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kinship flows in Brandy Nālani McDougall's The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa‘akai

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Feminist Review

Abstract

This paper follows the Salt-Wind and subterraneous freshwater flows in Hawaiian poet Brandy Nālani McDougall's collection of poetry The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa‘akai. McDougall illustrates that in order to begin again in the aftermath of American imperialism and environmental destruction, one must return to the salt-water and sub-surface waterings, and the ancestral connections and voices therein who beckon her (and others) home. In this way, her work is situated within contemporary movements within the Pacific, presently coming together in deimperializing efforts to restructure a future for the Pacific that is ‘beyond empires’ (Fujikane, 2012: 191). Selecting two poems in particular from McDougall's collection—‘Hāloanaka’ and ‘On a Routing Slip from the U.S. Postal Service, Pukalani Branch’—I illustrate how they chart the ancestral, cosmological, and historical flows of kinship between Kānaka Maoli and their near and distant earthly and spiritual relations. In particular, the water that passes through the taro plant infuses all manner of kinship, economic, and social relations in Hawai‘i, connecting Kānaka Maoli to their ancestor Hāloa, and to land, sea, and each other, as well as—through the formative oceanic movements of Moana Nui—to other Pacific islanders. A thirst for water—sacred, imaginative, mobile, past, present—underwritten by an assertion of Hawaiian sovereignty, language, and tradition flows just beneath the surface of McDougall's words.

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Notes

  1. I use the terms Oceania and Moana Nui throughout this paper. For contentious histories of these terms see Te Punga Somerville, 2006: 98. Moana Nui has also been taken up in contemporary activist contexts: Moana Nui (2011) ‘Moana Nui Statement’, Moana Nui [online], 12 November, http://moananui2011.org/?page_id=675, last accessed 10 June 2012.

  2. The terms ‘Hawaiians’ and ‘Native Hawaiians’ are used interchangeably in this paper. In ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, ‘Kanaka Maoli’ refers to the noun ‘Hawaiian person’ and the adjective ‘Hawaiian’, while ‘Kānaka Maoli’, with the macron, refers to the plural, ‘Hawaiian people’. ‘Kānaka ‘Ōiwi’ also refers to the Indigenous people of Hawai‘i.

  3. From here, I have not italicised Hawaiian words in order to foreground the fact that ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i is not a foreign language in Hawai‘i.

  4. Wilson, R. (2010) ‘Towards an ecopoetics of Oceania: worlding the Asia-Pacific region as space-time ecumene’ in Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica Anthropological Futures Conference. Taiwan, 12–13 June 2010, [online], http://www.ioe.sinica.edu.tw/chinese/seminar/100612/paper/Fwilson.pdf, last accessed 20 February 2012.

  5. Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i (2008). DVD. Directed by Anne Keala Kelly. Hawai‘i, http://www.nohohewa.com/, last accessed 30 October 2012.

  6. The Apology (1993) ‘United States Public Law 103-150, 103d Congress Joint Resolution 19’, [online], http://www.hawaii-nation.org/publawall.html, last accessed 11 June 2012.

  7. Earthjustice (2012a) ‘Hawai‘i water, a public resource’, Down to Earth Podcast, [podcast], 2012, http://earthjustice.org/our_work/campaigns/restore-stream-flow, last accessed 20 February 2012.

  8. Sproat, K. (2009) Ola L Ka Wai: A Legal Primer for Water Use and Management in Hawai‘i, Honolulu: Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law, [online], http://www.law.hawaii.edu/sites/www.law.hawaii.edu/files/news/WaterPrimer.pdf, last accessed 10 June 2012.

  9. Earthjustice (2012b) ‘Restoring streams restoring life story’, Restore Stream Flow, [online], http://earthjustice.org/our_work/campaigns/restore-stream-flow, last accessed 12 January 2012.

  10. The use of diacritical marks in Hawaiian-language writing was introduced in the twentieth-century. I have not added the glottal stop (‘) or the macron where they are not present in source material.

  11. McDougall, B.N. (Spring 2011) ‘Poi-ku’ Vice-Versa, Vol. 11, [online], http://viceversajournal.com/2011/03/03/poi-ku-by-brandy-nalani-mcdougall/, last accessed 10 February 2012.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Kim, A. ‘The 1911 prohibition on poi’. Hawai‘i Digital Newspaper Project, [online], https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home/historical-feature-articles/the-1911-prohibition-on-poi, last accessed 1 June 2012.

  14. Black, C.M. (2011) ‘Coming Full Circle: the taro movement imagines a sustainable future by bringing Hawai‘i back to its roots’ Green: Hawai‘i's Sustainable Living Magazine, Vol. 3., No. 5, http://www.greenmagazinehawaii.com/food_v3-5.html, last accessed 20 February 2012.

  15. Black, C.M. (2011) ‘Coming Full Circle: the taro movement imagines a sustainable future by bringing Hawai‘i back to its roots’ Green: Hawai‘i's Sustainable Living Magazine, Vol. 3., No. 5, http://www.greenmagazinehawaii.com/food_v3-5.html, last accessed 20 February 2012

  16. Bello, W. (2011) Conference presentation at panel on ‘APEC & TPP: What we must know; what should we do?’ Moana Nui Conference, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 10–11 November, [video online], http://moananui2011.org/?page_id=730, last accessed 20 June 2012.

  17. For example, McDougall, B.N. and Perez, C.S. (2011) Undercurrent, Honolulu: Hawaii Dub Machine; and Hamasaki, R. and Matsouka, D., producers [Amplified Poetry Audio Book], http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/undercurrent/id456751827, last accessed 20 February 2012.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Laleh Khalili, Rutvica Andrijasevic, and Benita Rajania for their editorial guidance (and patience!), as well as two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. To Candace Fujikane, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Benjamin Authers: many, many thanks for casting a critical and caring eye over multiple drafts of this paper—your feedback was both invaluable to bringing this paper to its current form and wonderfully supportive. Finally, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Daniel Coleman, Alexis Motuz, Hayden King, and Rick Monture for proofreading earlier drafts or portions of this paper, and to Craig Howes, Amy Brinker, and Chantrelle Waialae for pointing me to appropriate Hawaiian texts, writing, activism, and artwork.

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Peek, M. kinship flows in Brandy Nālani McDougall's The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa‘akai. Fem Rev 103, 80–98 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2012.28

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