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Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania
From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i. Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, by which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people) become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.
328 pages, Hardcover
Published November 8, 2019
11 people are currently reading
340 people want to read
About the author
Maile Arvin
2 books3 followersMaile Arvin is Assistant Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 20, 2019
One of the best books I’ve ever read. Between this book & Robbie Shilliam’s The Black Pacific, I’ve been thinking more about my relationship with blackness and it being more inclusive of my Polynesian, Micronesian, and Melanesian sisters and brothers.
Arvin’s writing is really great. It flows so well. While I was reading, I couldn’t help but wish I could write like this. This book surprised me in so many ways and I am thankful that it exists.
It’s a small book but it truly packs a punch. One of my favorite concepts that I was introduced to with this book was regenerative refusals. I’ll be thinking about that for a long time, especially with it’s relationship to decolonization.
This was such a solid book. Everyone should read it no matter what your discipline is in history.
Arvin’s writing is really great. It flows so well. While I was reading, I couldn’t help but wish I could write like this. This book surprised me in so many ways and I am thankful that it exists.
It’s a small book but it truly packs a punch. One of my favorite concepts that I was introduced to with this book was regenerative refusals. I’ll be thinking about that for a long time, especially with it’s relationship to decolonization.
This was such a solid book. Everyone should read it no matter what your discipline is in history.
July 2, 2025
Some of the most interesting and intellectually invigorating work I have read in imperial, colonial, and Indigenous studies in the last ten or more years has been in Pasifika studies. There has been work unsettling the notion of nations and boundaries, insightful approaches to migration, networks, and communication, and material that has challenged dominant notions of identity, association, and the historiography of colonial relations and dynamics. The more I look at the field, the more I find myself drawn into some of its emerging and established ways of thinking.
And yet my default outlook keeps me emphasising the south and west Pacific – that area of Oceania that I grew up thinking of as ‘our locality’. In all of this, Hawai’i has occupied a marginal space – Pasifika but of the USA, and all too often in my outlook slipping into being only part of the USA (paradoxically, the same is not the case for those parts of Sāmoa and the north Pacific the USA still controls as colonies). Yet, given the focus on settler colonialism in much of my work, Hawai’i should play a bigger part, in the light of the distinctive settler colonial history and forced absorption into the USA.
And yet Hawai’i is distinctive. It’s the only part of Polynesia (itself a contentious term) where Indigenousness is, in some cases, determined by blood quantum. It’s also a long standing centre of historical, social, and anthropological research with, in the form of the Bishop Museum, one of the leading and earliest Pacific studies centres. It has played a vital role in the revival of Pasifika cultures, including in long distance canoe journeys and the recovery – mainly drawing on Micronesian skills – of traditional navigation techniques.
It is this early role in Pacific studies that provides the basis of this outstanding book that unpacks the complex and at time contradictory role whiteness has played making sense of Oceania. Maile Arvin builds a rich and compelling dual stranded argument: one about the character of settler colonialism, and one about the nature of Indigenous response.
A widely held, perhaps the dominant view, of the settler colonial process is its necessary genocidal character – that settlers ‘become native’ by extinguishing the Indigenous. In the Hawaiian case Arvin argues instead for possession by whiteness: that the early racialisation of Pasifika peoples, especially Polynesians, was framed by their relation to whiteness, and that Polynesians were ‘almost white’. One of the richest parts of this strand is the way she identifies Polynesian advocacy of that position, through for instance the work of the Māori medic and anthropologist Te Rangihīroa in the 1920s and ‘30s, or of the Hawaiian king Kalākaua in the 1880s, as well as in the work of settler scholars and academics. In this section of the argument Arvin weaves together evidence from 19th and early 20th century scientific, booster, and social sciences approaches with more popular and popular culture material to show not only the development of those ideas, but of their spread and embeddedness in general outlooks.
For the second strand, Indigenous responses Arvin leaps from the mid-20th century to the early years of the current one to explore a range of Hawaiian engagements issues such as state recognition, ‘measuring Hawaiianness’, genetic and genomic sciences, and the arts. One of the key distinctions she draws in unpacking these issues is the extent to which Indigenous actors invoke settler law through processes she sees as bringing the law to the law (that is enforcing existing provisions) or bringing the law to themselves (that is defending existing provisions that benefit them to the exclusion of others of Hawaiian descent). The contradistinction here is what she calls regenerative refusal – that is, rejection of settler colonial dominance in a way that rejects settler coloniality.
