Dialogical heritage practices at Kahalu’u bay and Keauhou, Hawaiʻi island

ABSTRACT

This essay critically analyzes cultural and natural heritage of Kahalu`u Bay and Keauhou on the west coast of Hawai`i Island, which prospered as the royal centre from roughly A.D.1500 through the 1800s, through the lens of Hawaiian `ike (acceptance of knowledge diversity). Knowledge sources used here are archaeological reports, oral narratives, literature by contemporary Hawaiian scholars, organised into mo`olelo (Hawaiian story, oral history), as well as interviews. Similar to `ike, mo`olelo are alive and adapt to changing times, as seen here through a dialogical model of heritage and ontology of connectivity between multiple stakeholders, human and other-than-human. The analysis focuses on two case scenarios which open hybrid fora between human, Indigenous, land-based, institutional, and business agents. Although this heritage landscape has been sculpted and reordered by the tourism industry and remains entrapped in the late capitalist system, the framework of dialogical heritage brings the potential of co-production of new knowledge as well as new ways of thinking about heritage shaping and thus provides alternatives to Western colonial extractive practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Hawai`i
• landscapes
• archaeology
• colonialism
• tourism
• indigenous knowledge

Acknowledgements

I want to express my deep gratitude to my Native Hawaiian collaborators and teachers Kumu Keala Ching and Rolinda “Welu” Bean. They gave me the gift of their time to teach me to begin to see the world from a deeper Hawaiian perspective. Without their feedback in many conversations and email exchanges, this article would not have grown. I also express many thanks to the School of Art and Design at East Carolina University for supporting financially part of my field travel and to Rob Howard in the Geography Department who taught me ArcGIS Story Maps with perseverance and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In 2021, the Hawai`i Tourism Authority launched their Malama (take care) ʻĀina Hawai`i campaign as one strategy to regrow tourism at the end of the pandemic. This campaign mixes aspects of Indigenous knowledge with marketing tactics to educate about and simultaneously commodify Hawaiian land/ʻāina (https://hawaiitourismauthority.org/news/news-releases/2021/hawaii-tourism-authority-launches-educational-malama-hawaii-campaign/).

2. The Hawaiian concept of ʻāina appears to be similar to the Australian notion of country (Harrison 2013, 211–212). Similarities of this kind point to parallels between Indigenous knowledge systems.

3. Amy Greenwell spent much of her adult life studying Hawaiian botany and traditional culture. When she died in 1974, she left her property at Captain Cook to the Bishop Museum as an educational and cultural resource for locals and visitors.

4. For example, chief Ke`eaumoku Papa`iahiahi and his wife Nāmāhāna`i lived at Po`o Hawai`i; about 1791, their son chief Ka-lua-i-Konahale was born at Kahalu`u, probably in Po`o Hawai`i. Kamakau (1961, 388) adds that at this birth, there was a great hula at Kahalu`u, attended by a female cousin of Ke`eaumoku, to whom the child was given … and ‘ … with him the land Keauhou’, where she raised the chief.

The adult Ka-lua-i-Konahale was given the more familiar name Kuakini and later became known as John Adams: he was governor of Hawai`i Island from 1820 until his death at Hulihe`e Palace, Kailua, in December of 1844. According to Kekahuna (1952), Kuakini’s bones were prepared for burial at his stone house at Po`o Hawai`i by the Lana`i of Kapuanoni Heiau.

5. Such statements need to be verified.

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Notes on contributors

Jessica Christie

Jessica Christie My work has always been multi-disciplinary approaching visual culture through methodologies from Art History, Archaeology, and Anthropology. My Master’s thesis at the University of Texas in Austin explored the Pecos pictographs in West Texas. On the doctoral level, my focus shifted toward the ancient Maya and performance space of their Period Ending ceremonies. During my career as professor at East Carolina University, I have published about Maya palaces and elite residences (2003, 2006). Since 2009, I have turned toward landscape studies in the Americas (Landscapes of Origin, 2009) as well as with a world-wide focus in the co-edited volume Political Landscapes of Capital Cities (2016). My single-authored book Memory Landscapes of the Inka Sculpted Outcrops (2016) brought Inka carved rock complexes to life from before the Spanish invasion to the present. More recently, my theoretical focus is strongly shifting toward the wide impacts of Colonialism and questions of how to de-colonize as we interweave the past with the present for a sustainable future. This is a major objective of my recent book Earth Politics of Cultural Landscapes and Intangible Heritage: Three Case Studies in the Americas (2021, University Press of Florida). I am working on parallel heritage studies in Hawai`i and in the Maya area driven by my interests in bringing together different knowledge systems.