“You cannot just dance hula and go to Hawaiian language class at night and think you’re gonna get a land base; you can’t do that. Cultural people have to become political. It’s not just that political people like myself have to become cultural. Our culture can’t just be ornamental and recreational; that’s what Waikīkī is. Our culture has to be the core of our resistance, the core of our anger, the core of our mana [“power”].
That’s what culture is for.”
[Haunani-Kay Trask, quoted in Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina 1985]
Introduction
In the academy’s increasing engagements with settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples are often assumed to be already and automatically politicized collectives, whether by virtue of our structural positions vis-à-vis settler colonialism or by casting our ontologies as radical alterity. However, over a decade of ethnographic work with my own Native Hawaiian community has shown the opposite. Many friends and interlocutors engaged in blockades protecting sacred sites, committed their lives to teaching our language, tirelessly protested settler dispossession through legal mechanisms, or toiled to restore landscapes and ancestral practices. And yet, even my most radical friends had journeys of becoming politically active; that is, something brought them to Indigenous political thought and collective action. For example, my friend Kaʻena was a middle-aged educator training students in ancestral knowledge and active in campaigning against the U.S. military theft of Hawaiian lands for live-fire training. And yet, she was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, at one point even outside of Hawaiʻi itself, all without a whisper of Native Hawaiian politics. In the dozens of life stories that friends shared with me, in the casual conversations about our activism, and even in settings like writing strategic plans for grassroots organizations, they named “Hawaiian culture”, “our culture”, or simply “culture” as a primary motivation, commitment, and ad hoc descriptor for our work.
“Native Hawaiian culture” is itself a locally typified category in Hawaiʻi, by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents alike, that denotes sets of norms, practices, knowledge, and relationships. While acknowledging the many anthropological debates about the “culture” concept, my use of the term “culture” is different and based on a local category of “Native Hawaiian culture”; it includes the practices, relationships, norms, and knowledge systems that are locally typified as defining Native Hawaiian life in contradistinction to the settler majority. But instead of engaging “Hawaiian culture” as a taken-for-granted category, this article examines how it is socially typified, reorganized, and the conversion of its indexicality yields new social facts and forms of value. Kaʻena would refer to it as “the culture side” of her life’s journey, knowing I understood what she meant. Although the precise understanding of what exactly constitutes “Native Hawaiian culture” vastly differs across actors, the category itself still holds a known utility of mutual intelligibility. As detailed below, that slippage and capaciousness of what defines “Native Hawaiian culture” form part of its social function. Some strains of Native Hawaiian culture, particularly of elite echelons and institutions, can in fact depoliticize or pacify radical thought and action against the status quo: at most, locating politics in the domain of cultural representation or climbing the ranks of—as opposed to confronting—the status quo (Ramones Reference Ramones2026, 164–174). But in this case, how do Native Hawaiian ancestral practices, knowledge, and norms—what we would locally gloss as “Native Hawaiian culture”—posit politicization? A semiotic analysis reveals how individual experiences, within a cultural regimentation, come to be politicized.
A variety of other models attend to the political dispositions of Indigenous actors. A cornerstone concept in Indigenous studies roots politics in terms of “grounded normativities”, or the place-based ethical frameworks and relationships that emerge from the land over ancestral time (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014). Politicization emerging from land-based obligations appears across literature on Indigenous politics, but such models often background the underlying processes of mediation. In Native Hawaiian contexts, the term kulāiwi, meaning homeland or native land (Pukui and Elbert Reference Pukui and Elbert1986), literally translates to “plain of bones”, indicating where ancestors are buried and become ʻāina ‘land’ (Oliveira Reference Oliveira2014). As Kapā Oliveira observes, treasured ancestral ties to the land are a genealogical and material consubstantiality with ʻāina, from which emerge belonging and obligation. This relation to ʻāina, as an embodiment of ancestral knowledge and connection, forms the foundation for political consciousness and action (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua Reference Goodyear-kaʻōpua2013; Peralto Reference Peralto2018). In Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua’s (Reference Goodyear-kaʻōpua2013) work with a Native Hawaiian culture-based school, students engaged in a grassroots cultural education in which ʻāina was the foundation. This cultural education experience politicized students to mobilize against the genetic modification and patenting of taro, the staple crop that is a sacred genealogical elder to all Native Hawaiians (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua Reference Goodyear-kaʻōpua2013, 205–239). In this case, students provided testimony at State hearings and demonstrated at the Capitol’s rotunda. These students were immersed in an education, even a cultural way of life, of caring for specific ʻāina, learning stories of place, and cultivating a relationship with ʻāina as an agent and teacher of ancestral knowledge. As one grassroots educator working on the scarred shores of Puʻuloa “Pearl Harbor” told me, it was about “activating people”, who would then “take that kuleana [‘relational obligation’] and run with it”. But how does that “activation” happen? In existing literature, ʻāina and ancestors as core political catalysts are an ontological given, an automatic politics. Meanwhile, “Native culture” or equivalent terms are often taken as reified categories that inherently equate to politicization, leaving unanswered scalar questions of how one’s experience and world of meaning relate to group politicization and shared meaning-making. A Hawaiian organizer once blurted out during a gathering, “If I have to hear about our ‘relationship to ʻāina’ one more time [redacted] … come on!” For her, and I agreed, such ideational explanations seemed to skate over the precise mechanics of, and real opportunities to heighten, how these relationships came to politicize us—prior to land-based relations or “grounded normativities” crystallizing as a banner of political action. There was little account for mediation and questions of scale.