This dual stranded argument – possession by whiteness confronted by regenerative refusal – is a promising model or approach to explore the settler colonial now, and merits exploration well beyond Hawai’i. It’s challenged me to rethink but not reject the genocidal dynamic often seen as essential to settler colonialism, especially in cases where we see Indigenous cultural identifies celebrated as parts of settler nationhood, although often in limited and prescribed ways, as performative, ‘safe’, and limited in impact and application – that is, where the whiteness that is the settler colonial seeks to prescribe ways of being Indigenous in a way that makes the settlers the determinants of ‘nativeness’.
What’s more, Arvin does this in a way that is accessible and engaging, in an elegantly produced, well-illustrated text. The book has been in the ‘read now’ pile for too long; I’m delighted it’s now made it out of that stack. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to it often. An exceptional and important book.
And yet my default outlook keeps me emphasising the south and west Pacific – that area of Oceania that I grew up thinking of as ‘our locality’. In all of this, Hawai’i has occupied a marginal space – Pasifika but of the USA, and all too often in my outlook slipping into being only part of the USA (paradoxically, the same is not the case for those parts of Sāmoa and the north Pacific the USA still controls as colonies). Yet, given the focus on settler colonialism in much of my work, Hawai’i should play a bigger part, in the light of the distinctive settler colonial history and forced absorption into the USA.
And yet Hawai’i is distinctive. It’s the only part of Polynesia (itself a contentious term) where Indigenousness is, in some cases, determined by blood quantum. It’s also a long standing centre of historical, social, and anthropological research with, in the form of the Bishop Museum, one of the leading and earliest Pacific studies centres. It has played a vital role in the revival of Pasifika cultures, including in long distance canoe journeys and the recovery – mainly drawing on Micronesian skills – of traditional navigation techniques.
It is this early role in Pacific studies that provides the basis of this outstanding book that unpacks the complex and at time contradictory role whiteness has played making sense of Oceania. Maile Arvin builds a rich and compelling dual stranded argument: one about the character of settler colonialism, and one about the nature of Indigenous response.
A widely held, perhaps the dominant view, of the settler colonial process is its necessary genocidal character – that settlers ‘become native’ by extinguishing the Indigenous. In the Hawaiian case Arvin argues instead for possession by whiteness: that the early racialisation of Pasifika peoples, especially Polynesians, was framed by their relation to whiteness, and that Polynesians were ‘almost white’. One of the richest parts of this strand is the way she identifies Polynesian advocacy of that position, through for instance the work of the Māori medic and anthropologist Te Rangihīroa in the 1920s and ‘30s, or of the Hawaiian king Kalākaua in the 1880s, as well as in the work of settler scholars and academics. In this section of the argument Arvin weaves together evidence from 19th and early 20th century scientific, booster, and social sciences approaches with more popular and popular culture material to show not only the development of those ideas, but of their spread and embeddedness in general outlooks.
For the second strand, Indigenous responses Arvin leaps from the mid-20th century to the early years of the current one to explore a range of Hawaiian engagements issues such as state recognition, ‘measuring Hawaiianness’, genetic and genomic sciences, and the arts. One of the key distinctions she draws in unpacking these issues is the extent to which Indigenous actors invoke settler law through processes she sees as bringing the law to the law (that is enforcing existing provisions) or bringing the law to themselves (that is defending existing provisions that benefit them to the exclusion of others of Hawaiian descent). The contradistinction here is what she calls regenerative refusal – that is, rejection of settler colonial dominance in a way that rejects settler coloniality.
This dual stranded argument – possession by whiteness confronted by regenerative refusal – is a promising model or approach to explore the settler colonial now, and merits exploration well beyond Hawai’i. It’s challenged me to rethink but not reject the genocidal dynamic often seen as essential to settler colonialism, especially in cases where we see Indigenous cultural identifies celebrated as parts of settler nationhood, although often in limited and prescribed ways, as performative, ‘safe’, and limited in impact and application – that is, where the whiteness that is the settler colonial seeks to prescribe ways of being Indigenous in a way that makes the settlers the determinants of ‘nativeness’.
What’s more, Arvin does this in a way that is accessible and engaging, in an elegantly produced, well-illustrated text. The book has been in the ‘read now’ pile for too long; I’m delighted it’s now made it out of that stack. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to it often. An exceptional and important book.
August 15, 2020
Partially copied from my Amazon Review.
Extremely well thought out and researched. She explains how structures of whiteness defines what it means to exist in a neocolonial society, how the deployment of Western law, science, and capitalist marketing “justified” outsider claims to Polynesia in a historical and contemporary context. Her acknowledgement and exploration into the role intersectionality with gender plays within comparing colonial possessive societies and the indigenous nations they all but eclipsed allows the reader to consider how these roles shaped settler fascination and romanticization of a fictitious export culture to further enforce settler claims.
