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At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kauaʻi, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nuʻalolo Kai. First excavated by Bishop Museum archaeologists between 1958 and 1964, the site contained the well-preserved remains of one of the largest and most diverse arrays of traditional and historic artifacts ever found in Hawaiʻi. The house sites that are the focus of this book were built over five centuries of occupation and contained deeply buried, stratified deposits extending more than nine feet beneath the surface. The book details the work of the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa which has been compiling and studying the animal remains recovered from the archaeological excavations. The chapters discuss the range of foods eaten by Hawaiians, the ways in which particular species were captured and harvested, and how these practices might have evolved through changes in the climate and natural environment. Adding to this are analyses of a sophisticated material culture. Demonstrating that an increased preference for introduced animals effectively limited negative impacts on wild animal resources, the book argues that the Hawaiian community of Nuʻalolo Kai practiced a sustainable form of animal resource procurement and management for 500 years.

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (SFF), throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawaiʻi's multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawaiʻi that few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawaiʻi. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. This book uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the SFF. The book supplies an analysis of how the carefully crafted staging of Hawaiʻi's cultural diversity was used to serve a national narrative of utopian multiculturalism while empowering Hawaiʻi's traditional artists and providing a model for cultural tourism that has had long-lasting effects. The book positions the 1989 Hawaiʻi program within a history of institutional intervention in the traditional arts of the island's ethnic groups as well as in relation to local cultural revivals and the tourist industry. By tracing the planning, fieldwork, site design, performance, and aftermath stages of the program, the book examines the uneven processes through which local culture is transformed into national culture and raises questions about the stakes involved in cultural tourism for both culture bearers and culture brokers.

This book offers an account of Hawaiian public art and architecture during the reign of David Kalākaua, who ruled the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1874 to 1891. The book provides visual and historical analysis of Kalākaua's coronation and regalia, the King Kamehameha Statue, ‘Iolani Palace, and the Hawaiian National Museum, drawing them together in a common historical, political, and cultural frame. These cultural projects were part of the monarchy's effort to promote a national culture in the face of colonial pressures, internal political divisions, and declining social conditions for Native Hawaiians. The book interprets the images, spaces, and institutions as articulations of the complex cultural entanglements and creative engagement with international communities that occur with prolonged colonial contact. Nineteenth-century Hawaiian sovereigns celebrated Native tradition, history, and modernity by intertwining indigenous conceptions of superior chiefly leadership with the apparati and symbols of Asian, American, and European rule. The resulting symbolic forms speak to cultural intersections and historical processes, claims about distinctiveness and commonality, and the power of objects, institutions, and public display to create meaning and enable action. The book pursues questions regarding the nature of cultural exchange, how precolonial visual culture engaged and shaped colonial contexts, and how colonial art informs postcolonial visualities and identities.

This is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. The book reexamines the past and present roles that Asians have played in the U.S. colony of Hawai‘i. It identifies settler colonialism as the basis of Hawaiian critiques of U.S. colonialism, arguing that Asians have also played the role of settlers within the colonial framework. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers' claims to Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.

Bayonets in Paradise recounts the extraordinary story of how the army imposed rigid and absolute control on the total population of Hawaii during World War II. Declared immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, martial law was all-inclusive, bringing under army rule every aspect of the Territory of Hawaiʻi's laws and governmental institutions. The result was a protracted crisis in civil liberties, as the army subjected more than 400,000 civilians—citizens and alien residents alike—to sweeping, intrusive social and economic regulations and to enforcement of army orders in provost courts with no semblance of due process. Army rule in Hawai`i lasted until late 1944—making it the longest period in which an American civilian population has ever been governed under martial law. The army brass invoked the imperatives of security and “military necessity” to perpetuate its regime of censorship, curfews, forced work assignments, and arbitrary “justice” in the military courts. The authors provide a rich analysis of the legal challenges to martial law that culminated in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, a remarkable case in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally heard argument on the martial law regime—and ruled in 1946 that provost court justice and the military’s usurpation of the civilian government had been illegal. Based largely on archival sources, this comprehensive, authoritative study places the long-neglected and largely unknown history of martial law in Hawaiʻi in the larger context of America's ongoing struggle between the defense of constitutional liberties and the exercise of emergency powers.

Politicians everywhere attract popular disaffection but in the Pacific the word ‘politician’ has increasingly become synonymous with corruption, graft and misconduct. But who are these much-maligned figures? How did they come to arrive in politics? What is it like to be a politician? Why do they enter, stay and leave? Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the region’s political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job. We come to know politicians as people with hopes and fears, pains and pleasures, vices and virtues. A reminder that politicians are human - neither saints nor sinners - is timely given the clamor of popular critique. The book concludes with a reminder that while we may not always like who politicians are, or the way they operate, representative government does not work without them.

