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At Home and Abroad: Greg Johnson on Indigenous Hawaiian Repatriation
17 Plays1 year ago
In today’s episode, Matt and Ira speak with Greg Johnson, Professor in the department of religious studies at UC Santa Barbara and director of the Walter H. Capps Center for the study of Ethics, Religion and Public Life. His essay “Domestic Bones, Foreign Land, and the Kingdom Come: Jurisdictions of Religion in Contemporary Hawaii” explores the legal efforts of Native Hawaiians in repossessing land and human remains and its connection to religion and spirituality. The three begin discussing Johnson’s experience as a delegate a part of a team of experts retrieving iwi kupuna, the bones and skulls of Native Hawaiians, from the Dresden Museum of Ethnology. The conversation shifts to discussing the ways Native Hawaiians maneuver around legal jurisdictions, a term that Johnson refers to as “auto-jurisdiction.” Finally, they highlight the United States’ perception of Native Hawaiians and the continued search for land reclamation.
All this and more on today’s episode of Interactions.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Interactions Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, I'm Ethan Anthony, and welcome to Interactions, a podcast about law and religion and how they interact in the world around us.
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
00:00:17
Speaker
November 16th, 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a law meant to facilitate the return of human remains to indigenous peoples across the United States.
00:00:31
Speaker
However, as of December 9th, 2022, the remains of over 100,000 indigenous peoples are still in the possession of museums and educational institutions.
00:00:42
Speaker
In a series by ProPublica titled The Repatriation Project, the delayed return of native remains, they note that half are owned by 10 institutions with UC Berkeley possessing 9,075 unreturned remains. As put by Danela Gutierrez, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley, in life they were not respected. They were forced to march, removed. Even in death, they aren't respected.
00:01:13
Speaker
Indigenous peoples of North America have historically been antagonized, dying for the protection of their land, community, and identity. Although steps have been made for reclamation, as we've seen in the land-backed movement, there is still a lot to be done in return to Indigenous communities.
Introducing Greg Johnson and His Work
00:01:30
Speaker
In today's episode, Matt and Iris speak with Greg Johnson, professor in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and director of the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
00:01:43
Speaker
His essay, Domestic Bones, Foreign Lands, and the Kingdom Come, Jurisdictions of Religion in Contemporary Hawaii, explores the legal efforts of Native Hawaiians in repossessing the land and human remains and its connection to religion and spirituality. The three begin discussing Johnson's experience as a delegate, a part of a team of experts retrieving iwi kapuna, the bones and skulls of Native Hawaiians, and the Dresden Museum of Ethnology.
00:02:07
Speaker
The conversation shifts to discussing the ways Native Hawaiians maneuver around legal jurisdictions, a term that Johnson refers to as auto jurisdiction. Finally, they highlight the United States perception of Native Hawaiians in the continued search for land reclamation. All this and more on today's episode of Interactions.
Hawaiian Land and Ancestral Remains - How Are They Connected?
00:02:32
Speaker
So Greg, first off, we want to thank you for participating in this podcast with us.
00:02:38
Speaker
We read your chapter, the domestic bones foreign land and the kingdom to come jurisdictions of religion, contemporary Hawaii. And not only was it interesting and thought provoking, but it gave us a lot of questions, which we're now grateful for the opportunity to ask you. So if you don't mind, we'll get right into it. The first question, just to set some context to
00:03:03
Speaker
the chapter and some of our later questions, just could you explain the relationship between the land of the Hawaiian Islands and the people or the bones of the Hawaiian Islands? I know you mentioned in the beginning of your chapter, but we'd love to know how they're related in terms of myth and religious significance, as well as the relationship in terms of the history of the Pelanesian people's discovery and settlement of the Hawaiian Islands and the land of the Hawaiian Islands itself.