Specifically, her study into indigenous/imported definitions of self and identity gave me the most enjoyment from this read, it really is SO GOOD.
Couldn’t put it down, finished it in 3 sittings. After buying a copy for myself and a friend, I’m about to buy a third copy for another friend.
Extremely well thought out and researched. She explains how structures of whiteness defines what it means to exist in a neocolonial society, how the deployment of Western law, science, and capitalist marketing “justified” outsider claims to Polynesia in a historical and contemporary context. Her acknowledgement and exploration into the role intersectionality with gender plays within comparing colonial possessive societies and the indigenous nations they all but eclipsed allows the reader to consider how these roles shaped settler fascination and romanticization of a fictitious export culture to further enforce settler claims.
Specifically, her study into indigenous/imported definitions of self and identity gave me the most enjoyment from this read, it really is SO GOOD.
Couldn’t put it down, finished it in 3 sittings. After buying a copy for myself and a friend, I’m about to buy a third copy for another friend.
July 1, 2021
This was an interesting and important work. As someone who works in the Pacific, I think it is important to take a critical look at how settler colonialism impacts the way Polynesians are defined, subsumed and commodified by a whiteness. Historically, by both defining Polynesians as "almost white" and as immigrants, settlers were able to justify their possession of Hawai'i, and therefore exert political, economic, and cultural violence against the Kanaka Maoli. And while it would be comfortable to think of this as a historical period, Dr. Arvin shows a direct genealogical path from the anthropologists of the 19th century to geneticists, astronomers, politicians and sociologists of the 20th and 21st century. And while the book continues to show examples of structural racism and possession through whiteness, it also speaks of regenerative refusal. Drawing on Audra Simpson's work on the concept of refusal, Arvin shows how Kanaka Maoli are refusing to participate in structures of whiteness, refusing to settle and refusing to be possessed by settler colonialism. Using examples from modern art, the TMT, The Hawaiian genome project, and the State's Blood Quantum, this book explores indigenous refusal from feminist and indigenous perspectives.
I found this book was a slow read. Admittedly I'm out of my element here, which is why I wanted to read it. The arguments are well thought, well laid out, and well documented. However, for me this wasn't a book that I could just put on the kettle and bust out a chapter. I had to prepare myself to go to school and read, and think, my way through the text. I highly recommend this for people working or thinking about Pacific communities, or those who are interested in the relationships between settler power structures and the indigenous communities those structures are designed to benefit from.
I found this book was a slow read. Admittedly I'm out of my element here, which is why I wanted to read it. The arguments are well thought, well laid out, and well documented. However, for me this wasn't a book that I could just put on the kettle and bust out a chapter. I had to prepare myself to go to school and read, and think, my way through the text. I highly recommend this for people working or thinking about Pacific communities, or those who are interested in the relationships between settler power structures and the indigenous communities those structures are designed to benefit from.
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November 9, 2020It's a tough fight, going against the global tyranny is more like pessimistic survival under the skin of touristic oriental gaze. Through this writing, I hope hawaiian can connect with other protesters in the world, in solidarity.
October 15, 2021
Dominantly about Hawaiians, this book covers whiteness and how it manipulates from many different facets of society through narratives and policies/practices to own/possess Polynesian (and in this book, specifically Hawaiian) resources, including the people.
February 19, 2025
Very interesting book!
August 4, 2020
Maile Arvinʻs Possessing Polynesians is a unique and important text to Pacific studies in this present moment. As science is continually used to taxonomize peoples, justify oppression, and recreate myths such as the "hybrid vigor" found in liberal multicultural discourses today, Arvinʻs interjection is crucial. By writing of how, through what she terms possession-through-whiteness, Polynesians become sites of making racial difference and reasserting anti-Black white supremacist violence, Arvin forces the field of Pacific studies to ask: through what processes are we racialized and how are our differential investments in whiteness harming Oceania? More importantly, the questions she poses around Polynesian exceptionalism, racial hybridity, and the various myths told by colonizers to our peoples are so important. Arvinʻs text is one you will need to sit with, as it will shift your understanding of Polynesia and the Pacific as a whole, but is absolutely worthwhile. Her writing style, moreover, shifts between powerful invocations of justice and deeply theoretical and nuanced analyses––more often the convergence of the two. Any student of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, or science studies should read this text.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews