HB 645, Settler Sexuality, and the Politics of Local Asian Domesticity in Hawai‘i

Abstract

Hawai‘i House Bill 645 proposed a permitting system to allow local residents to fish overnight at Ka‘ena Point, the northwestern tip of O’ahu. The bill is a response to a State Department of Land and Natural Resources regulation against ‘camping paraphernalia’ in wildlife sanctuaries, which effectively prohibited overnight fishing at Ka‘ena. If they allow camping in state parks, State administrators caution, ‘tent-cities’ and the dangerous people who live in them may spring up and threaten nesting native birds and tourists. Local fishers, who are and are not Native Hawaiian, protested the regulations as colonial impositions by the ‘tourists’ who run the Department of Land and Natural Resources, incursions against their State-protected traditional cultural lifestyles, and they sought to differentiate themselves from homeless persons who are supposedly the real threat to the wildlife sanctuaries. This paper considers how this situation arises under the rubric of Asian settler colonialism, a framework that identifies the complicity of Asian settlers with the colonial dispossession of Hawaiians. Many ‘homeless’ in this area are Hawaiian and many of the State’s protections are explicitly afforded to Hawaiian traditions. To approach local fisher land use struggles, I propose ‘settler sexuality’ as an optic through which claims to Hawai‘i as a ‘home’ diffract into workings of colonial power.