Candace Fujikane

In this era of late liberal settler colonialism, cartography as a methodology is critical to rearticulating our radically contingent relationships with the living lands, seas, and skies. Capital fears abundance because it must manufacture the perception of scarcity to generate markets. By contrast, mapping abundance is an urgent insistence on life in the face of corporate-induced climate change. The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for movements against climate change, one based on Indigenous economies of abundance as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. As settler colonial cartographies map thresholds between life and nonlife in ways that have devastating effects for the planet, these exhausted cartographies of capital are being transformed by the cartographies of Kanaka Maoli and settler ally artists, writers, and activists who map abundance, knowing that restorative changes have exponential effects. In this way, mapping abundance refuses to succumb to capital’s logic that we have passed an apocalyptic threshold of no return. Vital to decolonial futures is the Kanaka Maoli art of kilo as it is practiced at restoration projects in Hawaiʻi at taro pondfields, fishponds, and waterways. Kilo is the intergenerational observation of the elemental forms, recording the laws of these forms in moʻolelo (storied history), oli (chants) and mele (song). Kilo cultivates a decolonial love for lands, seas and skies that transforms climate events into renewed possibilities for abundance. My writing and research engage synchronic sets of practices: those that challenge the operations of the US occupying/settler state, and those that enact a future beyond it. Praxis is a critical part of my research, and I am actively involved in land struggles against urban and industrial development of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi sacred and storied places in Lualualei Valley, Waiāhole, Kalihi and Mauna Kea, as well as in other places where people live their vision of an independent and sustainable Hawai‘i. I have co-edited with Jonathan Okamura Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). In this collection of essays, Native Hawaiian and settler contributors examine Asian settler colonialism as a constellation of the colonial ideologies and practices of Asian Americans as settlers who currently support the broader structure of the U.S. settler state. Premised on a critical distinction between Hawaiians, who have a genealogical connection to land in Hawai‘i, and non-Hawaiians, who are settlers whose genealogical ties lie elsewhere, the contributors examine Asian settler colonialism in essays ranging from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers’ representations of Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts. My book, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi, is forthcoming form Duke University Press in 2021.
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Honolulu, HI  96822