This essay was originally published in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Volume 12, Issue 1 (Spring 2025), pp.124–138, published by University of Minnesota Press.

ABSTRACT
Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Palestine brings into critical focus the violence embedded in positivist notions of state sovereignty. The narrative highlights the devastating impact of the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation while critiquing the global justification and sustenance of Israel’s genocidal campaign under the guise of “self-defense” and “national security.” While Palestinian intellectuals and activists have effectively challenged these arguments, in this work I attend to the question of Palestinian liberation through a critique of the broader concept of statehood and sovereignty. In doing so I offer an intimate study of precolonial Hawaiian governing practices. By examining the practices of sanctuary via the institution of the Pu‘uhonua (places of refuge), the author suggests an alternative framework where sovereignty can be reimagined, offering a vision that challenges the violent exclusionary practices traditionally associated with statehood. In engaging with these questions, readers are invited to reconsider the meanings of sovereignty in the context of ongoing struggles for collective freedom and liberation.

Rafah burns, and I hold my sleeping son
I look at the pictures
Of children
Their smiling faces torn from the bone
Their laughter evacuated
I watch the videos of burning tents, of flesh floating in the wind I watch them
While I hold my sleeping son on my chest
I feel something like rage
like love
like fear
And shame
And outrage
but this feeling is all this and still something different Something far beyond my emotional vocabulary
I am a poet without language
An empath without root
I am overflowing in something I do not recognize Something like terror
But still not quite that
I am holding my sleeping son
And a man I will never know
But love all the same
Holds up an infant corpse
His beautiful face
Has been carried off with the last of our humanity
Before I can catch myself, I let out a wail
And the sleeping baby in my arms jerks himself awake
And now he cries with me
For Palestine
& the uprooted olive trees
For the shelled hospitals & schools & homes
For the thousands of children
Their parents and loved ones martyred in a smoldering flame For the fathers who gather the severed limbs
like flowers
For the mothers who catch their drifting ashes like
sand caught in a gust of terror
My son and I are here
Under an occupation a whole world away
The flames of Rafah smolder before us
I can feel the heat crackling in my blood
And so, we— my son and I—
fill this silent world with our wails
Both feeling something we can’t quite name

I WRITE THIS INTRODUCTION with one hand on my keyboard and one arm cradling my three- month-old son.¹ My partner was three months pregnant when Israel began this renewed genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in October of 2023. In the time it took for my partner to grow and birth this magnificent child, Israel and its occupation forces have killed approximately 186,000 people,² each and every one of them also someone’s magnificent child. In addition to the rising death toll, Israel’s bombardment has forced tens of thousands of Palestinian women to give birth to their children in a warzone without proper medical attention or supplies,³ children have gone without school and food, and every hospital and school structure within Gaza has been either debilitated or destroyed entirely.⁴ By these figures alone, there is no question that Israel is engaged in a full- blown genocide against the Palestinian people.

All along, Israel and its allies have justified these horrific acts as a part of Israel’s sovereign authority. Israel, they say, “has the right to defend itself.” Palestinian authors, journalists, theorists, lawyers, and artists have effectively undermined these legal and political arguments in countless volumes.⁵ Palestinian freedom fighters have meaningfully demonstrated the way this genocide is simply a continuance of the ongoing Nakba that began in 1948.⁶ Since that work has already been done in a compelling and rigorous fashion, I will attend to a different question. Rather than question whether or not Israel has a right to defend itself, I would like to consider the meaning of statehood and sovereignty altogether. And more than that, I would like to imagine what it would mean for our global liberatory project to transform the meanings and practices of sovereignty beyond a simple and vicious allegiance to state preservation. I will attend to these questions through an analysis of the early Hawaiian Kingdom and its practices of refuge as a critical component of sovereignty with the hope that these mo‘olelo (histories, stories, genealogies, literatures) will be both meaningful and productive in our ongoing struggles toward a liberatory decolonial future.

