Abstract
This Testify article proposes archive as land as an anticolonial methodology for archival and historical research in the field of international relations (IR) and beyond. The article does so by reflecting upon a conversation about the Richard Kekuni Blaisdell Hawaiian National Archive (HNA) with two of the organizers— Dr. Lynette Hiʻilani Cruz and Emilia Kandagawa. Aunty Lynette is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Emilia identifies as a Hawaiian national. Their insights into the purpose, building-process, and function of the HNA are deeply rooted in Hawaiian indigenous resistance and movements against U.S. occupation, colonialism, militarism, and other structures of violence and injustice. Analyzing the conversation alongside a rich body of literature on indigenous methodology, this article argues that archival research is land-specific and political and that engaging ethically with the archives—including indigenous-led community archives like the HNA, colonial archives, state archives and more— requires working on relationships that are grounded in the particular location and land-relations of the archive and its sociohistorical and material contexts. Archive as land is a methodology to facilitate this kind of archival work and to assist critical, anticolonial, and decolonial struggles.
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Notes
I do not claim to do indigenous or decolonial work. By indigenous work, I follow Max Liboiron (2021)’s definition as the “expression of Indigenous sovereignty over Indigenous ways of producing knowledge on Indigenous Lands, by Indigenous peoples” (124). Instead, this article is anticolonial by resisting to reproduce the colonial-extractive mode of archival research and by publicizing indigenous activism of the HNA.
Since April 2023, Ka Lei Maile Aliʻi has become an independent organization.
Biographical information provided by Emilia Kandagawa.
I thank the reviewer for relating this point to the “pretendian problem.” Pretendianism is a phenomenon of false claims to indigenous ancestry and identify, including practices of racial shifting, faking connections and ancestry, and self-indigenizing.
Important exceptions include Grovogui (2016) Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; El-Malik, S. and Kamola, I. A. ed (2017) Politics of African Anticolonial Archive, Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International.
I thank Kenji Cataldo who helped move the boxes and select the files.
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Li, R. Archive as land: toward a land-based archival methodology with Lynette Hiʻilani Cruz and Emilia Kandagawa. Int Polit 61, 473–492 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00539-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00539-4