Landlocked

• In Event: In Pieces: Allotments, Kuleana, and Alienated Indigenous Territories

Abstract

This paper examines the legal, social, and familial afterlives of kuleana landholdings in Hawaiʻi. Taking an autobiographical approach, I discuss my own experiences in working to add my name to a property title once belonging to my late mother and her cousins in order to get in the way of state foreclosure. Throughout, I follow the chains of title through a sedimented history of Indigenous dispossession, property-making, and strained genealogical ties. The particularities of this property take on significance as an object of study: a landlocked, 2,000 square foot parcel zoned as preservation land, surrounded by a property owned by the Robinson family, who own the island of Niʻihau. In short, this is land that cannot be built or used towards any kind of capitalist production and, yet, holds enormous political and emotional value to my siblings and I as a tie to history and homeland. Exploring the contours of value-making in an Indigenous and settler context, I attend to the theoretical and material implications of capitalist relations to land as they are manifested in Hawaiian Kingdom and American political formations. What does it mean, I wonder, to hang on to the leftover scraps of colonialism despite their costs?

Author

• Hiilei J Hobart, Yale University