I take on these questions from this vantage point for a few reasons. That this genocide is done with the wholesale support of my country’s occupier, the U.S. government, is entirely unsurprising. However, what has been endlessly disappointing and shocking is the spectrum of support for Israel coming out of the sovereign Pacific. I have witnessed some of these same nations voting with the genocidal colonizers of the world.⁷ I have reflected and wondered if the sovereignty of my own homeland and beloved country were recognized, would we too vote with the colonizers?

I do not ask this question lightly. I do not mean to say that those in favor of Hawaiian independence are generally supporters of genocide. Instead, I mean to suggest that sovereignty and recognition are seductive beasts that function in ways that encourage those who have them to do anything in their power to protect them, including taking comfort in the proximity to and/or siding with global imperial powers and their violent campaigns.

Evidence of this is seen in the great number of Kānaka Maoli who continue to be both proud of our previous membership in the so-called Family of Nations and aspirational about processes of deoccupation via international legal bodies such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the Permanent Court of Arbitration. I have been perplexed by my own peoples’ continued allegiance to these pillars of imperial sovereignty in the expanding moments of genocides (not only in Palestine but also in West Papua and elsewhere). I have been disturbed by the number of Kānaka Maoli who continue to have faith that the ICJ would restore the Hawaiian kingdom when it cannot stop an ongoing genocide.⁸ These allegiances to a statist sovereignty and belief in the existing structures of power to “restore” and “protect” get at the very center of our perceived Hawaiian exceptionalism and faith in these imperial standards of governance. And while I still wholeheartedly believe that no one is more qualified to govern Hawai‘i than Hawaiians, coming intimately face to face with these violent contradictions of sovereignty and governance amidst a live-streamed genocide has called me to reexamine my own allegiance to dominant ideologies of Hawaiian “sovereignty” and its role (or lack thereof) in a global liberatory struggle. This is partially inspired by our collective inability to leverage our own sovereignties, democracies, and liberatory struggle in successful service of the Palestinian people.

As a Kanaka Maoli scholar, I was taught that the future is in the past (i ka wā ma mua, i ka wa ma hope),⁹ and so I am compelled to look to the past for the critical answers and inspirations to contemporary and future struggles. This had led me to turn to a brief study of the early Hawaiian kingdom and the incorporation of pu‘uhonua (places of refuge and sanctuary) as critical components to its governance. As a Mākua (a parent), my hope is that these mo‘olelo might inspire a new and transformed practice of sovereignty and governance both in our homes, our movements, and in our aspirations for our collective futures. And so, to you all, I humbly offer this essay by beginning with a cherished Hawaiian Mō‘ī Kamehameha Pai‘ea, Hawai‘i’s first “sovereign.”

Hawai‘i’s First Sovereign: Kamehameha

Kamehameha Pai‘ea was born i ka wā ‘ōiwi wale (the time of natives)¹⁰ in the mid-eighteenth century and his political ascension and rule would be marked by rapid transformation due to increasing arrival and settlement of European foreigners beginning in the late eighteenth century. Because of this, Kamehameha straddled a time of incredible prosperity and a devastating decline of Hawaiian life due to introduced foreign disease.¹¹ Most contemporary Kānaka celebrate Kamehameha Pai‘ea as the grandfather of the modern Hawai‘i Kingdom.¹² To all it seems undeniable that Kamehameha was one of the greatest warriors and political strategists that Hawai‘i has ever known. Because of the foundation he established, the kingdom he created would live on, mostly uncontested, until its illegal overthrow by haole businessmen— backed by the U.S. military— in 1893 nearly a century later.

