Unsettling Settler-Colonial Archaeology: Constructing Indigenous Futurities at Puʻukoholā Heiau

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Often thought of as a discipline that concerns itself with ruins—that which is in the past—archaeology also serves the settler-colonial project, in the present and the future. For that reason, archaeology inherently functions as a political tool, even if typically imagined as an apolitical means of “preserving” the past. In other words, archaeology offers settler-colonial states a means of maintaining a national origin story—the establishment of national identity—through narratives of pasts and futures distant and alien to quotidian life in the present. But in the case of Indigenous archaeology, this leads to an unsettling paradox: how can archaeology construct Indigenous futures if the historicization of sites serves a colonial and thus political purpose?

Puʻukoholā Heiau, one of the last traditional political temples constructed in Hawaiʻi, offers an interesting case study to understand this paradox. Through a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) methodology put forth by Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, I analyze this temple to illustrate how archaeology can function not just as future-oriented but also as futurites-enacting. Demonstrating how contemporary ceremonies at heiau create ea (sovereignty) and lāhui (collective identity), I show how blending Indigenous and archaeological approaches has the potential to break settler-colonial historicizations and enact Kanaka ʻŌiwi futurity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36459.0