00:03:32
Speaker
Great. Well, thank you for having me. It's great to be here and happy to have some good questions like these. So thanks. Let's start out with this observation. Hawaii is the most remote island chain in the world. That sometimes comes as a surprise to folks, and it wasn't contacted, so to speak, by Europeans until 1778. So in a kind of macro global sense, that's what we're talking about. It was settled by Polynesians
00:04:00
Speaker
several thousand years ago, by way of ocean going canoeing and navigating and the kind of the audacity of that experiment to go into the deep blue of the Pacific with, you know, just one's family, a few plants, pigs, perhaps, is remarkable. And what we need to keep in mind, too, is that when people undertook these voyages, they did so knowing they were
00:04:26
Speaker
quite literally leaving their homeland, leaving their extended families, their ancestors' bones, their sacred places from before. So an entire culture, as it were, was on the move to a new location. And surely there was tremendous celebration upon landing in these most remarkable islands.
00:04:48
Speaker
It seems to be the case that as the tradition took hold, the Polynesian tradition took on its own, particularly Hawaiian inflection in this new place, the honor towards the ancestors that had been left behind and the cherished stories and the family connections was transplanted, if you will, into this new place. And then what we see happening is
00:05:12
Speaker
reverence for ancient place names had been transplanted, but also newly passed ancestors, those who died upon being in this new place, took on a special kind of reverence in the community's view because they in some sense stood for the prior ancestors who were left behind.
00:05:30
Speaker
So today when people puzzle about why Hawaiians or Kanaka Maoli, as they prefer to be called, are so strong in their connections to the ancestors, both in memory and oral tradition, but also in terms of caring for physical human remains, it goes back, I think, to this idea of a people in a very remote place who had to leave something behind and now cherish what they do have in connections to place thereby. Does that make sense? No, that's great.
Repatriation Efforts and Legal Challenges
00:05:59
Speaker
Thank you.
00:06:01
Speaker
You were part of a delegation that went with Indigenous Alliance to Germany in order to obtain some bones that had been held in a museum collection there and to return them to Hawaii. In your book chapter, you described that repatriation as something that gave more than it was taking, in that the delegation conferred legitimacy on the institutions in exchange for the physical bones themselves.
00:06:30
Speaker
As we think about religion in the third millennium, do you see parallels between what the delegation did within the broader context of human rights and how priests and other religious figures might confer blessings under more traditional belief systems?
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, another excellent question. Thank you for that. Let me back up one moment and just round out something I failed to say in the first question. The most important observation about Hawaiian religion today is it still exists. And I emphasize that point because in literature and in some law cases, there have been appeals to the fact that Hawaiian religion was dropped by Hawaiian people themselves in 1819. That's a false narrative.
00:07:18
Speaker
The temple religion in the hands of certain elites was set aside at that time for various reasons. That is not to say that Hawaiian religion in the round was dropped or left aside. Certainly many Hawaiians became Christians and articulated their faith traditions in a new way by way of missionary influence.
00:07:40
Speaker
But many, many Hawaiians up to the present have maintained what they would call their religious traditions focused on precisely the ancestors, the family group, the landscape. So no longer mediated by priests and elites or controlled at a very local level. And that has persisted over time in all kinds of interesting ways. So I want to make sure to get that there.
00:08:05
Speaker
As to your question about Germany, thanks, Chad. That was an amazing trip. It stands as one example of an ongoing effort of Native Hawaiians and others to reclaim their ancestral remains from institutions, often remains that were collected under shady circumstances. Sometimes consent was given, but usually not. This particular repatriation from a museum in Dresden, 2017,
00:08:32
Speaker
was a product of 20 years of negotiations by Native Hawaiians with the museum. And in the course of those negotiations, what they realized was there was no legal mechanism proper that would serve them. That US law, of course, didn't apply. International soft law like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has no teeth. And German repatriation law at that time did not speak to these kinds of remains.
00:09:02
Speaker
So instead, the Hawaiians worked quite carefully and directly with various bureaucrats at the museums, curators, and others, and actually outlasted them. A whole series of folks retired, a new younger generation came on. And it was really a discourse of humanity that prevailed of Native Hawaiians and Sistic. These are our relatives in a direct sense. We don't imagine them to be dead or in communication with them.