Other frameworks have endeavored to theorize these mediating mechanisms. For example, Joseph Gone (Reference Gone2023) uses a psychobiography method to examine how his father, Joseph William Azure of the Assiniboine Tribal Nation at Fort Belknap, “noticed” environmental degradation and became an agent of activism and change in his community. By examining Azure’s midlife socialization into traditional spirituality, Gone shows how “shifts in self-configuration” can explain political consciousness and action (Reference Gone2023, 79). Others have provided a ceremonial framework whereby politicization is the outcome of experiencing potent communitas in ceremony that inverts colonial subordination, with actors reentering settler colonial structure to see it as a grotesque contradiction dripping with the need for rectification (Ramones Reference Ramones2026, 179–186; Tengan Reference Tengan2008). Working from a different theoretical tradition, Torres Strait Islander Martin Nakata (Reference Nakata2007) offers “Indigenous standpoint theory” to explain the birth of Indigenous political action; in one’s own life experience, the “cultural interface” between Indigenous and colonial institutions and norms produces an awareness of domination, with that friction exposing structural tensions and becoming a site for Indigenous political knowledge and action. However, when working with interlocutors in Hawaiʻi, I questioned how the very ground of one’s “standpoint” consolidated prior to encountering the “cultural interface”, or how the granular workings of cultural tradition or spirituality could lead to reconfiguration of the self and group mobilization. The politicizing faculty of Native cultural difference, principles, and norms is produced and structured, not inherent. The signifier is empty until it is filled.
This article does not take something like “Native culture” as a seamless politicized given. First, it examines how that local category itself is socially typified at different scales and orders, reorganized, and how its indexicality is converted to yield new social facts and forms of value (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003a; Reference Silverstein, Rubel and Rosman2003b; Gal Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023). In this process of reconfiguration, “Native culture” is shown not as an ontological and automatic politics, where motivational force is conducted as a freely flowing current, but instead functions as a semi(otic)conductor: a semiotic process that structures, regulates, and transforms the potential of politicization. Second, a semiotic framework also addresses a common lacuna of scale, contributing a model attuned to the dialogical relationship of localized experiences and sign processes with macro-scale social transformations. This attention to the individual–society dialectic also counters (neo)primitivist assumptions of the Indigenous subject as an always politicized individual or as timelessly indistinguishable from the political demands of their group. And third, while regimes of neoliberal multiculturalism permit and celebrate depoliticized instantiations of Indigenous culture (Hale Reference Hale2005), this semiotic process demonstrates how seemingly innocuous “Native culture” can smuggle the potential for politicization, provided that sign processes go to work on how Native actors make sense of, and collectively move within and against, our settler colonial conditions.
Rather than focusing on “mere imageless concepts such as ‘popular sovereignty’” or other abstract concepts to explain Indigenous politicization, I examine the “concrete, sensorily perceptible, and dramatic symbol vehicles as centers of national unification” (Turner Reference Turner1974, 106). This allows for theorizing how cultural semiosis leads individuals into group-level political reinforcement. Native Hawaiians learn about “culture” as emerging from land and ancestral history, with this socialization reinforcing a wider register of social discourse about what constitutes our “culture” as distinct from the settler majority. As evident in the dialogic encounters discussed below, what we call our “culture” then has its indexicality converted into new registers of political discourse. Interlocutors deploy registers in which place is mobilized through communicative acts, and specific experiences become linked to encompassing issues. In this individual-to-group semiosis, individuals’ cacophonic but metasemiotically focused voices are reconstrued as instantiations, or tokens, of the larger actionable political type. While token-type relations are often taken as scalar relations, this article shows how they also carry politically productive possibility.
