J. Kehaulani Kauanui
Katrin H. Lamon
Resident Scholar 2003-2004
Native Hawaiian Racial Formation: Blood Quantum and the Legal Construction of Indigeneity
Who counts as Hawaiian? Today’s fifty-percent blood quantum rule
legally defining who qualifies as “native Hawaiian” was established
in 1920 as part of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, a land allotment
policy. Hawaiian people contest this exclusionary state definition because
it undermines indigenous cultural practices that determine identity on
the basis of one’s genealogical ties.
In her book The Politics of Hawaiian Blood and the Question
of Sovereignty, J. Kehaulani Kauanui examines governmental understandings of
Hawaiian depopulation and land dispossession. “I map the shift from an
originally less restrictive definition of ‘native Hawaiian’ to the
fifty-percent rule by exploring how the categories of ‘full-blood’ and ‘part’-Hawaiians
emerged from the congressional debates leading up to the Hawaiian Homes Commission
Act.
“This shift from an inclusive definition of ‘native
Hawaiian’ entailed a move away from the recognition of Hawaiians’ land
entitlement to an emergent welfare-approach to rehabilitation where Hawaiian
racialization was tied to notions of indigenous competence as citizen-subjects.
I have also been able to trace how these different classifications worked to
affirm white property interests.”
Using a comparative framework based on other US racial
formations, Kauanui is examining the role of the state in the legal constructions
of indigeneity and race, not only for Hawaiians but for Indians and African Americans
as well. “We don’t generally think of Hawaiians when we think of
blood quantum,” Kauanui observes. “We think of Indians and tribal
membership, or the ‘one-drop rule’ for African Americans; but all
of these things were going on simultaneously in the 1920s.” She is exploring
how, over the years, the overarching system of institutionalized white supremacy
in the US has interpreted questions of blood quantum, sovereignty, land rights,
and citizenship in many different ways, creating arbitrary racial classifications.
Kauanui sees her research as contributing more than
just a Hawaiian focus to the fields of anthropology, American Studies, Native
American Studies and Pacific Studies, but opening up new lines of inquiry and
territory in all these areas. “As this work addresses US colonialism in
the Pacific and the making of new citizens, the project prompts the engagement
with histories and contemporary policy on the legal construction of indigeneity,” Kauanui
says.
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Assistant Professor, Department
of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University
