States of Emergency / Spaces of Emergence: War, the Exception, and Indigenous Sovereignty on the Island of Kahoʻolawe

Keywords: sovereignty, Hawaii, Indigenous, militarization, emergence
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 42

Abstract

In December 1941, within twenty-four hours of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi’s territorial governor declared martial law and ceded authority to the U.S. Army. Under this wartime state of emergency, the military seized hundreds of thousands of acres of Hawaiian land for training, including Kahoʻolawe, a small island south of Maui which was culturally significant to Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) as a manifestation of the Polynesian ocean deity Kanaloa. The Island soon became a crucial site for rehearsing the victorious U.S. island-hopping offensive in the Pacific War; Kahoʻolawe’s ruination enabled the resurrection of ‘Pearl Harbor’ as the symbol of U.S. innocence and redemption. Although martial law ended within three years, the U.S. military retained Kahoʻolawe and other training areas indefinitely. Kahoʻolawe was a space where the exception became permanent and war prefiguratively materialized as “terra sacer”—a sacred accursed land whose ban and desolation facilitated United States imperial formation. In 1976, Kanaka ʻŌiwi activists staged an audacious, yet improbable occupation of Kahoʻolawe to protest the bombing of the Island. In the process, they inadvertently helped to inspire a new Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Drawing on Deleuze’s concept of emergence and Peralto’s concept of kīpuka aloha ʻāina, this paper examines how activism can poke holes in the sovereign exception for fugitive sovereignties to take root.