Session 32: “Elemental Cartographies: Mapping Restoration Along the Waterways of Moʻo Reptilian Protectors, from Mauna Kea to Lahaina.”

Environmental Humanities Workshop, LARCA UMR 8225 –June, 13, 5pm, room 830, Olympe de Gouges Building. Candace Fujikane (U. of Hawaï), “Elemental Cartographies: Mapping Restoration Along the Waterways of Moʻo Reptilian Protectors, from Mauna Kea to Lahaina.”

Dear colleagues,

The Environmental Humanities Workshop at LARCA invites Candace Fujikane from the University of Hawai.

Her talk is titled:  “Elemental Cartographies: Mapping Restoration Along the Waterways of Moʻo Reptilian Protectors, from Mauna Kea to Lahaina.”

Aurore Clavier (LARCA) and Karin Louise Hermes will be respondents.

We hope to see you there!

Candace Fujikane teaches at the University of Hawai. Her writing and research engage synchronic sets of practices: those that challenge the operations of the US occupying/settler state, and those that enact a future beyond it. Praxis is a critical part of her research, and she is actively involved in land struggles against urban and industrial development of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi sacred and storied places in Lualualei Valley, Waiāhole, Kalihi and Mauna Kea, as well as in other places where people live their vision of an independent and sustainable Hawai‘i.

She has co-edited with Jonathan Okamura Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

In this collection of essays, Native Hawaiian and settler contributors examine Asian settler colonialism. Premised on a critical distinction between Hawaiians, who have a genealogical connection to land in Hawai‘i, and non-Hawaiians, who are settlers whose genealogical ties lie elsewhere, the contributors examine Asian settler colonialism in essays ranging from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers’ representations of Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.

Her new book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi, was published by Duke University Press in 2021.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/mapping-abundance-for-a-planetary-future

In this era of late liberal settler colonialism, cartography as a methodology is critical to rearticulating our radically contingent relationships with the living lands, seas, and skies. Capital fears abundance because it must manufacture the perception of scarcity to generate markets. By contrast, mapping abundance is an urgent insistence on life in the face of corporate-induced climate change. The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for movements against climate change, one based on Indigenous economies of abundance as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. As settler colonial cartographies map thresholds between life and nonlife in ways that have devastating effects for the planet, these exhausted cartographies of capital are being transformed by the cartographies of Kanaka Maoli and settler ally artists, writers, and activists who map abundance, knowing that restorative changes have exponential effects. In this way, mapping abundance refuses to succumb to capital’s logic that we have passed an apocalyptic threshold of no return. Vital to decolonial futures is the Kanaka Maoli art of kilo as it is practiced at restoration projects in Hawaiʻi at taro pondfields, fishponds, and waterways. Kilo is the intergenerational observation of the elemental forms, recording the laws of these forms in moʻolelo (storied history), oli (chants) and mele (song). Kilo cultivates a decolonial love for lands, seas and skies that transforms climate events into renewed possibilities for abundance.

Karin Louise Hermes is a Filipina-German storyweaver on climate justice, Indigenous rights, and political philosophies. She writes, thinks, and drops seeds of ideas in public media and academic settings, as well as into community spaces. She has an M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with a focus on cultural identities and national consciousness in urban Papua New Guinea, and a B.A. in Ethnology & Sociology from the University of Heidelberg.

Her PhD dissertation titled “Growing Intercommunalist ‘pockets of resistance’ with Aloha ‘Āina in Hawai‘i” is a philosophy of spirit and relationality, which revealed further seeds of theory to tend to in Andean philosophy of “Pacha” and its non-linear and spiral spacetime since. She has lived in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i, and is currently based in Germany.