Causal “culture”: how history gets enlivened
“Native Hawaiian culture”, as a locally available term, demarcates an important cleavage in the social field in Hawaiʻi. For example, a Native Hawaiian “culture-based” school is marked by “culture” as Other/Indigenous, while a standard public school, Catholic school, or other institutions are not seen as “cultural” because of their unmarked hegemonic position. “Culture” as a reemerging specter delineates an “axis of differentiation”, in which “contrasting, complementary qualities—formulated as defining each other in some sociohistorical imaginary—constitute an axis. […] Since the qualities of these contrasting pairs are complementary, one ‘side’ of the contrast is ideologically defined as what the other is not” (Gal and Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2019, 118). The axis of differentiation here is a central contradiction of settler colonial contexts: that of Indigenous-settler. Contrasting qualia of language, values, dress, racialization, practices, and so on are either unmarked or marked as “cultural” and thus define the other. The axis of differentiation forms the basis for typification that then organizes subsequent perceptions of, and actions within, a social world.
In educational and institutional settings, my interlocutors and I would both teach and hear of “Hawaiian culture” as arising directly from ʻāina and ancestors. These myriad Hawaiian cultural forms, from philosophy to dance, were commonly taught to come from ancestral knowledge and the land itself. At a large Hawaiian trust I worked with, which provided both educational services and stewarded a land base, documents and presentations would often include the saying “I Hawaiʻi nō nā Hawaiʻi i ka ʻāina”, which I translate as “Native Hawaiians are made Hawaiian because of/via the land”. Institutional actors explained this statement as describing that “Hawaiian culture” arose from the land itself. Relations with local ecology or microclimates, specific places, stories, and resident deities directly determined the cultural practices, rules of behavior, religious rites, agriculture and fishing, and so on. Essentially, they stated that highly localized “Hawaiian cultures” were caused by the land and ancestors. Such language was found, for example, in justifying the value, even obligation, of funding environmental and cultural stewardship. In this case, staff and beneficiaries of the organization were taught to think of Hawaiian culture as a direct result of the land and ancestors. Cultural education was accomplished through experiential learning from the land, elders, and ancestors.
Moving from this large institution to one of the many rural programs it funded, one can see a similar function. In a companion text that I used to teach secondary school students in a summer “culture-based” program, a lesson on the “bio-cultural landscape” described how “the cultural landscape … [is] important to the Hawaiian people because of [its] long-term association with the traditional cultural beliefs … of the native Hawaiians”. The text continued, recounting how the Hawaiian cosmogonic deities/ancestors first created the islands and other nonhuman ancestors before creating the first Hawaiians. The story ended by stating that “Hawaiians were the youngest siblings of the earth-family”, born into these cultural relations of obligation that determined ethics of behavior and modes of being. In this story, all of Hawaiian ontology is explicitly taught as arising from and caused by land and ancestral forms. This summer program was established to teach “bio-cultural literacy” that was not included in the Americanizing public-school curriculum. In this program, like many others I knew, we taught “culture” as arising from land and ancestors, in this lesson centering landscape and ancestral knowledge in students’ thinking. When combined with on-site instruction and labor to care for the land, cultural practice and knowledge indeed appeared to come from the land and ancestors. Reinforcing a wider register of the Native Hawaiian community, “culture” was discursively constructed as caused by/contiguous to land—in terms of Peircean semiotics, the perception of an indexical relation, a dicent. This allowed for land, a highly politicized Indigenous issue, to be taught in the innocuous vehicle of “culture”. As students learned about our “culture”, they cultivated affective attachments to the land and Hawaiian history, subtending a wider register of “Hawaiian culture” as flowing from land and ancestral histories.
