Kokolo Mai Ka Mole Uaua O ‘Ī: The Resilience and Resurgence of Aloha ‘Āina in Hāmākua Hikina, Hawai‘i

Abstract

This dissertation is a moʻolelo aloha ʻāina. It is a place-based narrative that recounts and honors the resilience and resurgence of aloha ʻāina (people and practices that embody deep love for and loyalty to homelands and community) in Hāmākua Hikina on the island of Hawaiʻi. Written by one of Hāmākua Hikina’s own, this dissertation raises up voices of past and present everyday aloha ʻāina to demonstrate the enduring nature of aloha ʻāina and its vast potential to function as an intellectual, theoretical, and practical home for place-based resurgence movements in Hawaiʻi, seeking to rebuild the structures and regenerate the systems that sustain ʻŌiwi and poʻe aloha ʻāina. Drawing upon various moʻolelo (stories) of ʻŌiwi resurgence from Hāmākua Hikina, past and present, this dissertation demonstrates the foundational role of moʻolelo aloha ʻāina in ʻŌiwi resurgence movements, as the the “seeds” that generate grounded normativities and renew ʻŌiwi relationality at the scales of families, communities, and nations. Situated within a continuum of ʻŌiwi intellectual traditions and shaped by a kulāiwi consciousness, I develop place-based metaphors for aloha ʻāina, lāhui (nationhood), and aupuni (governance), and a theory for ʻŌiwi resurgence. Further, in the face of the continued U.S. occupation that blatantly seeks to dispossess and disconnect ʻŌiwi from our ʻāina, this work argues that these place-based narratives of aloha ʻāina form the “mole uaua,” the tough taproot, that connects ʻŌiwi deeply to our kulāiwi (homelands) and empowers us to ea (rise, enact sovereignty). Specifically, this dissertation explores kuamoʻo (traditions, genealogies, and pathways) of aloha ʻāina that led to the formation of Hui Mālama i ke Ala ʻŪlili (huiMAU)—an ʻŌiwi organization, founded in 2011, that works to reestablish the systems that sustain ʻāina and community in Hāmākua Hikina. These kuamoʻo aloha ʻāina remember the movement and highlight the agency of aliʻi, konohiki, and makaʻāinana in generations past in Hāmākua Hikina to complicate prevailing notions of ʻŌiwi agency and deepen understandings of movement in the everyday processes of staying and maintaining unseverable, multigenerational relationships to place. Continuing on into the 21st century, these kuamoʻo further depict contemporary portraits of three of huiMAU’s “piko of resurgence”—people, places, and practices that converge in regenerative spaces, referred to in this dissertation as kīpuka aloha ʻāina—demonstrating the ways in which the place-based metaphors and theories of aloha ʻāina and ʻŌiwi resurgence have converged with huiMAU’s everyday practices to generate a praxis of aloha ʻāina that broadens the possibilities for family-, community-, and nation-based resurgences beyond state-centric and recognition-based nation-building paradigms here in Hawaiʻi.