Natives and Anthropologists:

The Colonial Struggle

by Haunani-Kay Trask

As a Hawaiian, a long-time outspoken defender of my people’s claim to nationhood, a scholar, and a Native who knows her history and people, I found Roger Keesing’s (1989) article in your first issue a gem of academic colonialism. Knowing old-fashioned racism too crude to defend but bitterly clinging to his sense of white superiority, Keesing plows the complaining path of the unappreciated missionary who, when confronted by ungrateful, decolonizing Natives, thinly veils his hurt and anger by the high road of lamentation: Alas, poor, bedeviled Natives “invent” their cculture in reaction to colonialism, and all in the service of grimy politics!

Keesing’s peevishness has a predictably familiar target: Native nationalists- from Australia and New Zealand through the Solomons and New Caledonia to Hawai’i. The problem? These disillusioned souls idealize their pasts for the purpose of political mythmaking in the present. Worse, they are so unoriginal (and, by implication, unfamiliar with what Keesing calls their “real” pasts) as to concoct their myths out of Western categories and values despite their virulent opposition to same. Thus the romanticization of pre-European Native pasts (the “Golden Age” allegedly claimed by the Maori); the assertion of a common Native identity (eg, Fijian “culture”); the “ideology” of land as spiritually significant (supposedly argued by Hawaiians, Solomon Islanders, Kanaks, and Aborigines). The gospel, according to Keesing, is that these claims are “invented.” To be specific, there never was a “Golden Age,” a common identity, or a spiritual attachment to the land.

Proof? Keesing supplies none, either on the charge that Native nationalists  have made such claims or that their claims are false. He merely asserts fabrication then proceeds to belabor, trought the  mumbo jumbo of academic “discourse” the crying need for Natives (and academics) to face “our” pasts with “skepticism,” while pursuing a “critical deconstruction of conceptualizations” to achieve “dialectical confrontation.”  The final intention should be to “liberate us” from our pasts.
 

Well, my answer to Keesing has been said by modern-day Natives to would-be White Fathers many times: What do you mean “us,” white man?

Among Hawaiians, people like Keesing are described as maha’oi haole, that is, rude, intrusive white people who go where they do not belong. In Keesing’s case, his factual errors, cultural and political ignorance, and dismissive attitude qualify him perfectly as maha’oi. Unlike Keesing, I cannot speak for other Natives. But regarding Hawaiian nationalists, Keesing neither knows where of he speaks, nor, given his maha’oi attitude, does he care.

Example: Keesing only cites works by haole academics on the current situation in Hawai’i. Obviously, he hasn’t bothered to read our Native nationalists and scholars, including those, like myself, who have been very critical of these same haole academics. Indeed, most of his comments on Hawaiian nationalists come from one problematic and contested article (contested by Natives, that is) by anthropologist Jocelyn Linnekin (1983), hardly a sound evidentiary base for sweeping claims that we invent our past.

Beyond his poverty of sources, there is Keesing’s willful ignorance of solid evidence from Native forms of history-genealogy-which reveal that in pre-haole Hawai’i our people looked on land as a mother, enjoyed a familial relationship with her and other living things, and practiced an economically wise, spiritually based ethic of caring for the land, called malama ‘aina.

Contrary to Linnekin’s claims, and Keesing’s uncritical acceptance of them, the value of malama ‘aina has been “documented historically,” and “recorded ethnographically,” (as Keesing might learn if he read Native sources), two of the criteria Keesing cites as central to any judgment of the accuracy of “ancestral ways of life being evoked rhetorically” by Native nationalists today.l If Natives must be held to Keesing’s criteria, why should he be allowed to escape them?

The answer is that Keesing, with many Western academics, shares a common assumption: Natives don’t know very much, even about their own lifeways, thus there is no need to read them. (The only “real” sources are haole sources, hegemony recognizing and reinforcing hegemony).
 

Kessing’s racism is exposed here. Not only he refused to read what we Native Nationalists write and say, he has refusedd to look  at our sources of knowledge. But then, Keesing believes, Natives are so colonized, why bother?

