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 1 

 

 

"Statehood or Sovereignty? Unearthing Hawaiian History and Politics through the Lens of 

the Contemporary Sovereignty Movement" 

 

Review by Naomi Alisa Calnitsky 

 

J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics 

of State Nationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 

 

Keywords: Sovereignty; Sexuality; Indigeneity; Colonialism; Land Rights. 

 

In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty, author J. Kehaulani Kauanui unearths one historical 

period, the early- to mid-nineteenth century, to explore transformations wrought by Christianity 

and the introduction of the Anglo-American legal system upon three spheres in the Hawaiian 

Islands: land, gender and sexuality. In doing, so she examines the consequences of such changes 

for the ways in which "contemporary sovereignty politics" in the islands have evolved (2-3). The 

author approaches this task with the theoretical tool of paradoxes as means to present new ideas 

linked to the problematic history of colonialism and sovereignty in the islands, and 

simultaneously to represent the concerns of the indigenous sovereignty movement in the twenty-

first century. She begins by exploring tensions inherent to external (i.e. US government) efforts 

to represent indigenous Hawaiians as equivalent in status to American Indians in terms of 

prospects for political representation and engagement vis-a-vis the United States, a notion 

rejected by activist Mililani Trask in 2014, owing primarily to the sovereignty movement's 

continued engagement with the discourse of kingdom-based nationalism. The imagery and 

history associated with the Hawaiian monarchy's presence as an agent of international relations 



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and of Hawaiians' relations with outsiders through the nineteenth century is revisited as it feeds 

into contemporary indigenous formations of nationalism and sovereignty politics. 

 

The book is composed of four chapters, the first concerning questions of indigeneity and identity, 

the second matters of land and sustenance, the third questions of marriage, gender and propriety, 

and the fourth addresses discourses revolving around sexuality and "savagery." The book delves 

into the question of colonial biopolitics to discuss the arrival of liberal governance in the 

nineteenth century as a process wherein deviant sexualities were increasingly managed and 

regulated by the state as indigenous chiefs and elites worked in "tandem" with missionaries to 

achieve increasing sense of "racial respectability" (23). As a result of colonial processes, 

indigenous women experienced a "degraded gender status" as Western social norms were 

increasingly imposed on and internalized by Kanaka Maoli or indigenous Hawaiians. 

 

The idea that indigenous sovereignty stems from the land itself is foregrounded in the author's 

discussion of indigenous sovereignty discourses, which often refer not only to historical facts and 

events (i.e. the fact of the monarchy) but also to indigenous constructions of sovereignty through 

language and ideas. Since "sovereignty" is an adopted, Western concept, indigenous political, 

legal and cultural terms are introduced in Kauanui's text, including the term ea (life, breath, to 

rise, rule, independence) (28). As a diasporic Hawaiian scholar with a specialization in 

anthropology and American studies, yet without an intimate knowledge of the indigenous 

Hawaiian language, the author's involvement in sovereignty politics since 1990 informs her 

methodological approach. Her 2008 study, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of 

Sovereignty and Indigeneity, predates this study, prompting the immediate question of how 

Paradoxes of Sovereignty, effectively published ten years later, departs from the previous book. 

Hawaiian Blood's emphasis on genealogy rather than land and sexuality makes it unique, while 

Paradoxes addresses many issues, like Christianity and colonization, that have been amply 

explored in other scholarly works.1 In this regard, in some places the book draws from the 

previous and pathbreaking work carried out by historian Patricia Grimshaw. What does make 

Paradoxes unique, however, is its self-professed emphasis upon "critical discourse analysis and 

archival research with a close examination of contemporary historical documents of Hawaiian 



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nationalist statements and position papers" (31). Historical and contemporary articulations of 

Hawaiian sovereignty are, as a result, explored here side-by-side with fruitful results.  

 

While the book examines a number of competing theoretical threads, they are tied together under 

the umbrella of colonialism's past and the evolution of Hawaiian statehood, with an eye to the 

impact of constitutionalism, political production and monarchical evolution in the decades of the 

mid-nineteenth century. The arrival of a more institutionalized patriarchy, through the 

application of Western legal norms upon indigenous ones, was one critical result of changes 

implemented from “above” during this era. This study is fundamentally interdisciplinary, 

drawing in part from a range of schools and approaches, including native studies, cultural studies 

and American studies, as well as anthropology and history. The examination of governance and 

self-determination alongside the question of gender makes this study unique. In her theoretical 

formulations of how indigeneity has operated in the Hawaiian context, the author points to 

Robert Nichol's concept of the "settler contract" as an extension of the social contract, whereby 

domination and hegemony of Western colonial governments over indigenous peoples was and 

continue to be enacted through the social contract model (53). 

 

Chapter two examines the divergence between Western conceptions of property and the Kanaka 

Maoli/indigenous Hawaiian reverence for the land, as refracted through indigenous Hawaiian 

deities that have manifested components of the land and natural environment, inflecting it with 

meaning and a sense of shared spiritual literacy for centuries. Hawaiian deities effectively are 

"living entities with names" and are understood to literally embody the physical world (77). As 

this spiritual canon might be linked to the sovereignty movement, it can indicate a rejection of 

Western ontological modes of organization, and restore power to the notion of original 

occupancy as a mode of existence that is explicitly linked to a "distinct" relationship to Hawaiian 

lands, which resultantly continues to exist either beyond or outside of Western legal frameworks 

(80). Despite these ideals, the author remains sufficiently objective so as to highlight the 

dissonance between contemporary trends in land expropriations in the islands (81) and the 

specificity of desires of the sovereignty movement. 

