We see ourselves through our food: Kānaka ʻŌiwi (ʻai)dentity formation through their foodways

Abstract

This research examines how Kānaka ʻŌiwi identity, people whose bones are direct descendants of Hawaiʻi, is constituted, negotiated, and rearticulated through food and foodways in Hawaiʻi. Centering the concept of (ʻai)dentity, I argue that food is not simply a marker of culture, heritage, or consumption, but a primary site through which genealogy, memory, sovereignty, and relations to ʻāina are enacted and contested. In contrast to dominant approaches in the sociology of food, which often privilege Western frameworks of authenticity, ethnicity, and consumption, this study develops a Kānaka-centered analytic grounded in ʻike Hawaiʻi. In doing so, it reframes foodways as a domain of Indigenous epistemology, political struggle, and continuity rather than a neutral field of cultural representation. I use a mixed-methods design that combines cookbook analysis and archived oral history analysis. The present research uses 9 cookbooks published between 1967–2014. They are not merely to catalog recipes, but to read food texts as cultural materials through which identity is narrated, performed, and codified. Oral histories of 16 residents in Hawaiʻi conducted in 1979 and 2018 further illuminate how food memory, labor, land relations, and everyday practice shape the transmission of identity across generations. The findings demonstrate that food in Hawaiʻi is a contested terrain where Kānaka identity, local identity, and settler-colonial power are continuously negotiated. Plantation modernity and the heritagization of “local” food culture helped produce the very a local identity many in Hawaiʻi love, yet one that frequently obscures Native dispossession and normalizes settler belonging. At the same time, the research argues that Kānaka foodways endure as living practices of aloha ʻāina, kuleana, and Indigenous resurgence. Through chapters on kūpuna resistance, fishing practices, and the socialization of ʻulu, this study shows that Kānaka food traditions are not static inheritances, but adaptive and political practices through which community, memory, and sovereignty are sustained.