HE KAMI INITINI: HOW NATIVE HAWAIIAN GOVERNANCE AND AMERICAN INDIAN POLICY BECAME LINKED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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2019
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Buchanan, Shirley Elaine
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Reiss, Suzanna
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History
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In the nineteenth-century, Native Hawaiian governance and American Indian policy in the U.S. were connected, reverberating across the Pacific and back in a loop of proactive and reactive legislation. This study follows an arc of history from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the year 1887. In this period, an “American” space was problematically tested and defined, but that space was only possible by dispossessing others of their space. My dissertation asserts that the development of what became American governance was intricately linked to the power of indigenous places. Those policies live on with us today in America and get imported and transformed around the world “as needed.” This dissertation seeks to consider troublesome questions in U.S. history and assert new connections between Native American, Native Hawaiian, and American developments in the nineteenth century. It shows that the expansion of the U.S. and the fulfillment of an American national paradigm hinged on the interactions and negotiations that were cultivated with native people. These negotiations became the founding principles of American domestic and international policies and traversed territory from New England to Oʻahu. What is more, the negotiators between and within nations were frequently women, and native people interacted with and learned from the experiences of other indigenous nations as they encountered American imperialist ambitions. Following social, religious, political, legislative, cultural and commercial networks across both Euro-American and indigenous worlds, this research disrupts notions that Native American and Native Hawaiian governmental policies were separate and distinct entities, uninfluenced by one another and thus "by-products" of "manifest destiny." Additionally, the research reveals the emerging concepts of "rightful" possession of land and the patriarchal ambitions of American colonizers. Most importantly, this study focuses on the women absented from traditional histories of the period, “recovering” the integral space that women – both native and non-native – created and governed, acting as authorities and mediators in policymaking, challenging suppression, and ultimately altering the trajectory of indigenous and American destinies.
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American history, Native American studies, History of Oceania, Indian, Kanaka, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Women
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339 pages
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