Eleven years ago I moved to Lā'ie, Hawaii and began teaching at Brigham Young University–Hawaii. While I no longer teach at that school, the intervening years taught me that this small village of barely five thousand people, populated nearly entirely by Mormons, embodies some of the USA's most interesting articulations of race, religion, and colonialism. Hokulani K. Aikau's A Chosen People, a Promised Land is a fascinating, nuanced, sophisticated, and highly personal analysis of several of those articulations.

Aikau seeks insight through Haraway's concept of situated knowledge. Inhabited by people of various racial/ethnic identities and regarded since its 1865 purchase by representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a gathering place for Mormon Hawaiians (and later for Mormons from elsewhere in Oceania), few places carry so concentrated wealth of meanings as Lā'ie. These meanings vary in important, but often subtle, ways depending on one's positioning. Aikau makes much of her own position – a Native Hawaiian raised in Utah within a strongly Mormon family, but who no longer considers herself an active believer in the faith and whose progressive ideological commitments strongly orient toward Hawaiian self-determination. (For the record, I am an actively practicing, haole [white] Mormon who grew up in Utah and who carries some ideological sympathy toward indigenous self-determination and progressive politics.) She frames her argument around her personal and theoretical struggle to understand how and why Hawaiian Mormons have strong commitment toward a church/cultural system that has been racially structured and that participated – if not played a leading role – in colonizing Hawaiian and Pacific peoples and places.

Aikau's primary answer is that an “ideology of faithfulness” combines for Hawaiian Mormons with a favorable ascribed lineage to open avenues to perpetuate Hawaiian culture. These avenues are not unproblematic, however. She structures the book around episodes where contradictions between indigenous self-determination and the church's participation in colonizing projects are most strongly apparent. The Introduction highlights the opening of the Hawaiian mission in the early 1850s. Originally intending to preach only to the islands' white colonizers, a spiritual vision led Mormons to regard preaching to Hawaiians as returning the gospel to remnants of the House of Israel. Chapter 1 explores Mormonism's racializations more deeply, detailing the nearly simultaneous doctrinal development of a light-skin/dark-skin binary along with belief that Polynesians have House of Israel lineage. Chapter 2 focusses on the contradictions involved with establishing Lā'ie as both headquarters for Mormonism's Hawaiian mission and a place of refuge for Hawaiian Mormons. Particularly important were tensions between cultural perpetuation (especially traditional land use) and the mission's need to raise cash (increasingly through sugar production).

Chapter 3 centers on Polynesian labor missionaries who built BYU–Hawaii and the Polynesian Cultural Center tourist attraction in the 1950s and 1960s. These projects simultaneously enrolled Polynesians more strongly into colonial modernity; cut off much of the remaining indigenous access to lands providing a measure of subsistence and self-determination; offered opportunities for migration, employment training, and American education for Polynesian Mormons; and strengthened hierarchies between white church leadership and Polynesian members. Chapter 4 describes contradictions between cultural preservation and cultural perpetuation inherent in the Polynesian Cultural Center, concluding that global tourism cannot support cultural perpetuation over the long term, even though several Polynesians used the Center, especially in its early years, to strengthen their social/religious authority within the community. Chapter 5 ends more optimistically. The late 1990s and early 2000s birthing by the BYUH Center for Hawaiian Studies of a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe effectively lashed together indigenous and Mormon/Christian identities. It did so without unduly subordinating one form of identity to the other. Aikau concludes by finding much more potential for building toward Hawaiian/Polynesian self-determination in working through Mormonism/Christianity, despite contradictions and needed vigilance to avoid cooptation, than in trying to expel such influence.

A Chosen People, a Promised Land is an important and highly insightful contribution to the study of both Hawaii/indigeneity and Mormonism/religion within the United States. I have minor issues with parts of the argument and presentation (such as insufficient acknowledgment of how some “Mormon scholars” helped pave the way for Aikau's own critical analysis, amid appropriate critique of others who justify imperialism); others differently situated will likely have their own minor concerns. Nevertheless, I believe Aikau succeeds as much as reasonably possible in a slim book at her goal of balancing theoretically rich and politically potent indigenous critique with respect for people's beliefs and faith. That is an impressive achievement.