Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi. By Candace Fujikane. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2021. 304 pp., 53 illustrations. (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4780-1168-2. US List: $27.95.
Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future is a stunning book. Employing the teachings of Indigenous cartographic practices to trouble the Western epistemologies of subdivision that underpin private property development, Fujikane charts out an unabashedly hopeful vision for futures that exceed the dictates of capitalist accumulation. Abundance, as Fujikane shows throughout, is not an ungrounded future wish, or a hazily-defined otherwise that we must collectively imagine. It has already been mapped out for us by Indigenous peoples—in her example, Kanaka Maoli—who have long thrived according to fundamental philosophies of cultivation and relationality. Drawing on the work of David Lloyd, she argues that “abundance is both the objective and the limit of capital: the crisis for capital is that abundance raises the possibility of a just redistribution of resources” (4). Such an intervention is elegant in its simplicity, and profound in its implications. What possibilities open up when we work towards reciprocity, sharing, and intergenerational plentitude?
These are questions that can easily travel beyond the grounded specificity of Mapping Abundance, and it is one of the reasons why Fujikane’s work has—and will continue—to speak usefully across academic contexts beyond Hawaiʻi, applying to audiences in settler colonial studies, geography, economics, legal studies, anthropology, and environmental studies, to name a few. Even though it has broad appeal, it does not shirk the richness of detail that can sometimes be reserved for specialists in Hawaiian studies. Throughout the book, the reader is invited to move across Hawaiʻi’s landscapes, waters, and histories as they are narrated by Kanaka Maoli epistemologies of place. Those stories then become the contemporary frameworks for understanding the ecological nuances of Hawaiʻi: paying attention to, for example, hydrological cycles as they are embodied by akua (deities) on Mauna a Wākea, otherwise known as Maunakea, reveals how elemental forms, such as mists, rains, and snow, speak to environmental needs for care and conservation. Indeed, as the water that accumulates on the mountain summit melts, it filters into the Waimea aquifer that is a vital water source for downslope residents of Hawaiʻi Island.
The book’s chapters suture together traditions of Kanaka Maoli environmental knowledge and current-day struggles of land and water rights through the figure of the moʻo, or lizard. As a root word for various concepts of spatial relations, like iwikuamoʻo (a backbone or a mountain ridgeway), moʻoʻāina (smaller, connected land divisions with a larger ahupuaʻa land division), moʻolelo (storied histories), and moʻokūauhau (genealogical connections), the lizard narrates cartographic epistemologies that transcend, contradict, and amend Western forms of mapping that seek to isolate, enclose, and subdivide space according to private property logics. The chapters work as three sets of thematic and geographical pairs. The first two focus on the district of Waiʻanae on Maui Island, where Fujikane exemplifies moʻoʻāina as a method of Indigenous mapping, applying it to community activist strategies to resist corporate development of spaces deemed “wastelands.” The second two chapters turn to Moku O Keawe, or Hawaiʻi Island, where land and water protectors have been standing against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Drawing upon understandings of human and more-than-human relationships with water and rocks, Fujikane shows how genealogical understandings of space can help to inform decisions in the present that support projects of abundance over those of extraction. A final pair of chapters attend to the waterways along the Koʻolau mountain range on Oʻahu Island, which are currently threatened by subterranean infrastructures built in the service of military and corporate development, and to which community-based agri- and acqua-cultural restoration projects respond. Offered as a set, Kanaka Maoli environmental knowledge appears as a future-oriented and anti-capitalist epistemology.
Within a growing body of literature that thinks critically about what solidarity with Indigenous communities looks like—particularly by academics who write and theorize about land and territory under regimes of settler colonialism—this contribution stands out for its careful engagement. Fujikane identifies as a settler aloha ʻāina—“a land and water protector who affirms Kanaka Maoli independence” (12)—who has given countless hours of labor in support of the myriad legal battles being fought for the protection of Hawaiʻi’s environment. These personal commitments emerge within the pages of this book, though there is no settler savior complex to be found within. Instead, Fujikane centers and uplifts the wisdom and actions of those alongside whom she has worked. Anyone familiar with Native Hawaiian activism will see the hundreds of familiar names and faces that she takes care to foreground in the text. Indeed, the sheer length of the book’s acknowledgements testifies to the author’s commitment to community-oriented activist scholarship.
I believe that pointing out potential shortcomings of this exceptional book is counterproductive, given the many fields of study that it contributes to. However, it is worth noting the fresh questions that emerge out of abundance, which Fujikane powerfully formulates as that which promises to address capitalism’s foreclosure of decolonization. Namely, this reader is left wondering the following: Where do ideas around excess or deficit remain weaponized against Black and brown communities whose bodies have been deemed too fecund, personalities too extra, and appetites too big by colonial society? At what point, and for whom, does abundance index “enough,” rather than “too much?” For diverse communities, comprised of people with many differential racial, class, educational, and bodily privileges who work coalitionally to protect environments from devastation, Fujikane’s careful methodology offers scholars tools to approach these questions with a deep and abiding commitment to the specificity of people and the places to which they find themselves obligated.