This also occurred in a wider context of settler colonialism, which purveyed its own metasemiotic framings of “Native Hawaiian culture” that often caricaturized, simplified, and resignified it. In Hawaiʻi’s extremely diverse multiethnic fabric, this rendering casts Native “culture” as merely one of many different tiles in the cultural mosaic. As a move of “neoliberal multiculturalism” that reduces indigeneity to depoliticized cultural representations (Hale Reference Hale2005), it obfuscates material claims to land and autochthonous ancestors—the precise indexical values of Hawaiian “culture” taught in Indigenous educational spaces. For example, hula in settler understandings is simply a dance or an art form, albeit with a deep “cultural” meaning that, incidentally, carries great opportunity for profit in the tourism economy. However, in Native Hawaiian educational formation, one instead learns of hula—its motions, songs, sacred restrictions, relationships, and stories—as coming from the land itself and ancestral stories. In addition to this, hula itself was also targeted for elimination as a “heathen” practice, while certain ancestral lineages carefully sheltered the practice to later shepherd its proliferation. Thus, land and ancestors are taught as central to, indeed the source of, Native “culture”, while the wider settler discourse decontextualizes Native “culture” from these linkages to then recontextualize it within the regimentation of neoliberal multiculturalism. That difference in indexical value across these Native and settler registers then posits how Native “culture” might sublate into a subsequent politicized register.
Inhabiting “culture”: the typifying logic of politicization
This previous instance described Indigenous educational settings, what one might call sites of socialization, where certain understandings and dispositions of a register’s “social domain” are cultivated (Agha Reference Agha2005). But in fields of political activity among participants who were socialized in such settings, a different semiotic process of “culture” then unfolds. Here, the indexicality of “Hawaiian culture” is transformed into new forms of typified value that support registers of markedly politicized discourse.
My friend Noa was a middle-aged man with a full-time job and a family. He was not raised with formal cultural education, yet later in life, he founded an organization that restored an ancestral agricultural site, creating a hub for cultural education around ecology, agriculture, traditional medicines, and oral histories. He once told me a story where, in his first days discovering and clearing the site with community volunteers, a young girl tugged on his shirt, speaking to him in Hawaiian. Like many other Indigenous peoples, Native Hawaiians were attempting to recover from aggressive assimilationist policies that targeted their language for elimination. The result was that Noa, like most Native Hawaiians, did not speak our language. Yet this girl was educated in a Hawaiian language immersion program, a product of the intergenerational Hawaiian language revitalization movement. As Noa explained it, the girl’s teacher stepped in to translate for him, and “I can’t even respond to this child speaking our Native tongue! […] I thought, ‘I gotta go school.’ And that started me on a journey. Not only was I participating in the restoration of this place, I was participating in the restoration of myself.” Noa’s journey led him to take night classes about Hawaiian history and language, what he called “Hawaiian culture”. And one day, when the ʻāina that he dedicated himself to restoring was under threat from pollution, it drove him to speak out and protect it. After he was socialized in a field of “Hawaiian culture”, something drove him to action.
During a community workday at Noa’s site, I caught up with an activist friend whom I had not seen in years. He shared that he had been arrested while protecting Mauna Kea and Haleakalā, both sacred mountains, from telescope developments. I asked him why he chose to put himself on the line for those places, and he said:
Because of our history, the overthrow [of the Hawaiian government in 1893] is a huge part of our culture, and that just associates the U.S. government with this stigma that they’re bad. And so, standing up against them kind of rectifies yourself and your culture if you know about the wrongdoing that was done to your family and culture. So being educated about your own culture and history, which is part of your cultural identity, should drive you to have a purpose that your culture needs to be rectified.
After saying this, he asked me to stop and replay the recording. He then laughed, saying: “Wow … I said ‘culture’ a lot there.” In his explanation, he directly conflated the overthrow, the theft of Hawaiian land, and the assault on ancestors with “culture”. The word “culture” came to stand in for historical experiences of ancestors who lived through the overthrow and its aftermath, its effects on family and the self, the dispossession of lands, and an ethical onus of “rectification”. “Culture” had transformed from something flowing from land and ancestors, now becoming a marker of anything targeted for elimination and dispossession. In this politicized register, the social domain is that of one who aims to “rectify” what was done to “culture”. “Hawaiian culture” had gone from being an inheritance from land and ancestors to being laminated by the assault on land and ancestors. I simply asked him why he was protecting Haleakalā, not mentioning “culture” or any other leading cues, yet he conflated the “rectification” of “culture” and all that it transformed to encompass with the protection of land, history, family, and self, positioning them as one and the same. Noa’s story also demonstrates this process, moving from a register of learning and understanding culture as emerging from land and ancestors to then perpetuating and protecting “culture” as land and ancestors.
