Omar Abdelqader G2 interviews J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies in Anthropology and the Effron Center for the Study of America
OA: Kēhaulani, it is a pleasure to be speaking with you and I am confident I represent the whole of the graduate student body when I say there is genuine enthusiasm to have you join our department. There is much I’d like to hear from you regarding the future, but I’d be remiss to skip over your prolific two and a half decades at Wesleyan. How has that time helped shape who you are today, and what makes this the right moment for you to transition, particularly to Princeton?
JKK: Mahalo, shukran, and thank you for the warm welcome and your thoughtful preparation of these interview questions. Asking what makes this the “right moment,” which is apt because in many ways it is about timing.
I’m thrilled to be joining the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Anthropology department at an exciting time at Princeton. When I applied for the position in Fall 2021, I was aware of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton through a Spring 2019 conference I was invited to present at, “Indigenous/Settler.” There I met a dynamic group of graduate student organizers and select faculty that do work in (or related to) the field, and the energy was palpable. So, when the ad for the job went out, it was clear that the administration had made a commitment to this area of study – as evidenced by the prospect of a cluster hire and related institutional developments I learned about along the way. Now that I’m here, I am ready to dive into research collaborations, graduate student mentorship, undergraduate teaching, and community partnerships as a part of this initiative.
This moment is also particularly ripe for expanding the teaching, research, and collaborations I have developed over the last two and a half decades. In terms of my own position, the joint appointment made sense to me since at Wesleyan I was hired (and tenured, as well as promoted to full professor) in both anthropology and American studies. It also seemed like a good match in another way since I was coming from a research university with a strong identity as a liberal arts college. Princeton takes undergraduate education very seriously while also putting a premium on cutting-edge research, which makes it a great place to expand my work.
In terms of my years at Wesleyan, I can share just a few activities that I think are relevant to existing efforts here. I mounted a campaign for institutional compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (through the formation of an Ad Hoc Task Force), utilized the campus radio station to launch a public affairs program, “Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond” (which I produced and hosted for seven years), and eventually founded an Indigenous Studies Research Network on campus with over two dozen members. This is to say, I’m excited to collaborate with the students and faculty who are part of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton.
OA: As someone who wasn't formally “trained in anthropology” (with all due reservations about the phraseology), how did you find it a suitable discipline for exploring the questions you were interested in? Are there any insights or lessons you would like to share with future anthropologists?
JKK: For starters, we could flip the question and ask those formally trained in anthropology how they find my work suitable for the discipline in terms of the research questions my work asks and seeks to answer. As anthropology has undergone some profound changes over the past few decades, I have found the discipline friendly to my intellectual (and political) concerns. But I must admit that when I was a much younger scholar, I was quite conflicted about the discipline. Historically, anthropology has had such a bad rap in Hawai‘i – some of which is due to contract archaeologists unearthing sacred burials to make way for hotel developments, but also due to some high profile cultural anthropologists who were busy trying to “debunk” Hawaiian “authenticity” at the precise time Kanaka Maoli were engaged in cultural revitalization projects in the face of ongoing coercive assimilation policies and blood quantum classification. Aside from that, my undergraduate major was in Women’s Studies (at the University of California, Berkeley). And there, I was a student of Trinh T. Minh-ha soon after she published Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, which is particularly damning of the entire discipline – but especially the branch of cultural anthropology.
However, by the time I was a graduate student at Auckland University – where I was on a Fulbright fellowship in Māori studies, and also taking Masters courses Pacific studies – the disciplines of both history and anthropology were most prominent in the study of Indigenous Oceania, and so I focused some on ethnohistory. I then got involved with the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania during my time in the doctoral program I was trained in, History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz (known as “HistCon”). At the time, HistCon was arguably more anti-disciplinary than interdisciplinary, so we were engaged in critiques of a range of disciplines and identifying the limits of their respective methodologies. My two primary advisers were James Clifford and Donna Haraway – both deeply engaged with anthropology – but neither formally trained in the field. I am a deeply interdisciplinary scholar and had the privilege of working with Angela Y Davis, Neferti X Tadiar, Emma Perez, and others who were teaching in the program at the time. But I also took classes offered by the anthropology department – and with renowned anthropologists like Nancy N. Chen (on biopower), Jacqueline Brown (on race), and Anna Tsing (on ethnoecologies). Because of my research focus for my dissertation, on early 20th century history of race and indigeneity in relation to land dispossession in Hawai‘i (which was mostly archival), I did not need to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for my project. However, I found the subfield of legal anthropology to be quite useful. In any case, overall, given my training in critical theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and my longtime participation in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement (since 1990) as a diasporic subject (with insider-outsider status), much of my work is ethnographic and my theoretical work aims to push on the boundaries of the discipline. In short, I have a long trajectory of probing a range of fields and disciplines – exploring the epistemologies privileged in each.
