Kanaka ʻŌiwi Critical Race Theory (KanakaʻŌiwiCrit): A HERstory

This page chronicles the HERstory of Kanaka ʻŌiwi Critical Race Theory (KanakaʻŌiwiCrit) in higher education and my personal contribution to advancing its application in Hawaiʻi's K–12 sector.

Kanaka‘ŌiwiCrit is an Indigenous theoretical framework that (a) foregrounds the intersecting roles of racism, settler colonialism, and occupation in the reproduction of systemic social inequities and (b) disrupts these root causes of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi oppression by uplifting mo‘olelo and advancing the Lāhui Hawaiʻi's ea and kūʻokoʻa.

Ideological Ancestors

As a critical theory, KanakaʻŌiwiCrit is aligned ideologically with analyses of power and critiques of hegemony and marginalization. It pulls from the social critiques in Paulo Freire's 1970 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially his conceptualization of critical consciousness, a dynamic lens that empowers individuals to "perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (p. 35). Its particular attention to the intersecting roles of settler colonialism and U.S. military occupation on contemporary inequities experienced by Kanaka ʻŌiwi stems from Haunani-Kay Trask's powerful collection of essays and speeches in From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi. This counter-narrative to U.S. imperialism in the Pacific is an essential read to understand the social, political, and environmental consequences of militarism, tourism, and capitalism for Indigenous Peoples.

Although Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in the legal sphere as a tool to explain how race and racism impact U.S. law, Gloria Ladson-Billings & William Tate's article "Toward a critical race theory of education" directs our attention to the U.S. education system to demonstrate how schools, teachers, curricula, and pedagogies are also subject to the effects of racism and racial hierarchies. A decade later, Bryan Brayboy published "Toward a Tribal critical race theory in education" and conceptualized TribalCrit, an Indigenous theory that goes beyond the Black-white binary and names settler colonialism as a root cause of Native peoples' inequitable realities.

These are just four ideological ancestors to KanakaʻŌiwiCrit that I recommend consulting before engaging with more recent CRT literature for the Native Hawaiian and North American Tribal contexts. Some of their key contributions to the field include raising and analyzing the following questions: In U.S. society, who is considered oppressed, and who is considered privileged? Whose histories and stories are taught in schools, and who teaches them? How do race and racism affect the educational experiences of Students of Color? How does settler colonialism affect the educational experiences of Indigenous students?

Additionally, I recognize Rebecca Tsosie's 2005 legal article "Engaging the spirit of racial healing within critical race theory: An exercise in transformative thought" for using CRT to examine Native Hawaiian political and legal rights. Though it is not in education, this article is among the first to apply a CRT lens to explain how race and racism have shaped contemporary Native Hawaiian experiences. I also recommend V. Leilani Kupo's 2010 dissertation "What is Hawaiian?: Explorations and understandings of Native Hawaiian college women's identities", which uses a TribalCrit lens to analyze moʻolelo from wāhine ʻŌiwi students.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

Paulo Freire

"Toward a critical race theory of education" (1995)

Gloria Ladson-Billings & William F. Tate IV

"Toward a Tribal critical race theory in education" (2005)

Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy

Foundational Texts

I position three texts as the foundational core of KanakaʻŌiwiCrit: Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright and Brandi Jean Nālani Balutski's 2016 book chapter "Ka ʻIkena a ka Hawaiʻi: Toward a Kanaka ʻŌiwi Critical Race Theory," Nicole Alia Salis Reyes' 2018 article "A space for survivance: Locating Kānaka Maoli through the resonance and dissonance of critical race theory," and Nikki Cristobal's 2018 article "Kanaka ʻŌiwi critical race theory: Historical and educational context." 

Wright and Balutski (2016) outline the theoretical influences of CRT, TribalCrit, and Kanaka ʻŌiwi critical consciousness before introducing Kanaka ʻŌiwi CRT (ʻŌiwiCrit). Their theorization is predicated on the assumption that "educational structures are reflections of colonialism and occupation" (p. 92). They also propose five themes that capture how Native Hawaiian students are racialized in the U.S. education system, how colonial structures affect studentsʻ educational journeys, and how "students articulate these journeys" (p. 92). Furthermore, Wright and Balutski explain how the root causes of educational inequities in Hawaiʻi intersect with students' sense of kuleana and "identity conscious articulations of Kanaka ʻŌiwi educational moʻolelo" like aloha ʻāina, moʻolelo, and moʻokūʻauhau (p. 94).

