Amber Kela Chong

This project follows Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) residents’ everyday labor of resisting land dispossession. On the north shore of Kaua‘i, tourism represents the most recent iteration of settler colonial incursion and induces myriad processes of development, displacement, and environmental destruction that threaten to push Kānaka Maoli out of the region. In particular, amenity migration and the influx of vacation homes force residents to constantly navigate an exacerbating housing crisis, diminishing land access, and severely inflated costs of living. My ethnographic fieldwork will explore “the politics of staying home” by focusing on the material and imagined forms of home that emerge through residents’ struggles against dispossession. Whereas literature on Indigenous resistance and sovereignty movements largely foregrounds eruptive moments of mass protest, I examine two active struggles for home taken up by individuals and families to understand how pursuits of sovereignty unfold at this scale. I propose that the construction of “home” is fundamentally linked to that of “homeland” in the context of US occupation, and is thus bound up with claims to Indigenous nationhood and territory. By drawing out the political and ecological relationalities expressed through different notions of home, I hope to bring new dimensions to existing theories of sovereignty.