During his rule, Kamehameha was recognized as a devoted and religious mō‘ī. According to nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar Samuel Kamakau,¹³ Kamehameha’s devotion to honoring his war god Kūkā‘ilimoku was instrumental to his success in conquering the Hawaiian Islands.¹⁴ Following his successful campaign, the mō‘ī rededicated all the land reserved for his god Kūkā‘ilimoku to be pu‘uhonua— places of refuge where blood would not be shed. Kamakau describes these pu‘uhonua as places where all transgressions against the ruling powers would be forgiven and the perpetrators offered sanctuary instead of death.¹⁵

In addition to the expansion of pu‘uhonua, Kamehameha is also cele-brated for instituting the Kānāwai Māmalahoe (the kānawai of the splintered paddle).¹⁶ During an expansion expedition in Puna, Kamehameha Pai‘ea’s foot was caught in the pāhoehoe (lava rock) while chasing after a couple of lawai‘a (fishermen) from the area. While Kamehameha was trapped, one of the lawai‘a took his paddle and struck it so forcefully against the head of the future mō‘ī that the paddle was shattered. Such an offense and violation to the mō‘ī could have easily resulted in these fishermen being put to death. However, when the lawai‘a was brought before the mō‘ī, Kamehameha instated the Kānāwai Māmalahoe.

E nā Kānaka,
E mālama ‘oukou i ke akua
A e mālama ho‘i ke kanaka nui a me kanaka iki; E hele ka ‘elemakule, ka luahine, a me ke kama A moe i ke ala
‘A‘ohe mea nāna e ho‘opilikia.
Hewa nō, make.

In this kānāwai, the ali‘i calls for his people to first care for the akua, Kūkā‘ilimoku, and from that guidance to also care for the people great and small and those young and old. In the final lines, he orders that all Kānaka be allowed to lie and sleep in the streets without any disturbance to them.

Kamakau writes that with Kamehameha’s emphasis in the consecration of pu‘uhonua, and the enactment of the Kānāwai Māmalahoe, that the time of death had been finished and the rule of Kamehameha would be dedicated to life and prosperity.¹⁷ This analysis speaks to some of the core principles enacted in the earliest stages of the Hawaiian Kingdom but this assertion by Kamakau is also not entirely beyond critique for at least two reasons.

The first, regardless of the shifting practices around capital punishment in the early Hawaiian Kingdom, the introduction and spread of foreign diseases in Hawai‘i beginning just three decades earlier means that Kamehameha’s rule was overwhelmed by death. The second complication to the assertion of Kamehameha’s time as one of “life” is that Kamehameha was not, by any measure of language, a pacifist. During his campaign to be mō‘ī and consolidate Ko Hawai‘i Pae ‘Āina under his authority, he and his koa killed perhaps thousands of fellow ‘Ōiwi Maoli.¹⁸

So perhaps Kamehameha’s rule was one of life in aspiration rather than in fact. And perhaps it was the ever present and unstoppable death and suffering around Kamehameha, and his own remorse for the lives his own hands had taken, that influenced this young ruler to see the significant limitations of a kingdom whose legitimacy and power would rest solely in a state’s ability to defeat any challenger or kill any outcast. Perhaps, Kamehameha and his rule were haunted by the insurmountable challenge of bringing back the prosperity, waiwai, and health his people once enjoyed.

Of course, in this campaign for life Kamehameha would have many examples of ali‘i who ruled and consolidated power beyond warfare. He would need only to look to some of the powerful O‘ahu and Kaua‘i chiefly families to see these examples.¹⁹ I cannot say for sure what ultimately inspired this famed Mō‘ī and koa to take such an interest and influence in refuge and sanctuary; I can only say that in my mind, his role in institutionalizing and expanding pu‘uhonua was the greatest accomplishment of his leadership and the most enduring lesson of ‘ōiwi (Indigenous, people of the bone) governance.

Pu‘uhonua, Power, and Pono Governance

I have spent the last few years immersed in the history of these pu‘uhonua and their radical resurgence in the contemporary Hawaiian movement.²⁰ In the hundreds of nineteenth- and twentieth- century archival materials that I have read, the characterizations of pu‘uhonua as refuge, care, and sanctuary are consistent. At the center of the early Hawaiian Kingdom’s governing practices, the pu‘uhonua expressed an articulation of power and legitimacy that seriously considered carceral politics and put forth practices quite dif-ferent from that of our current sovereign world order.²¹

