The Place to Lay Your Body Down: Native Hawaiian Diasporic Indigeneity on Native North American Homelands

2025 Creighton Lecture

The Place to Lay Your Body Down: Native Hawaiian Diasporic Indigeneity on Native  North American  Homelands

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In the mid-19th century, labor diasporas landed Native Hawaiians on the homelands of Native North American people from Vancouver Island down the coast to California. In this context, they confronted an ethical dilemma: how were they even to approach the ideal of a reciprocal relationship to the land as a relative—an ethical ideal important to Hawaiians and many other Indigenous people? This paper looks to kanikau (mourning songs) composed by diasporic Native Hawaiians to understand how they thought through this question. Historically and spatially situated readings of these kanikau reveal that their composers found that building reciprocal relations with the land could only happen in the context of sustained and reciprocal relationships to the Indigenous people of that land. In their songs, these composers theorized diasporic Indigeneity and mapped out a way to think through core issues for diasporic Indigenous people in the present.

David Aiona Chang is a Native Hawaiian historian of Indigenous people, colonialism, borders and migration in Hawaiʻi and North America, focusing especially on the histories of Native North American and Native Hawaiian people. Moving between hyperlocal and global scales, he centers the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous people, integrating close textual analysis, granular social history, Indigenous geographies and epistemologies, and theoretically informed analysis of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism. He is the author of a number of articles and two books, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (2016) and The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership (2010).

Contact Information: Susanna Aubynn, history.ea@utoronto.ca

Sponsors

    Department of History
    CSUS
    Asian Studies