In the decades following the 1898 U.S. annexation of Hawaiʻi, the Territorial government deployed a coordinated legislative and institutional architecture designed to fragment Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sociality, domesticity, and land-based relationality. This seminar interrogates what I term the biopolitical assemblage of early Territorial law—specifically the interlocking mechanisms of marriage annulment (Act 22 of 1901), land enclosure (Act 39 of 1905), property coverture (Chapter 146 of 1905), juvenile delinquency statutes (Act 22 of 1905), and lineage regulation (Act 71 of 1907). Drawing on Foucault’s biopolitics and Mbembe’s formulation of decerebralization, this paper examines how the settler state sought to produce docile laborers for the plantation economy by criminalizing matrilineal care, collective child-rearing, and Indigenous mobility as clinical “delinquency.”
Alongside this carceral legal history, this paper recovers the serialized Hawaiian-language writings of Kona philosopher and author J. W. H. I. Kihe (1854–1930). Focusing on his epic 1914–1917 newspaper serial "Kaao Hooniua Puuwai no Ka-Miki," I argue that what the Territorial state diagnosed as “delinquency” was, in reality, advanced ancestral literacy. Through close readings of mele malama (ethnoecological calendar poetics) and the practice of hoʻopāpā (intellectual contest of wits), this chapter demonstrates how Kihe models an Indigenous counter-pedagogy. Centering the sovereign pedagogical authority of the kupuna wahine (grandmother) through pedagogical release and the relational humility of hoʻāikāne (interpersonal companionship), this work reframes sovereignty away from state-centric recognition and toward an agile, relational performance of collective wellbeing (mauli ola).
Kamalani M. F. H. Johnson, Ph.D., is the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and a Visiting Scholar with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) at Brown University. A political theorist, literary scholar, and translator specializing in Kanaka Maoli intellectual history, his research interrogates 19th- and 20th-century nūpepa (Hawaiian-language newspaper archives) to theorize Indigenous philosophies of sovereignty, ʻāina (land), and relationality. His current book project, Insurgent Archives: Binding Knowledge and Political Ontologies of Refusal, is under advance solicitation with Duke University Press. His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in American Quarterly, Biography, Hūlili, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.