00:09:29
Speaker
And we have a deep responsibility or they would say Kuleana to care for the dead. And can't you imagine your way into that and help us down this path? The museum agreed to that and in fact set a new precedent in doing so for how they would deal with other indigenous remains worldwide. It's quite a moment. I would say certainly the Hawaiians conferred a blessing in a literal sense when they came and offered prayers in the museum. These were prayers of honoring and blessing.
00:10:00
Speaker
And we can extrapolate from that to see the kind of religious role they served and in the idiom of the kind of human rights discourse for sure.
00:10:10
Speaker
But what I mean in the passage you make reference to about giving more than they took is that the Hawaiians, one thing they offered, and perhaps I wasn't clear enough about this, is that they were seeking very limited returns, in this case, several skulls and a jawbone. In return, they were offering to help the museum better interpret their remaining collection, to offer grounded experience in return for
00:10:40
Speaker
the human objects. And by way of museum curation, you know, sometimes it's done well, sometimes not. In this case, it was woefully out of date and to have direct experience and voices from native people to say, we wish for you to care for these things in the best way and to situate them with knowledge that
Museums and Native Perspectives
00:10:59
Speaker
we can provide you. So it was that nature of exchange that was so important. Yes, they spoke in the idiom of religion
00:11:07
Speaker
But at the end of the day, I think it was the broader discourse of basic humanity that prevailed here. I don't know how to better say it than that. Thank you. As a follow-up to that, can you give some specific illustrations of what you mean by better grounding and better interpretation that came out of this? Oh, yes.
00:11:32
Speaker
Simply put, a lot of the interpretive materials in colonial museums haven't been updated since colonial times for the most part, or if they have been updated, it's always an idiom of archaeological science, Western empiricism, and so forth. Very little recourse to
00:11:49
Speaker
Even native words, let alone native oral traditions can come out the ideas about how these objects relate to one another. That is to get away from the idea that we're describing and representing individual objects in and of themselves.
00:12:05
Speaker
and turning more to the whole cloth of the culture and the tradition in the long run, and what did those objects mean in context then, and how do they continue to mean to Hawaiian peoples today, and how would they be used back home as it were, what role did they fulfill, and so forth. Just putting a detailed cultural description to the objects in a way that also honors the best of what most museums hope for, I would think.
00:12:32
Speaker
Greg, I got to ask, and sorry if this sounds tackless, but why would you or did the delegation put it in the terms of giving more than it was taking? Because it seems as if making sure that the museum wasn't misrepresenting or misunderstanding their artifacts on the contextual foundation, which those artifacts are being presented, is more of a win-win. It benefits the museum, but also benefit
00:13:01
Speaker
the Native Hawaiian religion to be properly represented. So why is that a giving more than a taking, as opposed to we're going to get our remains back, but also benefit from having what's left at the museum properly contextualized?
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fair question. Absolutely. Thanks. And I accept the friendly amendment to frame it that way. I guess what I didn't give voice to is the larger context of repatriation in European museums. These museums are reluctant to return these human remains. They don't have
00:13:37
Speaker
a lot to gain from several Native Hawaiian skulls that aren't adequately provenance. But they have a lot to lose when a precedent gets set for returning objects. And we're talking not just about Hawaiian remains. We're talking about the fact that these museums, quite frankly, have the loot of cultures worldwide. And the museum took a risk in this. And so in the media and elsewhere, there was the sense that there was an opening being created that could unleash a flood.
00:14:07
Speaker
And so it's in that context that the Hawaiians are saying, help us help you understand this as a human issue. Don't fear about the transactional nature of this, what you might stand to lose in the long run. What you're gaining is a more capacious human sense of what it is you hold and a more concrete relationship to it.
00:14:29
Speaker
No, no, that's great. I very much appreciate it. I have to ask this, and I'm very curious to hear how this came to be. But both as you being as part of the delegation, as well as being an expert and a scholar on Native Hawaiian religion, first, how did that come to be? And how did the delegation perceive you?
