Nā Wahine o nā ʻĀina Kuleana: Assessing the Impact of Colonization on Gender Experience in North Kohala, Hawaiʻi Island

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While pre-contact gender in Hawaiʻi has primarily been interpreted in terms of the kapu and its regulation on food, close analysis of multiple ethnographic sources reveal that gender was more complicated than originally realized. Therefore, examination of gender experience in Hawaiʻi needs to be location specific. My research highlights the value of consulting historical documents and Hawaiian tradition, especially those written in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, as resources for understanding Hawaiian history. I analyze ʻōlelo noʻeau, mele, oli, place names, kaʻao, and moʻolelo specific to selected ahupuaʻa within North Kohala to interpret how gender was conceived within each ahupuaʻa. Using this interpretation as a foundation for understanding gender experience in these locations pre-contact, I then use it as a means to interpret how the conception of gender changed in Hawaiʻi, post-contact during the period following the Great Māhele. My research examines the moʻokūʻauhau (genealogies) of Land Claim Award recipients in these locations to figure out if foreign conceptions of gender influenced how Land Claim Awards were distributed and later passed down. Through this analysis, I will assess to what degree colonization impacted Hawaiian gender norms, specifically the status of wahine.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24077