Outside of this conversation, this register instantiates in the wider discourse of the Native Hawaiian community: in instances of land protest signage and social media soundbites, common phrases include “they’re not respecting our culture” or “this is a desecration of our culture and sacred lands”. The many instances of protecting ancestral remains from bulldozing were not only the protection of remains but of the entire cultural framework that valorizes them and their resting places in certain ways. In these instances, it is easy to see how “culture”, as flowing from ancestors and land, had its indexicality transformed to fuse them as interconnected, if not as part of a cohesive whole. Another noteworthy example is the common phrase “aloha ʻāina”, which simultaneously means both “love and reverence for the land” and “patriot” or “patriotism” for the Hawaiian nation. The term was also the name of the anti-U.S. annexation political party and 1895–1920 newspaper and was later touted as a cultural principle, a headlining protest slogan, and a deep ethic of responsibility. The political newspaper itself was known for publishing ancestral stories of land, which would be dubbed “cultural content” today, revealing a project that positioned land and culture as a unity of political import (Silva Reference Silva2017). When translation of this term aloha ʻāina was necessary in some situations, both components were always cited: love for the land and the Hawaiian nation. In such cases of wider discourse, land was equated with the Hawaiian people, our practices, values, histories, and political will—all of which were laminated in an ideology rhetorically casting it as “culture”.
“Native Hawaiian culture” is transmuted and renaturalized in a new register for actors to inhabit. This transduction of the past from “history” to the “mythic”, from “space” to “place”, and from “epistemic” to “ontic” yields a new register through which actors can voice and combine voices into collective political potency (Daniel Reference Daniel1996). The transformation of “Native Hawaiian culture” from a register of educational socialization into one of political intervention renders the category “inhabitable” by Native Hawaiian activists (Koh Reference Koh2015; see Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Rubel and Rosman2003b).
In the Native Hawaiian case, historical transformation also produced the conditions for the politicized register that renders “culture” as isomorphic with ʻāina and ancestors. Haunani-Kay Trask, a renowned community leader and a founding scholar of Hawaiian studies, credited evictions at Kalama Valley in 1971 as “the spark that ignited the modern Hawaiian movement” (Reference Trask1987, 126). Prior to these evictions, Trask explains how communities organized around “local” multiethnic, working-class identities and material interest in land, but Kalama Valley marked a shift toward indigenist politics. With subsequent movements reconfiguring around Indigenous claims to land, she observed that “the language of protest had changed from English to Hawaiian, with emphasis on the native relationship to land. The cultural value of Aloha ʻĀina (love of the land) was to characterize the demands of protesters into the 1980s” (Reference Trask1987, 127). Years after this shift that Trask describes, the 1979–1980 evictions at Mauli Ola were cast as an assault not only on lands but on Hawaiianness itself. As Puhipau, a founding figure in early Native Hawaiian film, was arrested at Mauli Ola, he spoke directly to the camera: “This is how you treat Hawaiians, ladies and gentlemen! Put them in jail, knock down their homes, kill their culture, and eliminate the Hawaiian race” (quoted in Keith and Rochford Reference Keith and Rochford1981). At its base, the eviction razed the lands of a Native community, yet Puhipau rhetorically configured the destruction as an attack on Hawaiian “culture” and the “Hawaiian race”. Yet again, in the 2019 movement that saw thousands of Native Hawaiians gather to protect the summit of Mauna Kea, including my friend quoted above, from a telescope observatory, “desecration” was among the most common descriptors used to characterize the project. It was not only about “land” or the presence of ancestors at the specific site (i.e., a token), but about bulldozing Hawaiian worldviews and “culture” (i.e., a type). These movements sought to protect land and ancestors but were articulated as the protection of that which Hawaiian “culture” transformed to encompass. In that way, “culture” came to envelop ʻāina and ancestors as sites of elimination/resistance. This created a powerful typification of “culture” with which activists could identify, raising the perceived ontic stakes of defending land and political action. This is precisely the point at which Native culture breaks through “neoliberal multiculturalism”: a regime that lauds cultural representation while confining material and political claims, celebrating sanctioned forms of indigeneity that leave capitalist political economy intact (Hale Reference Hale2005). Here, “culture” is not a tool of mere representation, as it transforms to encompass and is recursively invoked through material issues of land dispossession, protecting ancestral remains, and as my friend phrased it, “rectifying” historical events.