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. So I've worked with various Hawaiian repatriation leaders for more than 20 years. One gentleman in particular, Edward Haleiloha Ayao, whom I feature in this piece, was the leader of a group named Hui Ma Lama, and is now the leader of a follow-on group that's doing much of the same work.
00:15:17
Speaker
And he and I have worked together for many, many years. He's helped me better understand these processes. We've gone to various repatriation meetings together, but I hadn't myself been directly involved in a repatriation. He reached out knowing I understood the German context to some degree from prior research and just said, would I like to join the group? And the answer wasn't going to be no.
00:15:42
Speaker
And as I described in the piece, a number of other folks were included as well, people expert in different aspects of Hawaiian culture and also repatriation, politics, law, and so forth. So it was quite a team.
00:15:57
Speaker
As I described in the piece, one of the things this team did was help conduct ceremonies at the museum in Dresden. But then we went on to museums in Berlin that hold quite a huge number of native Hawaiian human remains and objects and have been less willing to return them.
00:16:17
Speaker
And in conversations, in discussions with the museums in Berlin, it struck me as very important that this group had these different experts so as they could represent in a full-throated way who they are, why they were there, why it mattered, and to make that case in a number of registers, the political, the legal, the religious.
00:16:41
Speaker
There was a genealogical expert who could chant back their traditions, you know, generation upon generation. There were collective prayers. I think the formal effect of all of this was to say, if you doubt we are experts, if you doubt that we are in control of our cultural knowledge, if you doubt that we
00:16:58
Speaker
understand legal frameworks, doubt no more. We are here as ourselves and speaking for and as our ancestors. It's a Polynesian way of doing cultural business, if you will, to take on the responsibility of the ancestors, to care for them, and to act in a sense as them.
00:17:19
Speaker
And this is hard from a Western perspective to get our minds around. I still struggle with it, how this could be. But this is how it's understood. It's the perpetual presence in a Polynesian idiom of the ancestral energy or mana coming forward in that moment.
00:17:35
Speaker
Whatever else I might say, I would say this, the museum folks got it. They could see that people gave over tremendous time, energy, and resources to be there, and that their collective learning in these different fields was, we should just say, astonishing. And they could set aside questions of, are these the real Hawaiians we should deal with? And instead foreground, how do we move forward?
00:18:10
Speaker
Let me use your reference to frameworks of law as a way to pivot back to Hawaii itself from Germany and talk about some of the other things you discuss in your chapter.
Native Hawaiian Land Jurisdiction Issues
00:18:22
Speaker
You discuss native assertions of jurisdiction over the lands, bypassing the court system in many ways and simply working that out on the ground.
00:18:34
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about this assertion of jurisdiction, and if you can just introduce that concept for listeners, I do have a follow up question after that as well. Great. Yeah, so the other things I described in the chapter have to do with land struggles.
00:18:55
Speaker
military lands and their use, the ongoing telescope controversy on Mauna Kea and so forth. By the way, I should add all of the conflicts or disputes I described in that chapter are ongoing. None of them are resolved. So if I appear to choose my words carefully, it's with cognizance that these are ongoing issues of great consequence for Native
00:19:20
Speaker
Hawaiians. I introduced the concept of auto jurisdiction. That's my own framing of it, whether it's successful or not, we'll see. But I just mean to say that indigenous peoples in many locations, and particularly in Hawaii, have begun to assert the force of law speak, if you will, the language of law themselves. The intermediaries of the state, whether at the state level or federal level, have failed them repeatedly.
00:19:49
Speaker
Again, whether state or federal appear to reach out to native peoples to say, we can protect you some of the time in certain kinds of ways, particularly if you make religious freedom claims and so forth. Time and again, that promise goes unrewarded or unfulfilled. Native claims, time and again, are illegible to the state. They fly over people's heads or categorically ignored.
