E Ola Mau ka ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi: Pushing for more ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi-centered research in Hawaiian archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The separation of the past into “pre-historic” and “historic” has often been criticized for creating an artificial division that prioritizes Eurocentric written histories over Indigenous oral histories. However, this bias towards Eurocentric histories persists even when Indigenous written histories are available. In Hawaiʻi, texts that are written in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (and have not been translated) are rarely used in archaeological analysis despite large quantities of them existing. To highlight the different types of information that can be gleaned from ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi archival documents, this paper compares two types of documents that were part of the 1848 land claim process in Hawaiʻi: the native registrar reports (written in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi) and foreign testimonies (written in English). Analysis of these documents reveals discrepencies in how land was described. Thus, this paper highlights how learning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (including the culture) aids one in landscape reconstruction and in understanding a different history of Hawaiʻi.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What Is "Historical"?

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow