Nā wāhine mana: a postcolonial reading of classroom discourse on the imperial rescue of oppressed Hawaiian women

Abstract

‘White men are saving brown women from brown men.’ Gayatri Spivak suggests that this phrase is for her as fundamental for an investigation of colonial dynamics as Freud’s formulation ‘a child is being beaten’ was for his inquiry into sexuality. Through a deconstructive interrogation of elementary Hawaiian history textbooks, Hawaiian studies curricula and Hawaiian studies classroom conversations, this paper examines how the colonial myth of oppressed indigenous women who were liberated through colonization continues to be perpetuated and sustained in postcolonial classrooms today. Drawing from traditional Hawaiian and Foucaultian methods of genealogy, the author disrupts the dominant narrative of progress and increased civilization for Hawaiian women through colonization, and proposes a counter‐narrative of traditionally powerful Hawaiian women, whose political and domestic autonomy were severely challenged and gradually eroded with the imposition of Euro‐American forms of government and Christian‐American domestication.