00:20:16
Speaker
and we can go deeper into that, but getting to your question, rather than continue to just be frustrated. People have stayed engaged with law because they want to create a record of having been there, have spoken back and so forth, but knowing that most often they will lose and usually lose badly. So that's kind of the larger legal strategy framework
00:20:43
Speaker
The more tactical aspect of auto jurisdiction is to say, meanwhile, issues need to be attended to, sometimes in ways that comport with law and sometimes beyond law, direct action and so forth, or even asserting legal titles themselves to be the Kanaka Rangers, as I described so forth, basically to say,
00:21:05
Speaker
In the absence of any demonstration of justice by the state, we're going to operationalize it ourselves today on the ground. We're going to attach to ourselves titles, names, and authority that the state refuses to give us, and we challenge them to take it back. And in the meanwhile, we're going to work through these cracks and fissures of possibilities to assert our, as they say, inherent sovereignty
00:21:29
Speaker
And they take that to be a religious concept given from the spirits, but also a political concept from that they regard themselves, many of them as the heirs of the Hawaiian kingdom that was illegally taken by the US. So it's a double front of culture and religion on the one hand and outright political claims on the other saying,
00:21:50
Speaker
We're going to outweigh the state. And in the meantime, we're going to do it on our own, constructing our jurisdiction and sovereignty in tactical daily concrete ways as we see fit. Sometimes that results in people getting arrested. Sometimes it results in bemused police officers not knowing what to do with them.
00:22:07
Speaker
But I have to say, after 20 years, more than 20 years of working there, I've begun to take these tactical actions very, very seriously. At first, I had the reaction of, wow, is this a good use of time and resources? It seems so implausible. The US military seems to be such a force and just the idea of the nation state. What's the presumption to work beyond that?
00:22:36
Speaker
Each and every time I've been to Hawaii to do work, I've seen this happening on the ground and the movement perpetuates itself. It's gaining steam while the apparatus of the nation state crumbles away day by day. So I'm far more persuaded now than ever that things are happening in Hawaii that
00:22:56
Speaker
challenge the very claim of the nation state upon that land. How that will play out, I don't know. I don't pretend to prophesy the result, but I am fascinated by the daily concrete actions of people to assert their auto jurisdiction in an unmediated way. You described that dialectic, if you will, as a move to stand beyond a law
00:23:24
Speaker
It seems to me like a lot of thinking about law and politics sees them as one phase and then another. That you try to win a political battle, if it doesn't work, you might turn to the courts for redress. If you lose a lawsuit, you might go back to the legislature and ask for something to change. But reading your chapter just made me think of Karl von Clausewitz, the military strategist, who said war is just the continuation of politics by other means.
00:23:52
Speaker
To what extent are law, politics, auto jurisdiction, are all of those just the same phenomenon carried on by different means all overlapping with each other? Before you answer, Greg, I even want to add, is there a separation between religion and politics as well in this discourse or fight in auto jurisdiction? Yeah, you've asked.
00:24:19
Speaker
fantastic and huge questions. I would emphasize that part of what characterizes the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian movement today, is it's acephalous in politics and in religion. That is, there's not a body with a head in either case. Both sides, if you will, of the movements are without specific hierarchies or leaders, no priests, no rulers, no nothing. So these are self-fashioned groups
00:24:50
Speaker
coming out of the family unit and broader communities, often working in synergies, sometimes working with friction between them, but collectively getting things done on the ground. So it makes it very hard to generalize about their tactics because there are different inflections. And some are much more about the political sovereignty side of things. Others are much more about grounding what they do in the idea of oral tradition and commitment to the ancestors.
00:25:21
Speaker
And they do spend a lot of energy bumping and grinding among one another. But when they face common threats, land desecration, the spoiling of their aquifers, the desire to care for their ancestors, more often than not, they do come together and emphasize a kind of auto jurisdiction that I would say they would frame, yes, as political, cultural, and religious in one breath.
