Creighton Lecture

In the mid-19th century, labor diasporas landed Native Hawaiians on the homelands of Native North American people from Vancouver Island down the coast to California. In this context, they confronted an ethical dilemma: how were they even to approach the ideal of a reciprocal relationship to the land as a relative—an ethical ideal important to Hawaiians and many other Indigenous people? This paper looks to kanikau (mourning songs) composed by diasporic Native Hawaiians to understand how they thought through this question. Historically and spatially situated readings of these kanikau reveal that their composers found that building reciprocal relations with the land could only happen in the context of sustained and reciprocal relationships to the Indigenous people of that land. In their songs, these composers theorized diasporic Indigeneity and mapped out a way to think through core issues for diasporic Indigenous people in the present.