Ikaika Ramones

IKAIKA RAMONES, then a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Bureaucracy and Social Movements: Native Hawaiian Philanthrocapitalism and Indigenous Nation-Building,” supervised by Dr. Fred Myers. This grant supported twelve months of dissertation research in Hawai_i, focused on the political economy and institutionalization of Native Hawaiian movements and social reproduction. The research concerns how Indigenous polities pursue fundamental social transformation while constituted within the same structures that facilitate dispossession. Generations of Native Hawaiians have led a massive regeneration of Indigenous cultural forms, language revitalization, land-based practices, ancestral knowledge, and political activity. Many have celebrated these movements, while this research explores the material basis and political economy that supports and constrains such movements. This research examines how Indigeneity is made to endure, while also undergoing internal change within its shifting material and historical conditions. Ethnographic research by a Native Hawaiian anthropologist engaged actors working in elite Indigenous institutions, as well as those organizing at the grassroots level. The research reveals how actors managed contradictory entanglements with capitalism and settler state control, all while furthering different conceptions of Hawaiian-ness. Along the way, the project reveals how Indigeneity itself is contested in the processes of its own reproduction.