Example: Keesing has also failed to distinguish between what Hawaiian nationalists say about our ways of life and what the mammoth tourist industry advertises “Hawaiian culture” to be, including “hula dances, ukuleles, and pineapples.” Because he is totally ignorant of modern Hawaiian resistance, he is also totally ignorant of the Native criticism of the tourist industry, including the myth of happy Natives waiting to share their “culture” with tourists. In fact, after years of Native resistance to tourism, the churches in Hawai’i (with the push of Native nationalists and international ecumenical groups) sponsored a conference on the impact of tourism on Hawaiian people and culture in I989. At that conference, Hawaiians from each of our major islands spoke eloquently of tourism’s damage to Hawaiian sites, dance, language, economics, land, and way of life. The declaration issued from that conference listed ways to halt this damage, including a ban on all resorts in Hawaiian communities. Keesing should be reading this kind of primary evidence if he wants to learn what Hawaiian nationalists think about tourism and our culture. (2)

Example: Keesing claims that Native nationalists hark back to an “authentic,” “simple, unambiguous reality,” when, in fact, “there were multiple ‘realities’-for commoners and chiefs, for men and for women …” in cultures where “genealogies, cosmologies, rituals were themselves contested spheres.”

As usual, the critical reader finds not a single reference here to a single Native nationalist statement. More haole sources follow, especially Keesing on Keesing. But where are the Natives? In the dark, naturally.

The truth is that Keesing has made a false charge. Those of us in the current Hawaiian nationalist movement know that genealogies are claimed and contested all the time. Some of the chiefly lineages have legal claims on lands taken by the United States government at the American annexation of Hawai’i in I898, which means that genealogies have an impact beyond the Hawaiian community. Cosmologies are also contested, with nationalists citing and arguing over accuracy and preferability. (3)

Finally, at the Center for Hawaiian Studies -which generates nationalist positions, sponsors nationalist conferences, and teaches the historical background and political substance of nationalist arguments- students are required to take a course on genealogies.

Given Roger Keesing’s shameless claims about us Hawaiian nationalists, I invite him to take this course, or any other offered at our center. We Natives might teach him something.
 

Example: Keesing asserts that “cultural nationalist rhetoric often depicts anthropologists as villains who appropriate and exploit.” In a note, he adds that anthropologists are “imagined to be appropriating and profiting from other people’s cultures ….”

In Hawai’i, contract work is a major source of funding for archaeologists and anthropologists. These people are hired by investors and state or private institutions to survey areas and deem them ready for use. In highly controversial cases regarding removal of Hawaiian bones and destruction of Hawaiian temple and house sites, many archaeologists and anthropologists have argued for development and against preservation while receiving substantial sums of money. At its worst, these controversies have exposed the racist paternalism of  anthropologists who pit (in their own words) emotional Hawaiians who try to stop disinterment and development against scientificanthropologists who try to increase the store of (Western) knowledge.

Of course, these haole anthropologists would be outraged were we Hawaiians to dig up theirrelatives for osteological analysis, search for evidence of tuberculosis and other diseases, and, not coincidentally, get paid handsomely for our troubles. To my knowledge, no anthropologist has ever dug up missionary bones, despite their plentiful presence. Nor has any haole “expert” ever argued that missionary skeletons should be subjected to osteological analysis, despite historical evidence that missionaries did bring certain diseases to Hawai’i. White colonialism in Hawai’i ensures that it is the colonizers who determine disinterment. Since we are the colonized, we have no power to disinter the bones of the colonizer.

Thus, Native remains are dug up and studied. Missionary and explorer remains are sacrosanct. Apart from contract work, anthropologists make academic careers and employment off Native cultures. Keesing may not think this is “profiting,” but anthropologists who secure tenure by studying, publishing, and lecturing about Native peoples are clearly “profiting” through a guaranteed lifetime income. Of course, Keesing is disingenuous, at best. He knows as well as Native nationalists that anthropologists without Natives are like entomologists without insects.

For Hawaiians, anthropologists in general (and Keesing in particular) are part of the colonizing horde because they seek to take away from us the power to define who and what we are, and how we should behave politically and culturally.(4)

This theft testifies to the stranglehold of colonialism and explains why self-identity by Natives elicits such strenuous and sometimes vicious denials by members of the dominant culture. These denials are made in order to undermine the legitimacy of Native nationalists by attacking their motives in asserting their values and institutions. But motivation is laid bare through the struggle for cultural expression. Nationalists offer explanations at every turn: in writing, in public forums, in acts of resistance. To Natives, the burst of creative outpouring that accompanies cultural nationalism is self-explanatory: a choice has been made for things Native over things non-Native. Politically, the choice is one of decolonization.