00:25:53
Speaker
But certain of them will take on different features of that. There are those most committed to fighting through the system as it exists now in the state federal legal context, whether in the courts or in the legislature. Others say no. We regard that as the fake state. We wish to move beyond that immediately. And others still say, in the cosmic way, kind of reframing time altogether,
00:26:20
Speaker
The primary duty is to the spirits and the ancestors themselves that the law and politics is incidental and we're going to outlast them this way. And to me, the magic, if you will, is the conjunction of these different kinds of groups with broadly common purposes, but different ways of engaging what we would call the reality of law and politics.
Federal Recognition and Native Hawaiian Response
00:26:43
Speaker
It's messy.
00:26:45
Speaker
But it's got a trajectory. I have to come back to that point that after decades of watching this, the overall coherence of the movement and the ways it's gaining steam, particularly through younger generations, bringing up children into the movement through immersion schooling, education. There's no such thing in Hawaii.
00:27:06
Speaker
as learning the language without learning attachments to genealogy and land, place, ancestors, the forces of nature. The language is all of those things. And so the kids of today are conversant in this way with their culture that was less the case when I started working there. So not a clear answer, but that's probably the best I can do at the moment.
00:27:45
Speaker
We've heard a lot of how Native Hawaiians see themselves vis-a-vis the United States. How does the United States see Native Hawaiians? Do they see them as insiders and part of the American people? Do they see them as outsiders who also happen to be part of the American people? How does that relationship from the other side's perspective look? I spend less time looking at it
00:28:14
Speaker
the broad landscape, cultural landscape from that direction, but I do have a sense of it. And as you might guess, it's highly variable because the different groups of Kanaka Māolein, Native Hawaiians approach the state differently. Some are prepared to go to jail and stand out, be incarcerated because of law, even while they attempt to stand beyond it. Others insist on working with the law and so forth.
00:28:41
Speaker
The federal government has been pursuing federal recognition for Native Hawaiians for some years now and made a full-throated push in 2014 to pursue this agenda under Obama. And it seemed to be the case, and this was headed up by Department of the Interior, seemed to be the case that Obama's administration had been given the word that, yeah, Hawaiians want this. They want to protect their entitlements under federal law that are
00:29:08
Speaker
quite akin to Native Hawaiian or Native American entitlements. And there was a misjudgment there. The committee came, a committee of federal folks came to have listening sessions with Hawaiians and they were told loudly, repeatedly, a ole, which means no. The very thing you're wishing to offer us is the thing we don't want.
00:29:31
Speaker
We wish to distance ourselves from you, not be enfranchised by you. And this came as quite a shock, I think, to some of the federal folks who are saying, no, we're simply here to help you protect your already existing rights and make those more robust in the future. And again, they could not come out at least at all. Your offers of help in the past haven't panned out so well for us. And we've keenly watched what's happened with various Native Americans.
00:29:58
Speaker
Frankly, we'd rather go at quite our own, not to mention we believe our Hawaiian kingdom is still the legitimate source of authority and jurisdiction for us. So there's that. But there also, again, just to repeat myself in a different register, folks who work in the legislature, in the courts, who maybe have mixed feelings about that, but understand that's the most proximate
00:30:26
Speaker
way to achieve change and protection. And it's how those groups, those inside those outside work together is an interesting question. I think the federal government is frustrated. I think people don't know what to do about the quote unquote Hawaiian problem. And I think there's a question here about self governance and auto jurisdiction
00:30:55
Speaker
or self-determination, auto-jurisdiction, I would distinguish those and say auto-jurisdiction as I mean it are those tactical acts in the present where people have grown tired of the state wish to resist it today on the ground in this moment. Whereas some notion of political sovereignty or self-determination is more of a future-oriented endeavor
00:31:18
Speaker
How do we re-establish ourselves as a sovereign body with a leadership and an agenda and recognition from other entities, whether the US or others, whether the one, the tactical, the micro-local, will lead to the larger? I remain agnostic. I don't know that. I just want to ask a clarification question. When they said, no, we don't want that,
00:31:44
Speaker
Was that based on like a language misunderstanding, like what they thought the government was giving was something different than what the government thought they were giving? Or was it really like a sophisticated know of, we don't want protection that you give us because by you giving it to us, it also, even if we have it, it's by virtue of our subordination to you. And we'd rather rebel than be given freedom.
