Place to Place, Space to Space: Huakaʻi Hele as Decolonial Praxis and the Tidalectic Repertoires of Place
The waters and lands of Keaukaha in the Hawaiian archipelago are nutrient-rich, providing life-giving sustenance to those who reside there. The abundance of this place is eluded to in a translation of the name "Keaukaha" as "converging currents." The textual interpretation of this name offers a useful analytic to write about the intersection of time, land, history, and politics in Keaukaha, while the embodied experience of immersing oneself in the cold brackish waters of the area “ground” us to place through fluid means. What else might we learn about specific archipelagic landscapes when we situate our bodies and inquiries within ancestral knowledge preserved in our named places? How do these “roots” offer routes into the Pacific past, waiting to be performed once more? This paper engages these questions by examining two huaka’i hele (trips visiting storied places, known as wahi pana) along Keaukaha's seashore that took place in the 1920s. Weaving together Albert Wendt’s Vā theory with Kamau Braithwaite's concept of tidalectics (as routed into the Pacific by literary scholar Elizabeth Deloughery), Diana Taylor’s concept of the repertoire, and Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s theory of decoloniality, I make the case for recognizing huaka’i hele as a genre of Indigenous Hawaiian history while considering the embodied and textual movements of these kūpuna (elders) across the Keaukaha coastline. Furthermore, I situate Vā theory as a decolonial praxis that performs Wendt’s call to abandon and decenter colonial renderings of Pacific histories (Wendt 1976), a move that also bridges the scholarship arising from Oceania with other contexts resisting the colonial matrix of power that continues to shape our lives in explicit and hidden ways (Quijano 2000). Through this paper, I make the case for the radical, decolonial remembering of the names and stories of ‘āina aloha (beloved lands) that permeate our coastlines and demonstrate the value of place-based theorizing as a means to further develop Vā theory while taking seriously the lived mobilities of our ancestors.
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