The direct links between mental and political decolonization are clearly observable to representatives of the dominant culture, like Keesing, who find their status as “experts” on Natives suddenly repudiated by Natives themselves. This is why thinking and acting like a Native is a highly politicized reality, one filled with intimate oppositions and psychological tensions. But it is not Natives who create politicization. That was begun at the moment of colonization.

In the Hawaiian case, the “invention” criticism has been thrown into the public arena precisely at a time when Hawaiian cultural and political assertion has been both vigorous and strong willed. Since 1970, Hawaiians have been organizing for land rights, including claims to restitution for the American overthrow of our government in 1893 and for forced annexation in 1898. Two decades of struggle have resulted in the contemporary push for Hawaiian sovereignty, with arguments ranging from complete secession to legally incorporated land-based units managed by Hawaiians, to a “nation-within-a-nation” government akin to Native American Indian nations. The US government has issued two reports on the status of Hawaiian trust lands, which encompass nearly half the State of Hawai’i. And finally, a quasi-governmental agency-the Office of Hawaiian Affairs-was created in 1978, partly in response to Hawaiian demands.

This kind of political activity has been accompanied by a flourishing of Hawaiian dance, a move for Hawaiian language immersion schools, and a larger public sensitivity to the destructive Western relaati0nship t0 the land  compared to the indigenous Hawaiian way of caring for the land. 

Non-Native response to this Hawaiian resistance has varied from humor, through mild denial that any wrong has been committed against the Hawaiian people and government, to organized counteraction, especially from threatened agencies and actors who hold power over Hawaiian resources. Indeed, representatives of the dominant culture-from historians and anthropologists to bureaucrats and politicians-are quick to feel and perceive danger because, in the colonial context, all Native cultural resistance is political: it challenges hegemony, including that of people like Keesing who claim to encourage a more “radical stance” toward our past by liberating us from it.

But Keesing obviously knows nothing about Hawaiians. He has failed to distinguish land claims from cultural resurgence, although both have nationalist origins. And he has little or no background regarding the theft of Hawaiian domain and dominion by the American government in the nineteenth century. Given this kind of ignorance of both our recent and distant past, Keesing would do better to take a “radical” look at the racism and arrogance of his culture which originated anthropology and its “search for the primitive.”

As for nationalist Hawaiians, we know our future lies in the ways of our ancestors, not in the colonial world of haole experts. Our efforts at “liberation” are directed against the colonizers, whether they be political agencies, like the American government, or academics, like Keesing himself.
 

We do not need, nor do we want to be “liberated” from our past because it is the source of our understanding of the cosmos and of our mana.

In our language, the past (ka wa mamua) is the time in front or before; the future (ka wa mahope) is the time that comes after. In the words of one of our best living Native historians, Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa (whom Keesing did not read), “The Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas. Such an orientation is to the Hawaiian  an eminently practical one, for the future is always unknown whereas the past is rich in glory and knowledge” (1986, 28-29).

In her article, Linnekin writes, “For Hawai’i, ‘traditional’ properly refers to the precontact era, before Cook’s arrival in 1778″ (242). But later on the samepage, she admits that “tradition is fluid …”Despite this confusion she criticizes Hawaiians for a “reconstruction of traditional Hawaiian society” in the present.

But what constitutes “tradition” to a people is ever-changing. Culture is not static, nor is it frozen in objectified moments in time. Without doubt, Hawaiians were transformed drastically and irreparably after contact, but remnants of earlier lifeways, including values and symbols, have persisted. One of these values is the Hawaiian responsibility to care for the land, to make it flourish, called malama ‘aina or aloha ‘aina. (Regarding the “traditional” value of malama ‘aina, see Kame’eleihiwa 1986). To Linnekin, this value has been invented by modern Hawaiians to protest degradation of the land by developers, the military, and others.

