Urban Aloha ʻĀina: subverting property in occupied Hawaiʻi

This thesis aims to disrupt the hegemonic hold that settler property relations have on our understandings of property and ownership by reconsidering the question of urban housing justice as intimately entangled with Indigenous relations of belonging. Drawing from housing justice methodologies, I center lived experiences of housing precarity in two contested places in occupied Hawaii: Puuhonua o Waianae and Kakaako. Through fieldwork and participant observation, I address the following research questions: How does property mediate the boundaries of belonging and home in settler colonial urban space? How do aloha aina and kuleana inform alternative relations of belonging and what effects do these relations have on the politics of property in the settler colonial city? How are Kanaka and settlers engaging property as a means of navigating the politics of recognition and refusal?

In urbanised Hawaii, racial regimes of property founded in dispossessory intent have sought to transform reciprocal, fluid, and genealogical relationships to aina into fungible and alienable private property tenureship increasingly held in the hands of settlers. Legal property regimes are based in the logics of possession and the violence of exclusion. However, property relations are malleable, and property claims can and have been used as strategies to resist dispossession. To this end, I draw heavily from Sarah Keenan's theorizations of property as a "spatially contingent relation of belonging" in order to make analytical space to understand the counterposed property claims made by people experiencing precarity in Kakaako and Waianae. This thesis illustrates that while urban space in Hawaii tends to hold up hegemonic property relations, Kanaka Maoli and settlers have nurtured non-hegemonic relations of belonging rooted in Indigenous relationalities, which, under certain material conditions, are held up as subversive property. Aloha aina (love for land and nation) repoliticizes home and housing as political questions that are inextricably tied to questions of sovereignty and to the persistence of Indigenous ontologies which continue to shape urban space and the relationships that grow within it. Specifically, kuleana, as a practice of reciprocal responsibility, underpins counterposed property claims that are expressed as relations of belonging to aina, and in fact, being an integral part of aina. If the ownership model of property has served to exclude and extract, then kuleana and aloha aina offer a vision of how we think about property in a different way. They remind us that claims to property and belonging can be rooted in responsibility to land, rather than ownership of it.

However, subversive property is not an escape from structures of oppression, and people who maintain non-hegemonic relations of belonging remain deeply embedded within settler capitalist legal property regimes. Property is a mediator of the settler colonial politics of recognition. Therefore, this thesis is also attentive to the ways that settler property regimes work to appropriate and discipline subversive property relations through urban policy and the politics of recognition. By analyzing the multiplicity of ways that settler colonial property regimes intervene in non-hegemonic relations of belonging, I highlight the complex and contradictory entanglements that are generated as Kanaka Maoli and settlers experiencing housing precarity claim space for themselves. Recognition, as always partial, also generates opportunity for its political alternative--refusal.  I argue that the messy entanglements of subversive property illustrate that recognition and refusal are not mutually exclusive politics, and that the multiple and sometimes contradictory strategies employed by people experiencing housing insecurity and urban dispossession are all important tools for surviving the violence of property at the crossroads of race, class, and Indigeneity.

This thesis highlights how kuleana and aloha aina provide a foundation from which to deploy other strategies of resistance, refusal, and recognition that foster survival and resurgence in the context of settler colonial violence. They also provide us with a necessary starting point from which to build alternative imaginaries of property that operate beyond the logics of possession and exclusion.