In many of the world’s independent states— especially those consolidated and occupied over settler rule, the state draws the core of its stability and legitimacy from its ability to perform security via the exclusion, confinement, and violation of certain peoples who have been othered by the ruling order.²² The state achieves and protects its power by determining and enforcing who “counts” in its citizenry and turning others into terrorists who threaten the safety and security of the public.²³

Conversely, historically the ali‘i’s ability to govern in ways that were pono (balanced and righteous) became protective forces of the ali‘i’s legitimacy and mana (power, authority, legitimacy). While violence and war were certainly present in the time before foreigners, violence itself did not legitimize power or rule, it only momentarily consolidated it. Instead, following a military victory, an ali‘i had to govern. Therefore, the Mō‘ī’s legitimacy was determined by their ability to offer care, to mālama ‘āina, and to establish peace and prosperity for their kānaka.²⁴

I would like to suggest today that these ‘Ōiwi principles and values around sovereignty and refuge that were once used as domestic practices in times of great uncertainty can be intentionally and methodically turned outward. Our peoples of Hawai‘i and Moananuiākea have long learned from each other and abroad: we have soaked up the knowledges of our relatives and strangers and selectively appropriated²⁵ (whether appropriate or not) those knowledges in the design of our worlds and governments.

But perhaps this moment is asking us to not simply look inward toward each other, but to reach outward to the world. Perhaps it is now our kuleana (responsibilities and privileges) to lead not only the charge to address climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and demilitarization— but to also lead a movement against a small and contrived notion of sovereignty whose only real faith is its “right to defend itself.” Perhaps it is time for Hawai‘i and our grand Moananuiākea to turn outward, not simply to learn, but to teach, transform, and most of all create and offer refuge for those who need it most.

The story of the pu‘uhonua is just one of thousands of examples of ‘ōiwi governance that we might look to as inspiration for the new worlds we endeavor to create. By grounding ourselves in our ‘Ōiwi histories, discourses, and practices of our sea of islands we could begin to shift the very nature of sovereignty and then courageously extend that practice out to our kin beyond our moana. We could practice these principles to cease genocides in Palestine, West Papua, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere but also to transform the very world order that has fueled and excused these violences in the first place. Perhaps we could transform the very meaning of sovereignty or discard it altogether for something else— toward a more just world.

I realize that this is a tall order. Like many of you, our relationship to sovereignty in Hawai‘i is complicated. And so, when I speak of sovereignty today, I follow a particular strand of Indigenous studies that is both deeply critical of Western forms of sovereignty while being profoundly committed to imagining and articulating forms of self-determination that protect and produce life for our peoples, our ‘āina, and our more than human kin. This evocation of sovereignty is akin to that of Indigenous scholars such as Joanne Barker, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Glen Sean Coulthard who have each problematized Western forms of sovereignty and Indigenous quests for recognition.

Barker has argued that “Sovereignty carries the horrible stench of colonialism. It is incomplete, inaccurate, and troubled. But it has also been rearticulated to mean altogether different things, by Indigenous peoples in its linked concepts of self-determination and self-government.”²⁶ Similarly Simpson reminds us of the diversity of Indigenous thought from which articulations of sovereignty emerge. Simpson writes, “Sovereignty is not just about land; it is also a spiritual, emotional, and intellectual space that spans back seven generations and that spans forward seven generations. The word place includes animal nations and plant nations, the water, the air, and the soil.”²⁷

These critical examples of challenging Western forms of sovereignty have led many Indigenous theorists and organizers to, in the words of Coulthard, “turn away” from the colonial state and society and instead find in their own decolonial praxis the source of their liberation.” This particular approach to sovereignty and recognition has led him to argue that “the empowerment that is derived from this critically self-affirmative and self-transformative ethics of desubjectification must be cautiously directed away from the assimilative lure of the statist politics of recognition and instead be fashioned toward our own on-the-ground struggles of freedom.”²⁸

