Writing Settlement: Locating Asian-Indigenous Relations in the Pacific

Abstract

A & Q 25 Writing Settlement: Locating Asian–­ Indigenous Relations in the Pacific Yu-­ting Huang I In June 1978, in a weekly column in the New York Times, Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston described buying her first house with husband Earll Kingston in Hawai‘i. The essay was later reprinted in her 1999 essay collection Hawai‘i One Summer as the opening chapter to the volume of various reflections about life on the islands. But the essay was not a celebration of ownership or homecoming; instead, Kingston’s account featured her unrelenting anxiety about settlement—­about settlement pure and simple and about settlement on land stolen from the indigenous peoples. Kingston began the essay reminiscing about her former commitment to a sort of radical nomadism, when she was actively participating in antiwar activism in the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “In politics, the householder doesn’t say, ‘Burn it down to the ground.’ I had never become a housewife. I didn’t need to own land to belong on this planet” (Kingston 1999, 3). Ownership compromises, declared Kingston . But when political activism failed to dissuade the government from war, Kingston escaped from California to Hawai‘i “to have a place for meeting when the bombs fall and to write in a garret” (5). Ownership became more tolerable in political pessimism, and she reasoned, “If we owned a vacant lot somewhere, when the world ends, we can go there to sleep or sit” (5). As it turned out, it was not possible for Kingston to escape the demands on her political convictions so easily. At the escrow office, the Kingstons received papers detailing the history of the land, reminding them that the supposedly “vacant lot” in Kingston’s defeated political dream was once Native Hawaiian land1 —­ land that was parceled out, severed, and sold as private titles to American settlers in the 1840s, when King Kamehameha III adopted private ownership in the face of increasing U.S. and other foreign encroachments, in the hope that such measures could help preserve territorial and national sovereignty among Native Hawaiians.2 But as Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa (1992), Noenoe K. Silva (2004), and others have shown, the partition of Hawaiian land into private titles led to more steady erosion of Hawaiian sovereignty throughout the nineteenth century , leading up to the 1893 illegal overthrow of Queen Lili‘kuokalani, the 1898 annexation, and the 1959 incorporation of Hawai‘i into the Union, 26 A & Q shortly before a United Nations resolution could have created a pathway for Hawaiian independence—­ all amid vigorous Native Hawaiian protests.3 So today, Native Hawaiians are a demographic minority on their ancestral land by official counting, whereas Asians and whites have come to overwhelm them in numbers.4 In other words, the land that the Kingstons purchased was anything but vacant. Its title as private property was implicated in the history of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, the living testimony of U.S. imperialism that Kingston had so fervently protested back in the Mainland. “We don’t belong on it,” Earll Kingston declared, while Maxine Hong Kingston attempted to reason her way through the purchase: “I rationalized , isn’t all land Israel? No matter what year you claim it, the property belongs to a former owner who has good moral reason for a claim? We, for example, have right to go to China and say we own our farm, the one piece of property in the world that has belonged to our family since unrecorded history? Ridiculous, isn’t it?” (Kingston 1999, 8). Punctuated with question marks, these musings were never confirmed or rejected in the essay. The questions of belonging on stolen indigenous land lingered, as the essay continued to describe Kingston setting up her writing desk and laying down mattresses in the empty house with her husband and son. The ensuing essays in the column and in Hawai‘i One Summer go on to record Kingston’s encounter with the spirited land of Hawai‘i and her sense of being an outsider vis-­à-­vis the Native and Local communities in Hawai‘i.5 II The lingering questions signal to me that Kingston was not certain of the comparisons...