The Place to Lay Your Body Down: Native Hawaiian Diasporic Indigeneity on Native North American Homelands

Please join us for the Department of History's Creighton Lecture.

 

 

In the mid-19th century, labor diasporas landed Native Hawaiians on the homelands of Native North American people from Vancouver Island down the coast to California. In this context, they confronted an ethical dilemma: how were they even to approach the ideal of a reciprocal relationship to the land as a relative—an ethical ideal important to Hawaiians and many other Indigenous people? This paper looks to kanikau (mourning songs) composed by diasporic Native Hawaiians to understand how they thought through this question. Historically and spatially situated readings of these kanikau reveal that their composers found that building reciprocal relations with the land could only happen in the context of sustained and reciprocal relationships to the Indigenous people of that land. In their songs, these composers theorized diasporic Indigeneity and mapped out a way to think through core issues for diasporic Indigenous people in the present.  

 

 

David Aiona Chang is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) historian, the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History, and Interim Chair of the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. Chang is a historian of Indigenous people, colonialism, borders and migration in Hawaiʻi and North America, especially on the histories of Native American and Kanaka Maoli peoples. He is in an aloha ʻāina that stood with the protectors at Mauna Kea and supports the efforts of Native Hawaiian and Native American people to protect our homelands, home waters, and sovereignty.

 

Chang is the author of the award-winning book The Color of the Land: Race, Nation and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (2010), which brings the histories of Creek Indians, African Americans and whites in Oklahoma together into one story over the struggles of land. He is also an author of another award-winning book The World and All Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (2016), which traces how Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it in the century after James Cook’s arrival in 1778. The book examines Indigenous peoples as active agents, rather than passive objects, of global exploration.