of using kinship as expressionsof "world enlargement" (12)--with more restrictive colonialand neocolonial social and political systems; and the socialconstruction of an ostensibly unchanging or authentic centuries-oldindigenous identity, in this case the Native Hawaiian, and itsimplications on social movements that advocate for Hawaiian sovereignty. The author takes us through this narrative starting out with asubstantial introductory chapter that unpacks the implicit meanings ofblood quantum as an organizing principle in the Hawaiian context. Sheexplores the crucial connection between identity and territory insituations of colonial expansion, where the ostensibly noble objectiveof "returning Hawaiians to the land" is privileged over themore logical but economically inconvenient objective of "returningland to the Hawaiians" (8). This is followed by an account of thekey time period that is marked by the enactment of the 1921 HawaiianHomes Commission Act (HHCA) along with subsequent events that, forpurposes of discussion, culminated in Hawaiian Statehood in 1959. Thus,the second and third chapters present not only how the HHCA came aboutas one of several stages of legal disenfranchisement of Hawaiianshistorically linked to analogous experiences of American Indians in theUnited States mainland in the late 19th century, but also the underlyingassumptions of native and non-native leaders about the strength andviability of a Native Hawaiian culture. This culture is believed to beendangered and, consequently, in need of rehabilitation. Written fromthe point of view of the subaltern, and with abundant examples ofpolicies that demonstrate the rupture between the legal and the moral,the author nevertheless provides an interpretation of the developmentsin US law and government policy that reveal no easy villains. Moreimportantly, she presents the kinds of transformations that took placeamong Native Hawaiian elites and non-elites, as well as among otherwell-established settler communities from Asia, Europe, and the Americaswho participated in Hawaiian social and economic life. Her account ofwhat transpired during the hearings of the 1920 House Committee onTerritories is especially telling. Proponents of homesteading lawstravelled from Hawaii to Washington DC and hadmade no prior mention of blood-based entitlements to land. Kauanuipoints out that if they had originally operated under the assumptionthat all Hawaiians were entitled to land, by the end of the debates, theworking assumptions have fundamentally shifted--only some Hawaiians with1/32 blood quantum had any claims. Careful framing of the shifts inimplicit meanings about Hawaiian-ness, especially with regard to theimpact of federal policies and legislative action in the first fewdecades of the 20th century, is one of the book's greateststrengths. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on identity politics aspart of the consequences of the HHCA. In seeking to redefine who isKanaka Maole through an increasingly restrictive purview, the culturalmeanings and definitions changed as Hawaii itself is recast as a landfor the "virile, prolific, and enterprising" (Chapter 4), andwhere the racial politics of the United States mainland thattriangulates White-Indian-Black is re-expressed in Hawaii asWhite-Hawaiian-Asians for the economic benefit of US corporations(Chapter 5). By closely revisiting jurisprudence both in Hawaii as wellas the United States mainland, she convincingly makes the case that theuse and misuse of blood/race/proportional descent follows a"genocidal logic" that ultimately serves non-Hawaiians. Thesixth and last chapter revisits the question of who is a Native Hawaiianthrough the lenses of a 2000 court case and a 2005 law that both make aprofound impact on contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty movements. Although presented primarily as an historical account, the authormakes use of a great deal of anthropologically-informed ideas rangingfrom the fundamentally cultural formulations of "race"--whichunderpins the central argument regarding "genocidal logic" inthe Hawaiian historical experience--and by extension, the United Statesitself. Beyond key arguments presented by Marvin Harris on hypo- andhyperdescent and property rights surrounding land, aina (14, 22-25),Kauanui does not get into newer literature on blood-based orethnic-based claims. Specific genealogical practices in relation toinclusive land-use models (as opposed to land-tenure models), forinstance, may be generalized beyond Oceania, and a great deal ofvariation exists across the Pacific, much of which is attributable tohistorical circumstances arising from European contact. Nevertheless,the author cogently presents the inherent ironies in how a quantifiableNative Hawaiian identity is philosophically enshrined andproblematically implemented in United States law--are you fifty per centHawaiian? Twenty five perhaps? One-thirty secondth? (cf. page 5 andChapter 6), and how these structural conditions make an impact oneveryday interactions that are informed by the cultural and economicsignificance of a demonstrable (and numerically quantifiable)nativeness. Despite the conceptual emphasis on race, the book is more a studyof the economic underpinnings of race and land politics. There is sometreatment of how folk concepts of race or ethnicity, along with theirinherent fluidity in everyday practices, relate to bureaucratizedexpressions of a self-preserving state and national government. Kauanuidoes not make any causal claims between what she calls Hawaiiangenealogical practices that are marked by flexibility and inclusivenesson one hand, and the "blood quantum logic" of the UnitedStates government and its agents, but most certainly documents thehistorical moment when these two expressions of kinship and descentcould no longer co-exist. The author argues that over time, thefundamentally neo-colonial nature of the relationship between nativeHawaiians and the ever changing laws of the land increasingly moved outof their sphere of influence and into that of ever larger legislativebodies. Kauanui demonstrates the patently 20th century vintage of thisblood quantum logic and how it effectively serves non-Hawaiian economicand political interests by disenfranchising families who cannot conform.At the same time, she is not a skeptic of Kanaka Maole identitypolitics. On the contrary, her book argues that Native Hawaiian identitycould be and should be recast and repositioned by actively rejectingnumerically restrictive blood-based formulations enacted over time byboth federal- and state-level legislative bodies, and instead make roomfor more fluid genealogical practices that play out on the ground wheredescent is reckoned less in terms of percentage of documented descentfrom a specific ancestor but more in terms of cognatic/bilateral notionsof connectedness to one's Hawaiian family, 'ohana. To wit:"Since the HHCA, blood quantum classifications of Hawaiianness haveconsistently been used to enact, substantiate, and then disguise thefurther appropriation of land while they obscure and erase sovereigntyclaims and conceptions of identity as a relation of genealogy to place.Blood quantum is to allotment as genealogy is to sovereignty. In otherwords, blood quantum modalities entail allotment in relation to theindividual whereas genealogy better enables an emphasis on thecontinuing collective political claims of Kanaka Maoli" (174). Kaunaui's work is very ambitious; she tries to dismantle a wayof thinking that she believes is fundamentally harming the welfare ofthe Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement. I completely agree with herpolitical and philosophical position personally, and as ananthropologist. The formulation that she favors, i.e. thegenealogical/ancestry/collective approach of what she calls"identity as a relation of genealogy to place" is actuallysupported by empirical observations in many other culture areas. This isan exceedingly well written and well argued work on a complex case wherean "indigenous people," through no choice of their own, becamea racial/cultural "minority" and used, and continue to use,descent as a form of political expression against anintrusive/over-reaching state. Cherubim Quizon Seton Hall University