Collective mobilization and the disposition of opposition
However, this indexical transformation is only part of the picture. What of the wider semiotic landscape for interlocutors, as well as myself, that pivots toward politicization? Building on the more focused analysis of discursive repertoires above, I now scale out to a spatiotemporal, individual-to-group semiosis of land, nation, and ancestors that demonstrates a token/type dynamic of politicization. A distinctive “mediated spacetime”, evident in interlocutors’ experiences and interactions (Agha Reference Agha2007), calibrates political dispositions of kūʻē: a word literally meaning “to stand differently”, while colloquially meaning resistance and opposition to colonial injustice. Throughout the stories I have told, actors remained viscerally committed to their respective causes. Noa was politicized by his relationship with ʻāina, even taking the risk to speak out against pollution at the cultural site he was restoring. Another friend, Lani, ran educational programs at a site once home to her ancestors and a flashpoint eviction in Hawaiian history. She often told students that she “draws energy from generations before, and the many generations after”, looking in the eyes of the students standing before her. A mutual friend of ours, deeply committed to sharing the history of Hawaiian resistance to U.S. annexation, once told me: “It all boils down to realizing that you were lied to. Lied to! Your whole life,” referring to the myth that the U.S. peacefully and legally assumed control of Hawaiʻi (see Saranillio Reference Saranillio2018). In an ethnographic film I produced with my friend Kaleialoha, who dedicated her life to preserving the heritage of her community, she held back tears while speaking of feeling “such a responsibility” to ancestors, the nation, ʻāina, and especially the “culture” that was lost (Ramones Reference Ramones2020). I have elsewhere argued that this “genealogical subjecthood”, built from and perceived as kuleana ‘responsibility and obligation’, differs from the temporally bound present-tense human individual and is instead spatiotemporally expansive and consubstantial with lands, ancestors, and descendants (Ramones Reference Ramones2023). But this genealogical subjecthood is socialized, as I showed above, and operationalized through the individual-to-group dialogic relation. With a bundle of nation, land, lies, culture, and ancestors, how can it be systematized to reveal inner workings?
An interview with an activist friend named ʻAʻa in 2015 powerfully demonstrates this subjectivity in communicative practice. Despite her refusal of U.S. authority in Hawaiʻi, she often testified at environmental impact hearings that she called performative and “manufacturing consent”. Instead, she saw the public arena of testimony as key to building shared consciousness. When people deliver testimony at these fiery meetings, she pointed out how they were often speaking more to the audience than to the panel of decision-makers. At the same time, when one sits in these hearings, they quickly see that the contention includes more than the specific line items raised in an Environmental Impact Statement alone, but more so encompasses the proposed bulldozing of Hawaiian historical will and value systems writ large. One day, ʻAʻa reflected on her first trip to Kahoʻolawe, the sacred island that Hawaiians had reclaimed from U.S. military bombings through radical action. She told me a story of collapsing in grief, crying, and literally hearing the pain of the bombed and charred island—remarkable for someone I had known as always composed and measured. But, then again, such heavy experiences were common for Hawaiians’ first trips to the island. For another interlocutor, Kaʻena, who dedicated her career to working-class Hawaiians, Kahoʻolawe was a significant and recurring character and agent in her life story, even speaking of the island as “he” and “him”, referring to it as a body form of the deity Kanaloa. ʻAʻa told me a story of arriving on the island, followed by a sudden and unexpected experience. As she approached the climax of her story, collapsing in grief, she stopped. She called me “Kaika”, an informal nickname of “Ikaika”, used by close friends or family of a person with my name. She had never called me that before, as we were not that close. She then asked that I not publish the full transcript identifying her in a magazine that I worked for at the time. She was “embarrassed” by this story.
I replied, “don’t worry tita, I got you”. Also invoking the term “tita”, Pidgin and Hawaiian for “sister”, which I had never called her before, I matched her alignment of shared intimacy, as the “non-referential indexicality” of these terms signaled a shift to an intimate social relation (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976, 201). The concentration of less common Hawaiian terminology also increased at this point. For example, ʻAʻa’s sudden increased use of esoteric words like hōʻailona ‘signs or omens’ and ʻeha ‘pain’ is not common knowledge in Hawaiʻi society but is known well by those with Hawaiian language and cultural exposure or training. In this case, it cemented a particular “register” associated with a culturally familiar Hawaiian, one socialized through cultural education detailed above, who would understand the “world” of the story (Agha Reference Agha2005). At the emotional peak of her story, her tenses completely changed from past-perfect and the use of first-person singular pronouns, while her other deictic markers of “there” shifted to “here”. She began to voice the island’s pain herself and how Kahoʻolawe felt the hurt of “our people”. She had deictically shifted to first-person plural pronouns and the present tense, thus changing the “production format” to speak as Kahoʻolawe itself (Goffman Reference Goffman1979). In effect, she had subconsciously brought me, herself, our people, and Kahoʻolawe into an intimate encounter of the here and now. This interaction provided two insights. First, when a place is mobilized interactionally through communicative acts, it constructs a spatiotemporal and social relation between us both as Native Hawaiians. Second, that place is made to have agency and force in the social field, and dialogically co-constitutes her own experience, similar to other interlocutors. While ʻāina exists in the genealogies of Hawaiians, a commonly cited yet still abstract proposition, attention to actual social practice demonstrates land’s fundamentality to the transmission of ancestral knowledge and social reproduction (Basso Reference Basso1996). In the conversation with ʻAʻa, she unconsciously bundled land, ancestors, nation, and both of us together at the heart of her emotion and political conviction.