What Linnekin has missed here-partly because she has an incomplete grasp of “traditional” values but also because she doesn’t understand and thus misapprehends Hawaiian cultural nationalism-is simply this: the Hawaiian relationship to land has persisted into the present. What has changed is ownership and use of the land (from collective use by Hawaiians for subsistence to private use by whites and other non-Natives for profit.) Asserting the Hawaiian relationship in this changed context results in politicization. Thus, Hawaiians assert a “traditional” relationship to the land not for political ends, as Linnekin (and Keesing) argue, but because they continue to believe in the cultural value of caring for the land. That land use is now contested makes such a belief political. This distinction is crucial because the Hawaiian cultural motivation reveals the persistence of traditional values, the very thing Linnekin (and Keesing) allege modern Hawaiians to have “invented.”

2. For an example of tourist industry apologists and their claim that tourism encourages and exemplifies “Hawaiian culture,” see Smyser 1982, and my reply (1982). Also see the 1989 Declaration of the Hawai’i Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism, available from the American Friends Service Committee, Honolulu.

3. In Hawai’i the Kawananakoa line contests the loss of governance, since they were heirs to the throne at the time of the American military-backed overthrow of Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani. The Salazar family lays claim to part of the Crown lands for similar reasons. Regarding land issues, the Ka’awa family occupied Makapu’u Point in 1988 in protest over its current use. Their argument revolved around their claim to ownership because of their  genealogical connection to the Kamehameha line. Among nationalist organizations, ‘Ohana 0 Hawai’i, led by Peggy Ha’o Ross, argues claims to leadership based on genealogy.

These examples illustrate the continuity of genealogy as profoundly significant to hawaiians in establishing and thus, the power to command recognition and leadership. Keesing obviously knows nothing about any of these families or their claims.

4. The United States government defines Native Hawaiians as those with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood quantum. Those with less than 50 percent Hawaiian blood are not considered to be “Native” and are thus not entitled to lands and monies set aside for 50 percent bloods. Hawaiians are the only human beings in the State of Hawai’i who are categorized by blood quantum, rather like Blacks in South Africa.

While bureaucrats are happily dividing up who is and is not Native, the substance of what constitutes things Hawaiian is constantly asserted by anthropologists against Native nationalists. Of course, the claim to knowledge by anthropologists is their academic training applied to the field. Native nationalists’ claim to knowledge is their life experience as Natives.

The problem is more serious than epistemology, however. In a colonial world, the work of anthropologists and other Western-trained “experts” is used to disparage and exploit Natives. What Linnekin or Keesing or any other anthropologist writes about Hawaiians has more potential power than what Hawaiians write about themselves. Proof of this rests in the use of Linnekin’s argument by the US Navy that Hawaiian nationalists have invented the sacred meaning of Kaho’olawe Island (which the US Navy has controlled and bombed since the Second World War) because nationalists need a “political and cultural symbol of protest” in the modern period (Linnekin 1983, 246). Here, the connection between anthropology and the colonial enterprise is explicit. When Natives accuse Western scholars of exploiting them, they have in mind the exact kind of situation I am describing. In fact, the Navy’s study was done by an anthropologist who, of course, cited fellow anthropologists, including Linnekin, to argue that the Hawaiian assertion of love and sacredness regarding Kaho’olawe was “fakery” (Keene 1986). Far from overstating their case, Native nationalists acutely comprehend the structure of their oppression, including that perpetuated by anthropologists.

References:

Hawai’i Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism 1989 The 1989 Hawai’i Declaration of the Hawai’i Ecumenical Coalition on Tourism Conference. Available from American Friends Service Committee, Honolulu.

Kame’eleihiwa, Lilikala 1986 Land and the Promise of Capitalism. PhD dissertation, University of
Hawaii.

Keene, Dennis T.P 1986 Kaho’olawe Island, Hawai’i Ethnic Significance Overview. Copy in Hawaiian/Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai’i
at Manoa.

-Keesing, Roger I989 Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific. Contemporary Pacific I:I9-42.
Linnekin, Jocelyn I983 Defining Tradition: Variations on the Hawaiian Identity. American Ethnologist IO:24I-252.

I985 Children of the Land: Exchange and Status in a Hawaiian Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Smyser, A. A. I982 Hawaiian Problems. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 30 June.

Trask, Haunani-Kay I982 A Hawaiian View of Hawaiian Problems. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, I5
July. I986 Review of Linnekin I985. Hawaiian Journal ofHistory 20:232- 235.

Trask, H. 1991. Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle. The Contemporary Pacific 3 (1): 159-67