Becoming Hoa: Indigenous Political Thought and the Question of Settler Aloha 'Āina in Hawai'i

Abstract: How is Indigenous-settler solidarity to protect interconnected social ecologies urgent yet altogether precarious? The essay stews on this question in the context of Hawai'i and, through immanent critique of theories about settler aloha 'āina, demonstrates that becoming hoa provides a necessary alternative practice and dialectic process of binding relations together to aloha 'āina. First, I elaborate on Kanaka Maoli conceptualizations of aloha 'āina to foreground the investigation in Indigenous political thought and therein launch an immanent critique of settler aloha 'āina. Second, I examine the question of settler aloha 'āina to explore what it means, and its political and ethical implications concerning solidarity. I contend that the "settler" of settler aloha 'āina undermines Indigenous political thought by obscuring aloha 'āina. Third, I argue that becoming hoa is an alternative mode of solidarity to being settler aloha 'āina. Beyond contributing to critical interdisciplinary scholarship on Hawai'i, the analysis is useful for researching other contexts wherein non-Indigenous theorists, discourses, and movements deploy "settler" as a qualified additive to Indigenous worldviews and practices toward cultivating solidarity with Indigenous peoples on their territories. Settler liberal humanism's attachment to Indigenous worldviews and practices should be reconsidered even as it clings tightly to the language of solidarity.