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's much more the latter, though I'd say they would say it's not freedom so much as whatever protections the government purports to offer. Sure, are there knee-jerk folks responding and people who get on the bandwagon who haven't thought a great deal about this? As with all movements, there's some of that. And the media loves to pick up the stories of those people and say, look, the rabble-rousers are doing this.
00:32:43
Speaker
But I've been humbled time and again to realize the intellectual depth and the traditional knowledge of folks making this argument. And it usually goes back to the idea of the Hawaiian Kingdom, that it was stolen, and I think historically that can be shown clearly. And that they don't understand the nation state to be a permanent edifice. They regard it as a temporary thing that, like so many natural things, is prone to erosion.
Hawaiian Sovereignty and Multiracial Challenges
00:33:10
Speaker
And that their will is simply stronger and clearer than that of the nation state. They'll outlast it and they're holding space for their children and grandchildren and doing their best in the meantime to get through each cultural day.
00:33:27
Speaker
The US Census Bureau estimates that about 10.5% of the population of the islands identifies as native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander alone. Another quarter identifies as multiracial. And then the rest is a composite of Asian alone, white alone, black and Latino. When it comes to asserting
00:33:53
Speaker
sovereignty and possibly even thinking about restoring the Kingdom of Hawaii, which you write about in your chapter. What is the sense of what happens to all of those other people if this ever were to happen? Or is that such a utopian aspirational goal that that's just not a live issue for most of the folks who are actively pushing for it at this point?
00:34:16
Speaker
Yes. So no, it's active, actively discussed. That's for sure. Some would say that, oh, it's, it's too distant. We have so much work to do. We're not there yet. Our first order is care for the land, care for the ancestors. And we're talking about a generation or two down the line before we can actively take up that question.
00:34:37
Speaker
Others say, no, we have a model. The Hawaiian Kingdom was itself international and multiracial, and this isn't about dislodging the newcomers. It's about restoring proper sovereignty to Native Hawaiians who will take the leadership, but it's not about expunging a history of other people and displacing them. Surely there would be some land claims, issues that need to be worked out.
00:35:01
Speaker
And then there are more radical factions who say, no, Hawaii for Hawaiians, and that's just how the chips will fall if we ever get there. But I think the majority of you would say it's a long-term project that isn't about disenfranchising others, the military bracketed. It's about restoring proper cultural and political and legal leadership to Native Hawaiians. But just as a follow-up, I mean,
00:35:28
Speaker
to have a minority of the population in a position of asserting sovereignty over a majority that's not ethnically eligible for it. I mean, how much is that something that's discussed as, I mean, it's certainly out of step with more than I think just American notions of the nation state at this point in history, right?
00:35:49
Speaker
No, that's right. And the kinds of questions you're asking when I first started working in Hawaii, that those loomed large for me. And I thought, how is this even doable? And I've come to appreciate that there really are so many different camps with so many different answers. And I certainly can't adequately represent them all, but collectively, they haven't gone away. Their voices have grown.
00:36:15
Speaker
How they'll navigate these issues, I can't obviously speak for them. And I can't even really anticipate where it's headed. I think it's the proximate struggles that command their attention right now. Seeing their land base challenge, seeing their educational resources diminished and so forth. These are the front burner issues. And I think the conviction of the next generation that they're going to carry on that work is what tells me there's a there there.
00:36:43
Speaker
But what shape that will take vis-a-vis the larger political order, global forces and so forth. I'm out of my league to begin to gesture in that direction. But I do want to make sure I underscore, you know, I'm a scholar of religion at the end of the day, not a political scientist or anything like that. So back into my wheelhouse.
