Settler-Colonial Criminology: Indigenous Insights

• In Event: Crime, State Power, and State Responses

Abstract

Storm clouds that had been gathering over Paradise finally burst open with thunder and lightening on January 17, 1893, with the Hawaiian monarchy ending in a day of bloodless revolution. To the superior force of the United States of America, Queen Lili‘uokalani yielded her throne, under protest and duress, in order to avoid bloodshed. Thus, our Queen’s unlawful incarceration exposed merely one of the manifestations in a long genealogy of prejudicial affects that Western law imposed on Native peoples. Today, the legacy of settler colonial law lives on in the disparate impact of the criminal justice system on Kanaka Maoli. Therefore, the aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to advance settler-colonial criminology as a perspective that has potential to expand the discipline in an engaged and reflexive manner, (2) as Hawai‘i uniquely qualifies as a locus for advancing the ideologies of settler-colonial criminology, I describe how indigenous insights gives voice to culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies within the classrooms of Western academia, (3) finally, I argue that for reform to take place in the criminal justice system in Hawai‘i, advocates need to look for guidance in the culturally significant values of the Kanaka Maoli.

Author

• Penny-Bee Kapilialoha Bovard, University of Hawaii at Manoa