Indigenous placemaking amidst settler colonial leisure: A tale of Hawaiʻi's living parks

Abstract

What does the production of public leisure space tell us about the 20th century mechanics of settler colonial dispossession? In the second half of the twentieth century, the nascent State of Hawaii expanded and developed its state parks system in an effort to enhance public leisure and natural resource conservation. In turn, several sites acquired for park facilities also catalyzed evictions and removals of the local and Indigenous people who lived there. This essay tracks the emergence of a compromise (attempted and in one case, successfully) to create a 'living park' in which residents would remain so that they might educate the public on traditional Native Hawaiian lifeways. This essay describes how midcentury park development did the work of Indigenous removal and erasure by neutralizing and democratizing park space: state-funded leisure space for all radically precluded Indigenous placemaking at a time when Kanaka Maoli communities felt the generational effects of American assimilation most acutely. Ultimately, this essay builds upon scholarly critiques leveraged against conservation politics in order to reveal the dispossessive logics bound up in the envisioning of settler colonial leisure space. Such an understanding offers fresh insight into the violences that occur when space is rendered ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’ and explores the decolonial possibilities embedded in Indigenous placemaking beyond leisure.