But even among these criticisms, sovereignty has carried varied meanings for our peoples in the last half-century. In the early 1970s in Hawai‘i, sovereignty was the rallying call for movements against evictions, militarization, and political disenfranchisement.²⁹ By the early 1980s the language of sovereignty became instrumental across the Pacific in the struggle against nuclearization—giving birth to the Independent and Nuclear Free Pacific Movement.³⁰ By the 1990s sovereignty was a central question for Hawaiian studies scholars who were committed to Hawaiian nationalism in the ongoing struggle for self-determination.³¹ In the last two decades, explicitly Western forms of sovereignty have been prioritized by some in an argument for deoccupation in Hawai‘i due to our previous recognition as a sovereign state.³²

This particular approach to sovereignty via international recognition and deoccupation not only denies the real and urgent violences of colonialism that our people continue to suffer under— but it also produces a kind of exceptionalism founded in positivist notions of Hawaiian statehood. At times, these ideas have metastasized into an ideology that works to prioritize the legal necessity of deoccupation while foreclosing liberatory promises for “stateless” peoples including other “unrecognized” Indigenous peoples both within and beyond our moana.
More recently, a new generation of Hawaiian scholars has begun to seek out more appropriate articulations of anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggle. One of the products of such study was the revival of the term “Ea,” signifying breath, to rise, sovereignty. Since that time scholars, activists, and community organizers have articulated a diverse rendering of “Ea” that prioritizes its distinctness from sovereignty in that it is not a fixed polit-ical status but rather a dynamic set of practices that prioritizes our relationship to the life of our ‘āina along with our peoples.³³ This is probably most succinctly illustrated by the pivotal 1843 proclamation of Kauikeaouli Kamehameha III’s, “Ua mau ke ea o ka ‘āina i ka pono.” The sovereignty of the land (not the government or its institutions or its armies) endures through balance and righteousness.

While simply replacing English terms for ‘Ōiwi ones will not address the serious concerns wrought by colonialism, these examples of challenging the static notion of sovereignty are indicative of the many ways our peoples are working through the problem and paradoxes³⁴ of sovereignty. Our peoples must be prepared to continue to contend with how we have internalized notions of sovereignty into our conceptions of governance. Said quite simply, as we watch genocides play out in Palestine and West Papua, as just two examples, we must come face to face with these violences—not as exceptions or aberrations to sovereignty— but instead as essential components of its imperial design.

The nature and application of sovereign violence, at least in the last century, has coalesced around a comprehensive and expanding European and American military project. The United States, with its $800 billion military budget, has taken the lead in this charge. But we know that the U.S. government and other imperial states could not achieve this ongoing military growth without the Pacific. There is no denying Moananuiākea’s (the great wide and expansive sea and her peoples, Oceania) appropriation as the premier strategic training ground for American (and European) military might. It is here in our grand Moananuiākea where these imperial powers mine, test, and train for death. This stronghold in the Pacific means that since at least the nineteenth century, every aspect of U.S. military violence and U.S.- backed military intervention (like what we are seeing in Palestine) is fully facilitated and made possible by the perversion of our sea of islands into a sea of imperialist military occupation.

Perhaps the most illustrative example of this point is the Rim of the Pacific exercises (RIMPAC) that returned to Hawai‘i in June of 2024. RIMPAC is the world’s largest international maritime war games. It is during RIMPAC that militaries from around the world come to train on and contaminate our home and waters. These skills, and the trading of weapons and techniques, are then used not only by the U.S. military but by the militaries of Canada (one of the current leaders in deep- sea mining operations in Oceania), Japan (currently occupying Okinawa), Indonesia (currently committing genocide in West Papua), France (currently enforcing a vicious repression of Kanak anticolonial resistance in Kanaky), Israel (currently committing genocide in Palestine), and by other settler-occupying states such as Australia and New Zealand.³⁵
In the case of Israel, their genocidal state returns the “favor” to U.S. police departments via training in militarized enforcement tactics and donations of military-grade weapons and technology that are then used against Black, Indigenous, and protestors of color across the American continent.³⁶ This violence and these systems enable them to run free in a vicious and pernicious cycle. This is just a sliver of the violence and repression that our peoples, islands, and oceans have been implicated in over the last century.