This brings me to your second question. Although anthropology has a long history with colonialism globally (which is reflected in how it has been institutionalized in different regions and context), out of all the traditional disciplines, scholars have arguably been the most seriously engaged in decolonizing knowledge production – largely due to the innovative work of Native, Black, other scholars of color, as well as feminist and queer scholars. I think that cultural anthropology is where some of the most exciting and important work is happening in the academy – especially given the role of many anthropologists who are public intellectuals and can help us to better understand the most pressing social issues of our time while furthering decolonial movements, among other liberation struggles.
OA: Over the past two decades, we've seen a surge in decolonial initiatives within academia. Unfortunately, some of this work has diluted the movement’s original political impetus. There are efforts to rectify this. You’ve recently launched the Wangunk Studies Working Group with a focus on research about the indigenous people of central Connecticut, including Middletown. Could you describe how this initiative came about and what you see as its future prospects? More broadly, how do you assess the evolution of the relationship between academic scholarship and activism? How can academia provide space and traction for such projects?
JKK: The group is something I’d dreamed of years ago after teaching a service-learning course in partnership with the Middlesex County Historical Society, called “Decolonizing Indigenous Middletown,” at Wesleyan University. For that, I worked closely with Gary Red Oak O’Neil, who is a direct descendant of Jonathan Palmer (erroneously referred to as “the last Wangunk”). In terms of the new initiative, I first approached him with the idea suggesting that it could serve as a network to share research-related resources, workshop scholarly writings, and eventually institutionalize a structure along the lines of a Wangunk Studies Research Council. He wholeheartedly supported the plan, especially given the paucity of primary and secondary sources on the Wangunk people. In particular, O’Neil hopes we can assist in developing a curriculum focused on Wangunk to be adopted in elementary and middle schools throughout the region. When the working group first convened this summer (with over a dozen individuals I’d identified over the last decade), we agreed on the importance of broad education for the general public, including a resource website. We are confronting the fact that through a range of settler colonial processes, the Wagunk have been largely written out of history and erased – so this too is a decolonizing project.
In terms of your question about academic scholarship and activism – I think this sort of development is one that can embolden community efforts to call on institutions located on Wangunk homelands to establish the right relations with living descendants. In refusing what Patrick Wolfe theorized as “the logic of elimination of the native,” which undergirds settler colonialism, we can move beyond land acknowledgements and support the land back movement, as just one example.
OA: Parallel to the abstraction of decolonization I’ve mentioned earlier, especially in the context of conversations about settler colonialism, indigeneity is often narrowly confined to a very particular North American imaginary. This is true of both cynical discourses as well as ones we might instinctively think of as emancipatory — I’m thinking here of Mililani Trask’s “we-are-not-Indians” speech with which you open your book Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty, echoing the late Yasser Arafat’s proclamation a decade earlier. Your comparative work on indigeneity urges us to challenge this imaginary. Could you elaborate on why it is important to push against these narrow conceptions of indigeneity and settler colonialism?
JJK: Although he could have put it in different terms, I think Arafat was speaking to the question of political subordination that Native Americans continue to face in legal and other structural terms imposed by the U.S. government. I understand indigeneity as a category of analysis and identifying or being identified as Indigenous as a political condition as much as it is a cultural claim of having a distinct relationship to land (for starters) – one forged through many forms of violence and interaction. Nonetheless, there is vast diversity in the Indigenous world. According to the United Nations, there are more than 476 million Indigenous people spread across 90 countries worldwide. But in terms of the structural dimensions, I think the definition proposed by UN Special Rapporteur Jose Martinez Cobo in 1981 is still useful, defining Indigenous peoples as “those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that have developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them.”
