In this collection of essays, Native Hawaiian and settler contributors examine Asian settler colonialism as a constellation of the colonial ideologies and practices of Asian Americans as settlers who currently support the broader structure of the U.S. I have 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). Praxis is a critical part of my research, and I am 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. My 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. Kilo cultivates a decolonial love for lands, seas and skies that transforms climate events into renewed possibilities for abundance. Kilo is the intergenerational observation of the elemental forms, recording the laws of these forms in moʻolelo (storied history), oli (chants) and mele (song). 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. In this way, mapping abundance refuses to succumb to capital’s logic that we have passed an apocalyptic threshold of no return. 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. 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. The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. By contrast, mapping abundance is an urgent insistence on life in the face of corporate-induced climate change.

Capital fears abundance because it must manufacture the perception of scarcity to generate markets. 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.

Detours a decolonial guide to hawaii