Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai‘i. By Candace Fujikane and C.M. Kaliko Baker

Abstract

While many utopian plans have sought to incorporate or adopt Indigenous social and ecological frameworks, Fujikane pushes readers into the depths of what such visions mean in terms of actual relational and reciprocal actions. The book represents an ambitious fusion akin to combining the projects of Vine Deloria’s God Is Red, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The book follows the protocols of Hawaiian genealogy and responsibilities. The lineages are human and familial, but also non-human and intellectual. Every chapter and subsection begins with stories and bits of cosmology, which are juxtaposed with settler colonial assumptions that normalize environmental degradations. Mapping Abundance takes a firm stand on an Indigenous-centered “ecological” approach to how we learn from and live with the planet, with glancing critiques of how capitalism disrupts and distorts human responsibilities to one another and the wider world. Plants, animals, winds, rocks, and mountains are centered. Fujikane effectively explains how water—as fog drip, rain, clouds, streams, fishponds, aquifers, and ocean—is interwoven and integrated into every aspect of the human and non-human realities on the islands.