In terms of the second part of your question regarding settler colonialism, I understand it as a distinct form of colonialism that is eliminatory – with land expropriate as the central goal for a settler population intending to entirely replace the Indigenous one. I draw from the theoretical works of both Fayez Sayegh and Patrick Wolfe. In other words, I do not use it merely to refer to any colony with settlers. In any case, whether Palestinians identify as Indigenous or not, Israel actively continues to treat them as such – as one can see witnessing the horrors of the ongoing Nakba – the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.
The questions you raise are also ones I’m confronting as I am currently guest editing a special issue of Native American and Indigenous Studies (the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association). The organizing theme is “Enduring Palestine: Critical Interventions in Native American and Indigenous Studies.” The volume is scheduled for publication in Spring 2025 and promises to advance critical considerations of: global Indigenous studies; convergences and solidarities; and resistance and decolonization.
OA: Your current book project, “A Question of Decolonization: Hawaiian Women and the Dilemma of Feminism,” explores the role of mana wahine (women power) in the context of Kanaka Maoli women’s nationalist activism in Hawai’i and its implications for understanding feminism and decolonization. Could you discuss how this relates to your previous work on sovereignty and your critique of nation-statehood in Hawai’i? And how does mana wahine challenge some established practices and conceptions of the relationship between gender, power, and activism within indigenous and feminist studies, specifically in the face of the moment we find ourselves in?
JKK: My manuscript in-progress is provisionally titled, “A Question of Decolonization: Hawaiian Women and the Dilemma of Feminism.” In it, I’m exploring the politics of Kanaka Maoli women’s nationalist activism from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, and the reclamation of mana wahine (women’s power, spiritual energy, strength) as part of that mobilization. I’m specifically looking at politicized projects of reconstruction created through assessing and accessing sources of knowledge about gender roles and relationships that are considered part of a Hawaiian tradition understood to be egalitarian (albeit within different genealogical ranks). One of the questions I’m working on is how a reliance on an understanding of mana wahine – particularly the legacy of female deities and women chiefs – has served to authorize the Kanaka Maoli women’s activism and leadership in the nationalist struggle. The book project critically engages the concept of feminism vis-à-vis the political task of decolonization. What is curious to me is how a new generation of Kanaka Maoli activists and scholars have been deploying the concept of mana wahine as a gloss for “Hawaiian feminism,” whereas I suggest that they are not one in the same. My point is not to police the use of the terms (nor to discount feminisms) but rather to insist that they have different meanings and genealogies – and emerge from distinct epistemes.
OA: The first course you’ll be teaching here at Princeton, Decolonizing Indigenous Genders and Sexualities, is concerned with the context of the Pacific Islands and North America. What questions do you hope to encourage your students to explore in depth?
JKK: In Spring 2025, I will be teaching a 400-level seminar, “Decolonizing Indigenous Genders and Sexualities.” The class will focus on the politics of decolonization in a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania beginning with an historical exploration of how colonial processes, along with other forms of domination that have imposed models of normative (often binary) gender subjectivities and relations and notions of “proper” sexual behavior. The class will also critically interrogate how Indigenous self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual differences through nationalist movements that sustain masculinist and homophobic agendas. To get at these developments and problematics, we will be engaging new works in decolonial theory, Native feminisms and decolonial feminisms, as well as Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous studies.
Other courses (undergraduate and graduate), I plan to teach a class in the future include: “Global Indigeneities” and “Landback! Indigenous Sovereignty Politics.” For those, I’m hoping we can do field trips to New York City to attend the annual UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. I should also mention that this summer, after I attended the annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in Bodø, Norway, I traveled to Copenhagen to meet with key people at the International Working Group of Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). This included a brainstorming session on how students might get involved in some of the documentation projects for their Land Defense and Defenders program and contribute to future IWGIA Annual Reports. Lots of exciting possibilities that could go in a number of directions!