Acknowledging heterogeneity among ʻohana ʻŌiwi
On June 1, news spread across ka Pae ʻĀina of a lawsuit that challenges the legality of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act and the right for Kanaka ʻŌiwi to own property in designated areas of their ancestral homeland. While many Indigenous rights activists were quick to condemn the lawsuit as yet another attempt by conservative, extreme right-wing residents to attack Kanaka ʻŌiwi presence in Hawaiʻi, the news drew attention to a variety of perceptions of Hawaiian Homes, Hawaiianness, Hawaiian sovereignty and self-determination, and notions of property, ʻāina, and nationhood. This lawsuit as well as the October 2025 lawsuit attacking Kamehameha Schools’ admissions preference policy are important reminders of the heterogeneous beliefs circulating among contemporary ʻohana ʻŌiwi. There is no such thing as a uniform Kanaka ʻŌiwi ideology — both in the past and the present. Oral histories point us to a reality in which communities on the same island and communities on different islands observed prominent rituals and ceremonies at different times in the year. Today, some Kanaka ʻŌiwi believe our Lāhui Hawaiʻi is a sovereign Kingdom; others do not. This reality adds to the complexity of contemporary Kanaka ʻŌiwi identity and the difficulty of organizing as a fully united Lāhui Hawaiʻi against threats to our self-determination.
I acknowledge this heterogeneity in a forthcoming manuscript based on my dissertation research. The article “It takes a village, and I’m at the top of yours”: Intergenerational meaning-making through kin-based relations and storytelling” will be published in a special issue of Frontiers in Developmental Psychology on “family storytelling: discourse and narratives as developmental and methodological tools across the life span.” Ironically, I briefly mention the Hawaiian Homelands Commission Act in the manuscript because of its relevance to my research collaborators’ home community, and one of the findings’ sections wrestles with the dissonance that some Kanaka ʻŌiwi espouse through their rhetoric by supporting Hawaiian Homelands while denigrating Hawaiian sovereignty activists. In this current moment, when Hawaiian Homelands is now under attack, I am keen to know how such individuals interpret the discourses that Hawaiian sovereignty activists will undoubtedly take to protect Indigenous rights to remain in Hawai‘i.
This peer-reviewed article will be among the first of my empirical work to be published and the third publication to emerge from my dissertation (See Kawano, 2024 in AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples and Kawano, 2025 in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education). Some of the core findings from this manuscript include a modern-day practice of using core values of reciprocity, respect, relationality, and responsibility to transmit Indigenous and non-Indigenous perceptions of Hawaiianness to close relatives. These perceptions include notions of Hawaiianness and Christianity, meritocracy, pride, and culture. Depending on individual relationships among relatives, the likelihood that ideological disagreements are explicitly presented in group settings changes (i.e., between a grandchild and a respected elder as opposed to between two siblings or cousins).
I’m looking forward to being in conversation with Kanaka ʻŌiwi and non-Kanaka ʻŌiwi folks who find resonance and dissonance with the study’s moʻolelo and continued engagement with the significance of acknowledging heterogeneity among ʻohana ʻŌiwi in the 21st century.