Salis Reyes' (2018) article similarly reviews relevant CRT frameworks in education (i.e., CRT, TribalCrit and Asian critical race theory) in order to identify resonance and dissonance in their relevance and applicability for Kanaka ʻŌiwi. By naming settler colonialism and military occupation as two significant root causes of social inequities for Kanaka ʻŌiwi students, Salis Reyes points readers "toward a Kanaka Maoli critical decolonizing framework (KanakaCrit)" grounded in Indigenous critical pedagogy (p. 747). She proposes six tenets, including the recognition that "ʻŌiwi identities are multiple, intersectional, and liminal" (p. 749) and the contention that "knowledge must be developed and used to benefit [our] lāhui" (p. 752).

Cristobal (2018) synthesizes these two conceptual pieces into a unified KanakaʻŌiwiCrit model. Under this theorization, the following four themes/tenets emerge: 1) Occupation and colonialism are endemic in society; 2) Kanaka ʻŌiwi identities are multiple, intersectional, and liminal; 3) Learning and sharing moʻolelo contributes to our survivance; 4) Kuleana is the culmination of Kanaka ʻŌiwi moʻolelo about the ways in which we enact agency through social justice (p. 36).

Altogether, these three texts exemplify the ea and ʻike of wāhine ʻŌiwi scholar activists. They boldly name and critique dominant ideologies circulating in Kanaka ʻŌiwi homes and schools and disrupt majoritarian narratives about Indigenous Peoples using Kanaka 'Ōiwi ways of knowing and being. To this end, the moʻokūʻauhau and moʻolelo of KanakaʻŌiwiCrit is truly a HERstory because it was collectively conceptualized by these four wāhine ʻŌiwi and guided by the ʻike kūpuna of countless wāhine ʻŌiwi who paved a way for Indigenous stories to form the basis of Indigenous theories.

Click the links below to access these texts and begin your own journey with KanakaʻŌiwiCrit.

"Ka ‘ikena a ka Hawai‘i: Toward a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi critical race theory" (2016)

Erin Kahunawaikaʻala Wright & Brandi Jean Nālani Balutski

Recent Contributions

Since 2018, scholars and students in education and legal studies have been engaging with KanakaʻŌiwiCrit to disrupt majoritarian narratives and center moʻolelo in the exploration of Native Hawaiian experiences. These are just a few studies and dissertations that have helped expand the HERstory of KanakaʻŌiwiCrit.

Personal Contributions

After discovering KanakaʻŌiwiCrit as a graduate student in 2020, I began applying it in my work on and for Native Hawaiian students and the Lāhui Hawaiʻi. I use it as a framework and a lens to view and critique educational inequities. Personally, I've contributed to the HERstory of KanakaʻŌiwiCrit by utilizing it as a theoretical foundation for research on the K–12 sector and on identity formation among Native Hawaiian students. Most recently, I've expanded the KanakaʻŌiwiCrit literature on youth resistance and wāhine ʻŌiwi epistemology.

August 30, 2024 update: My first qualitative study using KanakaʻŌiwiCrit to analyze youth resistance has been accepted for publication in a special issue on CRT within a peer-reviewed journal in education and information studies. This is a special project because it started way back in Fall 2020 when I took an introduction to qualitative research series as a master's student and played around with secondary data collection and analysis methods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though KanakaʻŌiwiCrit has informed many of my conceptual pieces, I haven't explicitly named it as a theoretical foundation in any of my previously published works, so this is an exciting development in my personal relationship with KanakaʻŌiwiCrit.

"Toward a Kanaka ʻŌiwi racial identity model for a contemporary multiracial world" (2023)

"Enacting Kūʻē through Makawalu Discourse: A KanakaʻŌiwiCrit Study of Native Hawaiian Students” (accepted)

“Interweaving the Past, Present, and Future to Call Forth a Critical Wāhine ʻŌiwi Epistemology” (under review)