How the Land Speaks: “Native Culture” as Mediating Politics in Individual–Group Relationality

Abstract

Indigenous peoples are often valorized as automatically politicized collective subjects, backgrounding the precise mechanics of individual-to-group political formation. In the case of “Native Hawaiian culture”, a locally invoked category of norms, practices, and knowledge, this article examines its semiotic bases for motivating Indigenous resistance in Hawaiʻi. Beginning with settings of socialization and education, “Native Hawaiian culture” is taught to emerge from the land and ancestors. In subsequent politicized registers, this indexicality of “culture” transforms to produce new forms of value, whereby “culture” encompasses lands and ancestral heritage, which actors then see as facing episodes of colonial elimination. In this register, one’s own experiences, ancestors, and lands link to those of an encompassing national scale. In this individual-to-group semiosis, individuals’ experiences are reconstrued as instantiations, or tokens, of the larger, actionable political type. This article shows how rendering a political formation depends on “Native culture” not as a stable given, but as a mediating process of semiotic reconfiguration.