He Inoa 'Ala: Scent, Memory, and Identity in Indigenous Comics

Abstract

Abstract: More than any other of the bodily senses, Native Hawaiians rely on scent to navigate the world around us: it is the form through which we understand the language of the land and by extension, one another. It is the means through which we maintain memories and preserve stories, tucked away between the blossoms of fragrant flowers and billowing from plumes of volcanic sulfur and steam. How do we share these stories in a way more aligned with the worldview of our ancestors while still utilizing the power and pervasiveness of contemporary media? How do we confront the historiographical challenges of reproducing these storytelling landscapes radically altered by settler colonialism, including the loss of language and environmental destruction? My paper, "He Inoa 'Ala: Scent, Memory, and Identity in Indigenous Comics," is a graphic essay that explores the potential sensory aesthetics has in developing a uniquely Native Hawaiian approach to creating comics and graphic novels. Through real-time trial and error, this paper is an active series of experimentations to discover where the visual and pictorial language of comics and the layered storytelling experiences of Hawaiian mo'olelo–place-based storied histories–productively meld together and strengthen the formal qualities of one another. Spiraling through historical analysis of colonial deodorization in the form of the 19th century sandalwood trade and weaving in and out of personal narrative, "He Inoa 'Ala" is my attempt to push the boundaries of both cartooning and scholarly writing, all in the effort to discover creative methods that can be used to illustrate an entirely new genre of Indigenous graphic literature.