00:37:03
Speaker
I just want to underscore the fact that how I see these movements and their tactical operations, the day-to-day assertions of auto jurisdiction operating, is that in this bumping and grinding with one another and with the nation state, always and everywhere, looking back to tradition and culture to say, what are the resources we have to face the current moment?
00:37:26
Speaker
And that act of looking back and drawing forward and grinding it through is so generative for the tradition itself. It's creating new inflections, new articulations, new possibilities. And some would say, oh, these Hawaiians are doing invented things, or they're making up stuff as they go. The longer I've watched, listened, and learned, I see, no, no, no.
00:37:47
Speaker
They are so deeply learned in their genealogies, in their places, in their traditions, and they're drawing that forward. Of course, they're reshaping it in a contemporary moment. How could it be otherwise? But a strong insistence, this would be my punchline, that what they're doing in the present is every bit
00:38:04
Speaker
bona fide native Hawaiian religion as anything we can point to in the past. The tradition has always been configured in moments of struggle and battle and resource issues prior to colonization even and what tradition is exempt from that kind of
Hawaiian Religion and Diaspora
00:38:20
Speaker
reality. The question is how clearly do we see it? But Hawaiians carry forward these resources into the present and I simply as a scholar of religion want to flag that and say that deserves our attention. It's alive and well where it's headed we don't know.
00:38:35
Speaker
Greg, this has been really, really fascinating. I have one last question, or we have one last question for you. Your chapter was part of a larger book titled At Home and Abroad. And given our discussion and given your expertise on Native Hawaiian religion, how does the Native Hawaiian religion look at concepts of home and abroad vis-a-vis the
00:38:59
Speaker
cultural, historical, religious, and political contexts that Native Hawaiians are situated in? It's a big last question, of course. No, it's a big one, but it's a great last question, and a good note to end on. A reality for Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians is many of them can't afford to live in their own homeland.
00:39:22
Speaker
So there's a huge diasporic community, primarily in what we would call the US. They would call the continent, or the US is distinct from Hawaii itself. But in any case, bracketing the question for the moment about Hawaiians in Hawaii, many, many of them live in the US and have to maintain modes of connection back home. And so there's that transit in, by way of people, ideas, cash,
00:39:51
Speaker
back and forth all the time. So those avenues create lots of open-ended questions about what does it mean to say you're at home versus abroad. Back in Hawaii, sure, there are lots of ironies in play. For example, many of the movements I've described and discussed
00:40:13
Speaker
are animated in part by federal funding, language learning, et cetera. So they agitate against the nation state on the one hand and yet receive funds from it. And this isn't to say they're disingenuous. Again, they're making do through whatever means are available. But some of those mechanisms embed them deeper in the state than they maybe wish to be. And others create opportunities to step away.
Integration with Pacific Islanders and Closing Remarks
00:40:37
Speaker
So I guess I would end on the note of saying
00:40:40
Speaker
a processional view of this, of understanding Hawaiians as betwixt and between and constantly navigating and never always being of one voice in this, is what makes it so rich and interesting to me is, gosh, of all the Hawaiians I've worked with and know, not one of them holds exactly the same position on these matters as everyone else, but collectively, they're sorting it out with a remarkable body of wisdom
00:41:05
Speaker
in their tradition to do so and against all odds. And at the same time, having to make space for other Pacific Islanders who are just diasporic from their islands to Hawaii, creating another layer of engagement interaction. So a maddeningly vague answer to close on, I bet, but that's the nature of things in Hawaii today, I'd say.
00:41:30
Speaker
Greg, this is great. Thank you so much for your time. Having that chance to speak to you in addition to reading your chapter.
00:41:37
Speaker
gave such a deeper and richer understanding of not only what you were trying to say about... Thank you Greg Johnson for joining us in this discussion and thank you all for listening. If you'd like to stay updated on new and upcoming episodes, please be sure to like, share, and subscribe. The Interactions Podcast is distributed by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, a canopy forum, and produced by Ethan Anthony.
00:42:11
Speaker
you