 



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The Great Mahele, which in 1848 re-divided lands according to an imported Western model, and 

which was taken up pragmatically by Kamehameha III in an effort to protect his Kingdom from 

further foreign encroachments, alongside the 1850 Kuleana Act, are revisited to discuss the 

evolution of land owning patterns and property rights across the kingdom from the mid-19th 

century onwards. Indeed, the story of early land privatisation in the Hawaiian islands has been 

amply documented in other works, most prominently Stuart Banner's Possessing the Pacific.2 

Here, as Banner notes, accommodation to foreigners would rework the "internal politics of land 

tenure in the islands."3 Missionaries, as well as their offspring, were amongst those who would 

benefit economically from these changes (83; see also Schultz 2017).  

 

What sets this study apart is its effective emphasis on the story of colonialism and 

governmentality in the islands and the body politic's transformation with time (93; 97). The 

indigenous population would be cut in half by epidemics over the course of 1803 through 1831; 

in turn, these changes would dramatically impact patterns of sustainable agriculture which 

predominated prior to the Great Mahele and help signal the onset and ascent of commercial 

monoculture throughout the islands. Oral and written deeds to the land predominated prior to the 

Mahele. Under this system lands were primarily awarded or bestowed from above, in a top-down 

fashion, following the process of kalai'aina or carving of the lands (87). Alongside this, the 

paradigm of kuleana (responsibility or interest) predominated. Modern capitalism's ultimate 

dismemberment of these prior systems, (100) is charted here in some detail, with a focus on 

those capitalists whose scale of ownership has implicated them more directly in contemporary 

indigenous sovereignty demands and legal conflicts (97-105).  Moreover, the "very concept of 

sovereignty" is revisited through a nod to recent trends in the indigenous agricultural and 

ecological restoration movement (112).  

 

The historical prosecution of adultery amongst indigenous Hawaiians is a key theme explored in 

the third chapter, as Western missionary norms were increasingly enforced. The institution of 

Christian marriage accompanied the social pressures permeating the indigenous world, and as the 

author successfully shows, "the missionary pursuit had an emotional element to it" (138). Owing 

to the advance of coverture, indigenous women were effectively displaced from politics and 

disenfranchised as legal actors once married. (151) The final chapter creatively considers how 



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reforms enacted by Hawaiian chiefs reworked the "savage" sexualities that were normative 

amongst indigenous Kanaka Maoli to secure recognition from outsiders, adopting Western 

heteromonogamy as a model (159). This history of biopolitics is also impressively brought up to 

the present day, where discourses of "erotic autonomy" have taken precedence (192). In all, 

Kauanui's study constitutes a significant addition to the existing anthropological and historical 

scholarship that engages with events taking place in the nineteenth century in the islands, and 

scholarship linked to the contepmorary sovereignty movement, complementing the existing 

scholarship in a nuanced and commanding way. There is no doubt that this study will be of 

interest to scholars in the field, and its varied insights will constitute an enduring gift to the 

decolonization movement and its undertaking, both in the islands and more broadly amongst 

Indigenous communities worldwide. 
 

Notes  

1. See for example, Jennifer Thigpen, Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and 

Empire Remade Hawaii's Pacific World, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 

2014), Joy Schultz, Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity and U.S. 

Colonialism in the Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and Patricia Grimshaw, 

Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University 

of Hawaii Press, 1989). 

2. See Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers and Indigenous People 

from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), in particular the chapter 

on the Great Mahele. 

3. Naomi Alisa Calnitsky, "On the Margins of Empire? Toward a History of Hawaiian Labour 

and Settlement in the Pacific Northwest." Journal of the Polynesian Society 126.4 (2017):420. 

 

References 

 

Banner, Stuart. Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers and Indigenous People from Australia to  

 Alaska. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 

Calnitsky, Naomi Alisa. On the “margins” of empire? Toward a history of Hawaiian labour and  

 settlement in the Pacific Northwest. Journal of the Polynesian Society 126 (4): 417-442.   



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Grimshaw, Patricia. Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii  

 Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. 

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

 Indigeneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 

Schultz, Joy. Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity and U.S. Colonialism  

 in the Pacific. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 

 https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803285897/ 

Thigpen, Jennifer. Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade 

 Hawaii's Pacific World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 

 https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469614298/island-queens-and-mission-wives/ 

 

Naomi Alisa Calnitsky is an independent scholar and researcher based in Winnipeg, Canada. 

She received a Doctorate in History at Carleton University in 2017 with a focus on agricultural 

migration patterns between Mexico and Canada between 1974 and the present-day. She was a 

Commonwealth Scholar in History at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2008. Her current 

book project, Seasonal Lives: Twenty-First Century Approaches is currently underway with 

University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill. Her research and writing has focussed on 

Hawaiian trans-Pacific migration in the nineteenth century, Mexican portrait photography, and 

seasonal labour migration histories of the Western and South Pacific. 

 

 

 

© 2019 Naomi Alisa Calnitsky 

 

 


