Ikaika Ramones

This ethnographic book project examines the contradictions, paradoxes, and political economic basis for Native Hawaiian social reproduction and revitalization. By ethnographically studying grassroot revitalization efforts alongside an elite organization that maintains a $15 billion trust, I argue that Indigeneity itself is fundamentally reconstituted in the practices of its reproduction. A dialectical approach provides a different way of understanding Indigeneity, following a series of internal contradictions to build out the underlying dynamics of change in Native Hawaiian society. I theorize the formation of popular grassroots movements and their relationships with the largest Native Hawaiian institution. I propose that histories of racialized eugenics were rearticulated into Indigenous elite fears of class-based degeneracy and economic death, in which Hawaiian culture became positively valorized, yielding what I call “class eugenics.” I then examine the political economy of supporting and constraining efforts for Native Hawaiian thriving, exploring how actors attempted to commensurate, appropriate, protect, or articulate different economic modes and entailed ways of being. I then contend that “Hawaiian culture” functioned as a double-edged sword, one edge depoliticizing Indigenous concerns and another edge producing politicization. Mired in capitalism and settler colonialism, actors redrew fine lines of subversion and complicity in which Indigeneity itself was remade.