Abstract

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.

“Schachter has written a book that models how anthropologists can be responsible and responsive to indigenous people. [It is] massively researched but exceedingly accessible, ethically and methodologically groundbreaking, and yet humble in its ambition and presentation. This book deserves a wide audience, and will appeal to Hawai‘i specialists, as well as scholars of the Pacific and indigeneity. It is also imminently suited to classroom use, if students are ready for ethnographic detail…[and] will leave its own rich legacy for future generations of scholars.” · Asia Pacific Viewpoint

“For scholars new to Hawaiian studies, this volume offers an excellent introduction to salient issues and historical moments and holds comparative value for other postcolonial milieus. To area scholars, this text will ring true and perhaps hold few surprises. However, Schachter’s attention to personal experience brings a needed freshness to generalized histories of Hawai’i. Perhaps her most important point is about identity, more specifically self-identity. [The individuals’] complex narratives ultimately show that western and even subaltern studies, with concepts such as fluidity and syncretism, fall short of capturing native ideas of self-definition.” · Journal of Anthropological Research

“Anthropologist Judith Schachter has written a valuable book that accomplishes a rare feat: it engages a scholarly audience from a variety of disciplines in a manner accessible to an interested general public as well… Schachter serves as a role model for future researchers since, in keeping with Hawaiian tradition, she learned mainly by listening and watching instead of always asking questions of her ‘sources’. Ultimately the years of sharing stories have culminated in a collective moʻolelo that is now a gift to the younger generation upon whom [John and Eleanor] pinned hopes for the future’.” · Journal of Pacific History

“Schachter has produced a powerful and moving account of Native Hawaiian elders who have now passed physically but continue to live on in spirit in the prose that she has assembled from the writings gifted to her. This work represents the best that anthropology has to offer Indigenous peoples seeking to remain Native in a decidedly anti-Native world—a document that gives voice to the truths they know and which connects generations in a lineage of discourse.” · Ty Tengan, University of Hawaii

Judith Schachter is Professor of Anthropology and History at Carnegie Mellon University. She has been doing fieldwork in Hawai`i for more than two decades. Her publications include Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture (University of California Press, 1994) and A Sealed and Secret Kinship: The Culture of Politics and Practices in American Adoption (Berghahn Books, 2002). Her research includes articles on family and housing policies and, currently, on the movement for indigenous rights in Hawai`i (in Social Identities, 2011).