Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Sāmoa by JoAnna Poblete (review)

Abstract

Such messaging is both necessarily encouraging and eminently useful for intellectuals employing decolonial methodologies—particularly those in settler-colonial contexts—and all those who seek a decolonized Hawai‘i. To recognize the weakness of white supremacy and its formations means to acknowledge the strength of all it attempted to oppress, including Indigenous ways of knowing, living, and relating to the land and each other. It means to see Kanaka ‘Ōiwi māhū (a third gender with culturally defined spiritual and social roles in Hawai‘i) Sammy Amalu’s milliondollar prank involving a false investment deal not as a failed business but as a window into an alternative future in which ‘āina (land) is not property but rather that which feeds (166–167). It means supporting Kanaka ‘Ōiwi farmers on Maui as they work to redirect waterways away from resorts to their farms, where they once flowed, in order to decrease Hawai‘i’s overreliance on imported food (190–193). Ultimately, as Saranillio demonstrates, recognizing alternative histories that reject the strength of white supremacy and capitalism makes room for our imagination to grow beyond the bounds of the unsustainable empire, allowing Indigenous knowledge and the land itself to guide our futures.