This thesis investigates the role of Native Hawaiians in contemporary non-profit industry fueled collaborations with state, federal and corporate institutions, using the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement's (CNHA) annual convention as a site that illuminates the shaping of an ideal mode of citizenship for Native Hawaiians. At stake in such a study is how indigenous political practice can find other modes of expression beyond achieving legal recognition on terms set by the United States, which are always limited by the settler colonial legacy of the nation state's founding and continuing present. CNHA, as a key player in Hawai'i's non-profit industrial complex in Hawaiì, importantly shapes not only the discourse surrounding federal recognition legislation for Native Hawaiians through its support of the Akaka Bill, but also broader understandings of Native Hawaiian subjectivity and sovereignty. Thus this thesis also addresses the interplay between the bureaucratic and middle-class nature of CNHA and the contesting articulations of sovereignty championed by those who protest CNHA. This allows me to address the gendered and racialized logics at play in the multiple processes of Native Hawaiian subject formation, at CNHA and in the other more "radical" sovereignty spaces. The thesis considers how Native Hawaiian political praxis can be regenerated in the face of various legacies of colonial and patriarchal blood quantum policies.

This dissertation analyzes how scientific knowledge has represented the Polynesian race as an essentially mixed, "almost white" race. Nineteenth and twentieth century scientific literature--spanning the disciplines of ethnology, physical anthropology, sociology and genetics-- positioned Polynesians as the biological relatives of Caucasians. Scientific proof of this relationship allowed scientists, policymakers, and popular media to posit European and American settler colonialism in the Pacific as a peaceful and natural fulfillment of a biological destiny. Understanding knowledge as an important agent of settler colonial possession--in the political as well as supernatural, haunting connotations of that word--this project seeks to understand how Polynesians (with a particular focus on Native Hawaiians) have been bodily "possessed," along with the political and economic possession of their lands. Thus, the project traces a logic of "possession through whiteness" in which Polynesians were once, and under the salutary influence of settler colonialism, will again be white. The project's analysis coheres around four figures of the "almost white" Polynesian race: the ancestrally white Polynesian of ethnology and Aryanism (1830s-1870s), the Part-Hawaiian of physical anthropology and eugenics (1910s-1920s), the mixed-race "Hawaiian girl" of sociology (1930s-1940s), and the mixed-race, soon-to-be white (again) Polynesian of genetics, whose full acceptance in Hawai'i seemed to provide a model of racial harmony to the world (1950s). Rather than attempting to uncover "racist" scientific practices, the project reveals how historical scientific literature produced knowledge about the Polynesian race that remains important in how Native Hawaiians are recognized (and misrecognized) in contemporary scientific, legal and cultural spheres. In addition to the historical analysis, the project also examines contemporary Native Hawaiian responses to the logic of possession through whiteness. These include regenerative actions that radically displace whiteness, such as contemporary relationship building between Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. At the same time, other regenerative actions attempt to reproduce Native Hawaiian-ness with a standard of racial purity modeled on whiteness, including legal fights waged over blood quantum legislation. Overall, the project provides a scientific genealogy as to how Polynesians have been recognized as "almost white," and questions under what conditions this possessive recognition can be refused