UC Irvine

Between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, ali‘i wahine (ruling-class Native Hawaiian women) were mostly excluded from serving in the governments of the Hawaiian Kingdom and Territory of Hawai‘i despite their inherent power and responsibilities of governance. I argue that ali‘i wahine developed alternative paths of political leadership outside of the “formal” government structure. Facing settler colonial encroachment and U.S. imperialism, these women addressed pressing issues affecting the lāhui (Native Hawaiian community) such as maternal health, women’s political participation, and cultural preservation, amongst other needs. They did this by forming women’s clubs and mixed-gender societies that drew opon authoritative genealogical, marital, and social networks.

Their organizing labor resulted in community-based sovereignties in the form of healthcare facilities, schools, social welfare programs, women’s suffrage, and asserting control over cultural practices and historical knowledge production. Transgressing multiple regimes in less than a century’s time, I follow the continuities of ali‘i wahine governance while historicizing Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) sovereignties as ongoing and grounded in community, family, and non-biological kinship rather than anchored to particular nation-state formations. Under the pressures of colonialism and in the urgency of the context, ali‘i wahine organized with and against the settler state and its agents (including their own haole husbands) in expected and unexpected ways.

My research interrogates this history through major themes such as Indigeneity, kinship, race, gender, and class, and across the fields of Hawaiian and Pacific History, Native Feminist Studies, U.S Women’s History, and Decolonial Studies. To investigate how ali‘i wahine built sovereignties beyond the nation-state, I map the uncharted networks of their biological, non-biological, and marital kinship ties. Ali‘i wahine relied on these networks to form their organizations, to solicit donations, and to access particular social or political spaces. Left out and overshadowed in Native Hawaiian political histories, I foreground their life stories and organizational labor by reading, interpreting, and analyzing a diversity of primary sources in both ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) and English; this includes mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogies), newspapers, letters, memoirs, unpublished manuscripts, oral histories, mele (songs), and oli (chants), as well as analyses of visual and material culture.