To be more precise, this register of bundling links tokens of an individual’s experience with a wider national type. Individuals, specifically those socialized in registers of cultural education, had rich subjective worlds along the lines of “genealogical subjecthood”: ancestors and descendants were seen as copresent and consubstantial, making the self temporally expansive, while specific lands and ancestors could make affective claims on the self, even communicating through ʻAʻa’s hōʻailona ‘signs’. Noa also recounted that restoring an ancestral site was also the restoration of himself. At that site he stewarded, he recalled “feeling this exchange”, an intimate and mutual “understanding” that pulled him back over time. Or in the case of Lani, she related to her own ancestors’ site, seeing her ancestors and the descendants before her as motivators and stakes in her work. In communicative interactions, these constituent elements also form the basis for relations with a contemporary and copresent relational other, such as between ʻAʻa and myself.
These subjective worlds existed in magnetic relation to a wider national typification. Everything from political protest slogans for Mauna Kea, public speeches by Hawaiian leaders, and even conversations with other Hawaiians about the lāhui ‘nation’ all indicate a particular national scale at work. Rather than wading into discussions of nationalism, I map how meaning and material semiotically mediate processes of individual–group politicization. There are invocations of the kūpuna ‘ancestors’, as the abstract ancestors who carried our knowledge for centuries, experienced an imperialist coup, and fought for Hawaiian lands and lifeways. Actors and institutions would consistently operationalize specific chiefs, deities, and historical figures as the broader ancestral force that animates and drives the nation today. Similar to the scale of an individual, the national ancestral type reaches into the past and carries the nation into the future for the nation’s descendants. Aside from this axis of temporality, another axis for the nation is that of space. Many places such as ʻIolani Palace (home of the monarchy before the overthrow), Mauna Kea, or Puʻukoholā Heiau (a temple that figures prominently in the unification of the Hawaiian Islands into a single kingdom) are all vibrant touchstones for the nation: materialized, even incarnated, sites of ancestral knowledge, mana ‘generative potency’, historical struggle, and affective force that valorize broader nationhood. It is no coincidence that a sacred or storied place, a wahi pana, literally translates to “pulsing place” or “beating place”.
One’s individual experiences link with encompassing national issues in several revealing ways as a token-type relation. A wahi pana of a specific person like Noa, Lani, or Kaʻena is semiotically anchored to sites and issues on the national scale, as each is also a site of evictions or efforts that were pivotal in Hawaiian historical consciousness writ large. Meanwhile, one’s specific ancestors semiotically anchor to the general, national-ancestral scale, with the historical experiences of one’s ancestors indexing a shared national-ancestral experience. In effect, these are tokens of a type. For example, the esteemed Kūʻē Petitions of 1897 exemplify this process. Following a swift and massive organizing effort, over 95 percent of Native Hawaiians signed these petitions objecting to U.S. annexation of Hawaiʻi (Silva Reference Silva2004). Finding the signatures of one’s own ancestors could hold significant meaning for a Native Hawaiian, while also semiotically anchoring their ancestors to the national scale of the Kūʻē Petitions as a national symbol. For my friend who spoke about “realizing you’ve been lied to”, he and others helped people find their ancestors in the petition booklets, while also offering opportunities for Hawaiians to reconnect with historical and ancestral places. One day at a meeting of activists, including my friend, an animated speaker called out to the crowd: “You all remember seeing your kūpuna’s [ancestors’] names on the petitions. I know you do.” I still remember the day, passing by a petition booth at a community event. I found my ancestors on pages 360 and 387 of the Honolulu, Oʻahu petition books. There, nestled within the names of others, I saw the confident pen strokes of my ancestors speaking against annexation. My ancestors sat as bricks in a formidable wall of names, and in a way, the ink of the nation still seemed wet to me.
