Jodi A. Byrd
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816676408
- eISBN:
- 9781452947754
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816676408.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter focuses on how the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007 has been framed both within Hawai‘i and on the continent as a way to understand how the United States uses ...
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This chapter focuses on how the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007 has been framed both within Hawai‘i and on the continent as a way to understand how the United States uses discourses of Indianness to solidify its presence in the Pacific as it develops and contorts federal law to colonize indigenous nations. It studies how the continual transformation and revision of federal Indian policy becomes a coherent and inevitable expansionist discourse orchestrated by a seemingly static United States. In the face of colonial processes that seek to hide the fractures within U.S. boundaries among American Indian nations, it is important to investigate how discourses of Indianness are used both by the imperial U.S. government and by those Native Hawaiian activists who frame “Indianness” as an infection threatening their rights and status as an internationally recognized sovereign state.Less
This chapter focuses on how the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007 has been framed both within Hawai‘i and on the continent as a way to understand how the United States uses discourses of Indianness to solidify its presence in the Pacific as it develops and contorts federal law to colonize indigenous nations. It studies how the continual transformation and revision of federal Indian policy becomes a coherent and inevitable expansionist discourse orchestrated by a seemingly static United States. In the face of colonial processes that seek to hide the fractures within U.S. boundaries among American Indian nations, it is important to investigate how discourses of Indianness are used both by the imperial U.S. government and by those Native Hawaiian activists who frame “Indianness” as an infection threatening their rights and status as an internationally recognized sovereign state.
