Gathering Stories of Belonging: Honouring the Moʻolelo and Ancestors that Refuse to Forget Us

Abstract

ABSTRACT For too long Indigenous queers have been forced to quiet our pleasure and intimacy to be digestible to our communities. As more Indigenous queer scholars have begun to interrogate and move in conversation between Native studies and queer and feminist theory, Indigenous queers and feminists are carefully articulating a necessary shift in approach and perspective when unpacking the erasures and displacemennt of intimacy and desire under the tyranny of cis-heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and occupation. In the case of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) theories of intimacy can only emerge from the specific lessons our ʻāina (land, that which feeds) has taught us about how to practice an aloha (love, pleasure, and intimacy) that is just, generative, and deeply satisfying. Therefore, this article takes aloha and ʻāina seriously. And together as author and reader we explore the way kaona (Hawaiian literary techniques) demonstrate a deeply profound relationship between our ʻāina and the ways our kūpuna practice intimacy, pleasure, and consent with each other. These moʻolelo call us all to remember that if ʻāina and our relationship to her is our greatest model of intimacy then reestablishing an intimate connection to her and to each other are our most promising pathways towards decolonisation.