Emalani Case, "Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)

Summary

In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai‘i to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case draws on her own life experiences to explore the politics and ethics of being Native Hawaiian today. Drawing on her own experiences as an activist on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, as well as her academic work on the Hawaiian concept of 'kahiki', Emalani describes the friction between settler regimes of recognition which value primordiality and indigenous modes of creativity which value novel expressions of autonomy and authenticity. 

In today's podcast Emalani Case and NBN host Alex Golub discuss Emalani's teacher Teresia Teaiwa and the Pacific Studies program at Victoria University, Wellington. Emalani, a Native Hawaiian teaching in Aotearoa/New Zealand, describes the complexities of being indigenous on another indigenous group's land. She also discusses her activism opposing the University of Hawai‘i's attempts to construct a telescope on the summit of the mountain Mauna Kea, and the concept of 'kahiki', a Hawaiian word which refers to the ancestral homeland of Hawaiian people but has deeper levels of meaning which Emalani explains to Alex.

Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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Alex Golub

Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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