Conclusion

Since October of 2023, I have watched Israel ravage the Palestinian people and land with the wholesale support of many of our occupying (and some of our sovereign) nations. I have watched and mourned as our ocean and lands have been used to prepare for these genocidal atrocities. And within my grief I cannot stop thinking about the sanctuary and refuge these islands and ocean once were. I cannot ignore the way these fundamental principles of our early governing institutions have been entirely abandoned by our states—and occupiers.

This abandonment of ‘ōiwi governing principles for colonially recognized sovereignties has ravaged our ocean and her peoples. Put simply, there is no refuge for Hawaiians in Hawai‘i struggling through outrageous economic precarity.³⁷ There is no refuge for our people of the moana trying to survive a total climate collapse that has ravaged our islands in debilitating fires, droughts, monsoons, and rising seas.³⁸ There is no refuge for our Papuan cousins, cut in half by capitalism and genocidal occupation. There is no refuge for America’s “unincorporated territories,” Guåhan and Samoa, littered with military bases and recruitment offices.³⁹ Still no refuge for those displaced by toxic waste, and nuclear fallout in Bikini, Ānewetak, Kiritimati, Kalama, Meralinga, Emu, Moruroa, and Fang ata ufa.⁴⁰ No refuge for our Banaba cousins still reeling from phosphate mining.⁴¹ There is no refuge for our ‘āina from never-ending development and desecration. None for our moana and the endless extraction and mining from her deep and beautiful sea.⁴² Neither friendly relations with our colonizers nor recognized sovereignty have given any of us real refuge.

Each of these harms, if traced back to their source, is intimately linked to the imperial project that has also resulted in this genocide in Palestine. This is illustrated by our peoples’ continued seduction by the predatory nature of the imperial states as if our allegiance to and participation in empire would protect us. In the name of this imperial security, we have surrendered our humanity and moral principles at the altar of this genocidal sovereignty. This is an indication of both the limits and perversions of sovereignty and the wastefulness of it, if sovereignty cannot be applied to the protection of all peoples.

And so I ask, what good is sovereignty without refuge? Without care? Without genuine security?⁴³ What good is sovereignty if we cannot—or will not—stop a genocide on the other end of the world, or one in our own West Papua. What good is sovereignty if it is not fully leveraged toward the liberation of all peoples living under the tyranny of the UN Security Council and the League of Imperial Nations?

States will do what states do. We must do something else. We must transform our practices and aspirations of sovereignty and self- determination toward the liberation of others. Perhaps in doing this we could follow the example of Kamehameha Pai‘ea.

When Kamehameha died, he gave the government (The Aupuni) to his son Liholiho, but he gave the people to his wahine, Ka‘ahumanu.⁴⁴ Kamehameha used his sovereign authority to consecrate Ka‘ahumanu as a pu‘uhonua and offered her the kuleana of life and refuge. What I am suggesting is not all that different. Again, states will do what states do—but the people and the ‘āina who feed them belong to us. The people are our kuleana; they are our kin, and we are their refuge. There is no sovereignty, independence, or supreme power that can mean more to us than that.

Haunani-Kay Trask wrote in her canonical text, From a Native Daughter, that “upon the survival of the Pacific depends the survival of the world.”⁴⁵ If this is true, it must not simply apply to our rising waters, our overextraction of resources, our financial insecurity to global economies. It must also apply to our place in the violence inflicted both in our ocean home and far beyond. Let us begin here in conversation and conviction. Let us dream and develop toward a fuller practice of liberation and sovereignty that does more than just temporarily stave off the vultures who covet our ‘āina, our oceans, and our plentiful resources. Let us build collective power as we commit to something grander. Let us strive toward something as simple and pure as the survival and salvation of the world through the survival and salvation of our most cherished principles.

Because the revolution is not on the horizon, the revolutions are within each of us, right now. This is an invitation. Those in power want us to believe that the world cannot change, and yet it changes every single day. The nature and direction of that change is up to us all. Make it count. Make it transformative. Make ea, and our practice of it, mean life again.