Year: 1991
Type: article
Abstract: As a Hawaiian, a long-time outspoken defender of my people's claim to nationhood, a scholar, and a Native who knows her history and people, I found Roger Keesing's (1989) article in your first issue a gem of academic colonialism.Knowing old-fashioned racism too crude to defend but bitterly clinging to his sense of white superiority, Keesing plows the complaining path of the unappreciated missionary who, when confronted by ungrateful, decolonizing Natives, thinly veils his hurt and anger by the high road of lamentation: Alas, poor, bedeviled Natives "invent" theicculture in reaction to colonialism, and all in the service of grimy politics!Keesing's peevishness has a predictably familiar target: Native nationalists-from Australia and New Zealand through the Solomons and New Caledonia to Hawai'i.The problem?These disillusioned souls idealize their pasts for the purpose of political mythmaking in the present.Worse, they are so unoriginal (and, by implication, unfamiliar with what Keesing calls their "real" pasts) as to concoct their myths out of Western categories and values despite their virulent opposition to same.Thus the romanticization of pre-European Native pasts (the "Golden Age" allegedly claimed by the Maori); the assertion of a common Native identity (eg, Fijian "culture"); the "ideology" of land as spiritually significant (supposedly argued by Hawaiians, Solomon Islanders, Kanaks, and Aborigines).The gospel, according to Keesing, is that these claims are "invented."To be specific, there never was a "Golden Age," a common identity, or a spiritual attachment to the land.Proof? Keesing supplies none, either on the charge that Native nationalists have made such claims or that their claims are false.He merely asserts -fa"briclltion-th-en-pro-cee-ds-to-beJa"b-or; through--tlTe-mumbo-jumbu-of-aca""" --------------demic "discourse," the crying need for Natives (and academics) to face "our" pasts with "skepticism," while pursuing a "critical deconstruction of conceptualizations" to achieve "dialectical confrontation."The final intention should be to "liberate us" from our pasts.
Author: Haunani‐Kay Trask
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2237494061