Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i by Candace Fujikane (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i by Candace Fujikane Mary Tuti Baker (bio) Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i by Candace Fujikane Duke University Press, 2021 THE ACT OF MAPPING ABUNDANCE for a planetary future is audacious and necessary for planetary survival. Candace Fujikane works toward this goal in Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i. "The struggle for a planetary future," she argues, "calls for a profound epistemological shift" from economies of scarcity to economies of abundance (3). To engage this shift, she takes readers on a journey along fault lines of capitalist economies of subdivision and accumulation that are laying waste the 'aina (land, that which feeds) and she maps the procreative pathways of abundance through Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) stories of resistance, struggle, and transformative social practice. Her analysis of this epistemological shift uses two parallel cartographic methodologies: Kanaka Maoli mo'o'āina cartography and critical settler cartography—interlaced methodologies that she frames with the following questions: How are the exhausted cartographies of capital being transformed by the vibrant cartographies of Indigenous and settler ally artists, scientists, writers, and activists to restore more sustaining arrangements of life? How can abundance be mapped to show functioning Indigenous economies not premised on the crises of capital? How are lands mapped as an ontology—a life, a will, a desire, and an agency—of their own? How can such cartographies help us to grow a decolonial love for lands, seas and skies that will help to renew abundance on this earth? (4) She addresses these questions through a thoughtful study of mo'olelo (storied histories), cutting analysis of the failures of the occupying state, and loving interactions with Kanaka Maoli whose work on the land and in community bring ancestral knowledge and values to bear in the present to engender future economies of abundance. Fujikane's work begins with critical settler cartography that critiques "the toxic logics and imaginaries of late liberal settler colonial cartography" and then moves into the "expansiveness of Kanaka Maoli cartographies that map familial relationality among humans, lands, and elemental forms, plant [End Page 156] and animal 'ohana (family)" (17–18). These cartographies are set in motion as we traverse the storied landscapes laid out in each of the six chapters. The battle plays out again and again between ancestral knowledge and practice and the practices of wastelanding that destroy relationships with 'aina in order to possess it. The text is dense. Her lyrical writing moves readers deftly through the details of a mo'olelo into a topography of complex land formations that echo and support the claims of stewardship and protection embedded in the stories. A full appreciation of the many references to and invocations of Kanaka Maoli mo'olelo, wahi pana (storied places) and the ancestral knowledge and cultural practices of her companions on the journey requires a careful reading of the text. I wonder if some of the richness of her analysis might be lost to readers outside of Hawai'i and those who do not have direct visceral experience of the elemental forces and ancestors she invokes. Fujikane identifies as a settler aloha 'āina. Aloha 'āina is a highly politicized positionality in contemporary Hawai'i. It is both the act of loving and caring for the land and one who practices aloha 'āina. The term emerged in Hawai'i politics during Kanaka Maoli resistance to settler rule in the nineteenth century and the descendants of these Kānaka Maoli declare allegiance to the sovereign Hawaiian nation with the phrase "until the last aloha 'aina." To what degree can settler aloha 'āina be included in this accounting? There will always be an incommensurable difference between settler and native subjectivity. In the book's introduction, Fujikane engages in a frank assessment of the challenges of this incommensurability. Settler aloha 'aina must navigate the discomfort and, as she maintains, commit to a shift in consciousness with respect to land-based knowledge. It necessitates growing "an intimacy with land that brings about more pono (just, balanced, and generationally...