Indigenous Pacifics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. xv, 141 pp. US$24.99, paper. ISBN 9780824886813.
Pacific scholars have long understood the centrality of movement to the region. From the ever-changing ocean itself—to ideas, goods, power, and people—the Pacific is characterized by motion. Emalani Case makes a compelling case for the contemporary importance of Kahiki to this recognition, and in doing so profoundly enriches our understanding. Movement is only apparent in productive combination with stasis. Case does not present a restless concept in Kahiki, but a conceptualization of multiple relations—past, present, and future—that ground indigenous Hawai‘i and its people. Kahiki is a “sanctuary” and a place for “reflection” and “self-awareness.” It is a source of strength and grounded-ness that can be carried with people, one that is constituted in the very ideas and histories of displacement, arrival, return, and mutual recognition that Case describes as a timeless strength and awareness for Hawaiian people. Those wanting a definition of Kahiki will not have to look far into the book: a mythical homeland for Hawai‘i, an origin place for Hawai‘i; connections and powers beyond Hawai‘i that are drawn in and constitute the place and people; and a conceptual and spiritual sanctuary for thought, comfort, and self-refection. In the very precision of these different yet potentially overlapping conceptual domains, something powerful in motion is conveyed.
Yet there is no one place in the book where this awareness is definitively presented or captured. Rather, Case builds and circles around, weaving personal history, narratives of historical and of recent events, and her own consideration through reflexive attention to what is known as positionality. She discusses in a sensitive and self-critical manner what it means and can mean to be an indigenous person in a colonial state with its attendant politics. The book makes a strong political statement not because it is partisan (although Case repeatedly acknowledges her commitments and political cause), but precisely because the concept/state of Kahiki that she attends to is always outside, yet also formed by and responsive to, this history. Finding it takes work, and the reader is given an opportunity to see that work in this personal and brave exploration. Case argues for an indigenous interest in maintaining the sanctity of lands while giving attention to views that also have claims to indigeneity, but take a different road.
The text is scholarly while easy and personal, informed by and referring to a literature from Pacific Studies, anthropology, history, and branches of environmental science. It is structured around a personal engagement with a particular activist struggle to prevent the construction of a large 30-meter tall telescope on the sacred mountain Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai‘i. This narration allows Case to develop themes that concern her. Chapter 1 examines how the concept and practice of Kahiki—as a mode of being that draws strength from relations to others and has an outward focus in generating inner strength—can be a powerful motivation and sustaining presence in activist struggles to protect indigenous lands. Chapter 2 begins with an etymology and analysis of the term Kahiki, turning reflection on this scholarship to critically examine key terms that are applied to indigenous peoples, and to which they necessarily hold. A pedagogical strategy used to engage university students is described to question how solidarity and difference among indigenous Pacific peoples, with different colonial and post-colonial experiences, could work. Chapter 3 looks to a historical instance where Kahiki came to be used in colonial politics, both for and against US imperialism in the nineteenth century. This is presented with balance and insight (Kahiki is what people make and use in their present, and since it changes with different people’s use and need, it is thus malleable). The theme of responsibility and agency necessary in Kahiki are linked to an actively hopeful vision of greater indigenous sovereignty.
Chapter 4 is a subtle and important consideration of the kinds of temporal and political double binds that the term “indigeneity” can foster. Case gently but forcefully shows the common links between a recognition of legitimate difference and the simultaneous relegation of the reality of such difference to an irretrievable past. Everything Ancient Was Once New is a direct assertive response to political moves which delegitimize current actions based on indigenous ways of being and doing. Case objects to how indigenous activism is portrayed by law and state authorities as in-authentic precisely because of their very engagement in and with, the struggles of today. Drawing in the notion of Kahiki and the attendant emphasis on relations to others, and on finding inner strength built on these ways of being to address the needs of the moment, she argues that engagement to protect lands and sites is to demonstrate contemporary Kahiki. Chapter 5 considers what Kahiki looks like “in Kahiki,” that is, outside Hawai‘i, and where and how the way of being that it points to might contribute to the struggles of other indigenous Pacific peoples. The final chapter consolidates the idea of Kahiki as sanctuary, as “the non-physical space from which life comes” (100) as a kind of indigenous space and time that cannot be colonized.
At once moving, hopeful, and realistic in its recognition of what has been and will be lost, there is sadness portrayed alongside hope. Case builds powerfully from the premise that Kahiki, “is the general understanding that life, in the form of people, ideas, and forms of sustenance—be it physical, spiritual, intellectual, or cultural—may have originated elsewhere in the Pacific…” (6) through careful and thoughtful examination of it in motion in peoples’ everyday lives and struggles as indigenous Hawaiians. Kahiki stands as an encompassing, multi-layered, and politically active way of living in the now.
James Leach
Aix-Marseille Université-CNRS-EHESS, Marseille