Relocating Philippine “kapwa” or community in the Hawaiian estuary to a “spirit of relationality” for aloha ‘āina
By relocating Filipino collectivist philosophies in Hawaiian space/place, I contest the U.S. military and imperial hold on Hawai‘i in relation with Philippine settler positionalities and kuleana (“accountability”) through fisherfolk practices and other food sovereignties.
In my work I theorize a “spirit of relationality” for decolonial convergence towards Indigenous resurgence in the estuary or intertidal shoreline as a “travelling” framework for intercommunal place-based solidarities. When relating place-thought like aloha ‘āina (“love of the land”) to climate justice in other migrant or diaspora spaces outside of Indigenous Hawaiian place, I felt the need to reinsert “spirit” without appropriating “aloha” or other Indigenous thought/being out of its context.
From a postcolonial non-Indigenous Filipina perspective, I argue that the interbeing with the tides and ocean is buoyed and animated by the spirits in-between. In relocating Filipino kapwa or “community” within philosophies of water, swimming, and breathing, I interpret ways of knowing and ways of being towards ways of doing “community.” Through meaning-making with Hegelian philosophy of religion and “community of Spirit,” I term this as “spirit of relationality,” based on my own Filipina-German triangulation. This appears to approximate what Hawaiians enact as “aloha” and “aloha ‘āina” in Indigenous place-based epistemologies to Hawai‘i. The unintended approximation concludes a need for spiritual relation that was removed in Euroamerican frameworks of communalism to enact community.
Kapwa or kapuwa refers to relating (ka-) to a shared space/gap (p(u)wa or puwang) as theorized in Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology). With regard to the 500 years of colonization onto an archipelagic territory of diverse ethnicities, I utilize kapwa with a diasporic and Manila-centric meaning-making of my own experiential knowing/being, and do not intend to “re-Indigenize” a sense of Filipinoness. However, in seeking analogies to Hawaiian wā spacetime by triangulation of philosophies of spirit and community, parallels appear to be implicit, especially when centered in the space of the intertidal estuary.
In solidarity with decolonial Indigenous resurgence, I re-infuse what I term a “ghost” (pneuma) epistemology into collectivist kapwa ontology. This relationality goes beyond structures of Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i to seek affinities through material conditions and towards common cause of decolonization, abolition, and climate action. The amphibious mangrove in the Hawaiian estuary illustrates the material and metaphorical colonization hindering Kanaka Maoli fishing practices and food sovereignty, while being pushed elsewhere as a bioshield of climate defense. With Pneumaterialist metaphors of “breath” or “spirit” and symbiotic processes of carbon and oxygen exchange in the estuary, I theorize intercommunal spaces for collectivist action as “spiritually” dynamic and relational.
Terri Keko‘olani further evokes Epeli Hau’ofa’s “sea of islands” in “casting a net of inter connection” across the Moana Nui. For my focus on solidarities between Asian settlers and Kānaka Maoli, this kaona or metaphor of a fishnet becomes material to the mutual fishing practices and other acts of decolonial solidarity. The fishnet also depicts an imagery of the interspatial relationality here, with the net itself holding the catch, but the abundant catch only coming together through the spaces-in-between and the flow of water.
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