In 2019, thousands of Hawaiians thronged to the summit of Mauna Kea to form a blockade and protect it from the construction of the Thirty-Meter-Telescope complex. The broad-based movement sought to protect ʻāina and ancestors from the impending desecration. In the above semiotic model, a threat to national lands and a shared genealogical ancestor like Mauna Kea as an elder kin is perceived as a threat to the nation and the self. For some, like my cousin whose grandfather’s ashes were scattered at Mauna Kea, the defense of Mauna Kea on the national plane directly intersected with her own. In the reverse direction, a threat to one’s own ancestral ʻāina is imbued with wider systemic and historical threats to national lands. For example, those fighting to reclaim their families’ land parcels allotted during the kingdom era were part of a larger movement to reclaim national lands. Workshops on how to exercise claims on one’s ancestral land parcels were contextualized as part of a broader reclamation of lands, instead of being extricated as isolated and individualistic struggles for “property”. The model presented here provides a heuristic to understand how individuals’ cacophonic but metasemiotically focused voices are reconstrued as instantiations, or tokens, of the larger actionable political type. While token-type relations are often envisaged as a methodological issue of scale, here, it takes on an empirical importance as it exercises an individual-to-group politicizing faculty.
Conclusion
This chain of semiotic processes begins with actors in common experiences of learning about “Native culture” as coming from land and ancestors, while settler metasemiotic frameworks normatively excise land and ancestral experience from the conceptualization of “Native culture”. In moments when the Indigenous-settler contradiction comes to the fore, the indexicality of “culture” is converted into new forms of value, whereby “culture” encompasses lands and ancestral heritage as actors see them face episodes of colonial elimination. In this register, place is mobilized interactionally among participants, while one’s own experiences, or discrete episodes of conflict, are tokens that link to wider phenomena of a national type. In this individual-to-group semiosis, “Native culture”, if not the figure of the Indigenous itself, is not an automatic and unmediated collective politics. Rather, the rendering of an actionable political formation depends on mediating processes of semiotic reconfiguration.
The category of “Native culture” is therefore not what it seems, with important wider implications. One’s identity, abstract concepts, or mere structural position do not automatically endow a politicized disposition, much less group formation. In the depoliticizing jaws of neoliberal multiculturalism, these semiotic processes interrupt with the potential for re-politicization; while settler colonialism aims for the dissolution of Indigenous polities, these processes reinforce individual-to-group collectivization. Although it is true that many friends and interlocutors discuss coming to politics through and for “our culture”, the point is that they came to politics via deeper semiotic processes, submerged beneath the appearance of a denotational sense of “culture”. This challenges the conflation of all Native culture-as-politics, asking for a more thorough investigation of the mediation between “culture” and politics. In 1985, Native Hawaiian leader and scholar Haunani-Kay Trask provocatively explained:
You cannot just dance hula and go to Hawaiian language class at night and think you’re gonna get a land base; you can’t do that. Cultural people have to become political. It’s not just that political people like myself have to become cultural. Our culture can’t just be ornamental and recreational; that’s what Waikīkī is! Our culture has to be the core of our resistance, the core of our anger, the core of our mana [power]. That’s what culture is for. [quoted in Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina 1985]
Speaking at a time when she worried that the cultural focus of the Hawaiian movement was displacing more militant political demands, Trask also does not reject cultural revival in the name of political mobilization. While identifying herself as one of the more “political people”, she positioned “culture” and politics as a dynamic unity, with “our culture” as the “core” of political resistance, anger, and power. This function of “culture” emerges in the model of politicization offered here. “Native culture” and political potency must not be conflated, confusing one for the other. Instead, they must be carefully untangled and understood, their mediation brought to light. As Trask shows, this is not just a pressing scholarly question, as it also matters deeply for those on the ground in the trenches of struggle.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief, Asif Agha, for their transformative guidance on this article. I would also like to thank Hyemin Lee for her insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. The ideas developed here benefited from the generous feedback of Fred Myers, Nicholas Harkness, Beth Semel, and Ryo Morimoto.
Funding statement
The primary research was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (No. BC 2049229), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (No. 10144), and the Social Science Research Council. The writing of this article was also supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Fellowship (No. 10758).
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