This book is a political history of the island of Malaita in the British Solomon Islands' Protectorate from 1927, when the last violent resistance to colonial rule was crushed, to 1953 and the inauguration of the islands first representative political body, the Malaita Council. At the book's heart is a political movement known as Maasina Rule, which dominated political affairs in the southeastern Solomons for many years after World War II. The movement's ideology, kastom, was grounded in the determination that only Malaitans themselves could properly chart their future through application of Malaitan sensibilities and methods, free from British interference. Kastom promoted a radical transformation of Malaitan lives by sweeping social engineering projects and alternative governing and legal structures. When the government tried to suppress Maasina Rule through force, its followers brought colonial administration on the island to a halt for several years through a labor strike and massive civil resistance actions that overflowed government prison camps. This book presents a practice-based analysis of colonial officers' interactions with Malaitans in the years leading up to and during Maasina Rule. A primary focus is the place of knowledge in the colonial administration. The book's overarching topic is the dangerous road that colonial ignorance paved for policy makers, from young cadets in the field to high officials in distant Fiji and London. Today kastom remains a powerful concept on Malaita, but continued confusion regarding its origins, history, and meanings hampers understandings of contemporary Malaitan politics and of Malaitan people's ongoing, problematic relations with the state“rebels.”

In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship because they were not “white,” dismissing the plaintiff's appeal to skin tone. Unable to claim whiteness through naturalization laws, Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi developed their own racial currency to secure a prominent place in the Island's postwar social hierarchy. This book explores how different groups within Japanese American society staked a claim to whiteness on the basis of hue and culture. It demonstrates how the meaning of whiteness evolved from mere physical distinctions to cultural markers of difference, increasingly articulated in material terms. Nisei consumer culture demands examination because consumption was vital to the privilege-making process that spilled over into public life. The book builds on recent scholarship that considers ethnic communities within a trans-Pacific context, highlighting ethnic fluidity as a strategy for material and cultural success. Yet even as it assumed a position of conformity, the Japanese American consumer culture that took hold among Honolulu's middle class was distinct. It was at once modern and nostalgic, like the wayo secchu ideal—a hybrid of Western and Japanese notions of beauty and femininity that linked the ethnic group to the homeland and mainstream U.S. culture. By focusing on the marketing of whiteness that connected the old world and new, the book reveals the dynamic commercial and cultural environment that underwrote the rise of the Nisei in Hawaiʻi.

In 1941 the Japanese military attacked the U.S. naval base Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu. Although much has been debated about this event and the wider American and Japanese involvement in the war, few scholars have explored the Pacific War's impact on Pacific Islanders. This book fills this gap by advancing scholarly understanding of Pacific Islander relations with and knowledge of American and Japanese colonialisms in the twentieth century. It traces the formation of divergent colonial and indigenous histories in the Mariana Islands, an archipelago located in the western Pacific and home to the Chamorro people. It shows that U.S. colonial governance of Guam, the southernmost island, and that of Japan in the Northern Mariana Islands created competing colonial histories that would later inform how Americans, Chamorros, and Japanese experienced and remembered the war and its aftermath. Central to this discussion is the American and Japanese administrative development of “loyalty” and “liberation” as concepts of social control, collective identity, and national belonging. Just how various Chamorros from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated their multiple identities and subjectivities is explored with respect to the processes of history and memory-making among this “Americanized” and “Japanized” Pacific Islander population. In addition, the book emphasizes the rise of war commemorations as sites for the study of American national historic landmarks, Chamorro Liberation Day festivities, and Japanese bone-collecting missions and peace pilgrimages.

This is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders. The book reconfigures conventional views of globalization's impact on indigenous communities, moving beyond diagnoses of cultural erosion and contamination to a grounded exploration of creative agency and vital cultural production. Central to the study is a rich and textured ethnographic account of contemporary Cook Islands dance practice. The book offers an analysis of how Cook Islands social life is generated through expressive practices. Dance is explored in a variety of settings, including beauty pageants, tourist venues, nightclubs, and community celebrations at home and within Cook Islands communities abroad. Contemporary Cook Islands dance practices are also shaped by competing ideas about the past. Debates about precolonial traditions, missionization, and colonialism pervade discussions about dance and expressive culture. The book shows how the politics of tradition reflect the competing moral, political, personal, and economic practices of postcolonial Cook Islanders.