Online Content Session – Era Two: Settler Colonialism and Atlantic Slavery

I am a Native Hawaiian historian of Indigenous people, colonialism, borders and migration in Hawaii and North America, focusing especially on the histories of Native American and Native Hawaiian people. My work moves between hyperlocal and global scales while centering the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous people and integrating close textual analysis, granular social history, theoretically informed analysis of race, gender, sexuality and nationalism, and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies.  

My second book, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration was published in 2016 by the University of Minnesota Press. It speaks to a foundational imperative in Indigenous studies: the need to not just understand Indigenous people from their own perspectives, but to understand the world from their perspectives as well. It traces the ways that Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) explored the outside world and generated understandings of their place in it in the century and half after James Cook stumbled on their islands in 1778. In doing so, this book examines indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration, rather than the passive objects of that exploration, broadening our understanding of geographical knowledge production and power in the context of colonialism. 

My first book, The Color of the Land, argues for the central place of struggles over the ownership of Native American lands in the history of racial and national construction by Creeks, African Americans, and whites in the Creek Nation and eastern Oklahoma. The Color of the Land was awarded the 2010 Theodore Saloutos Prize for best book in agricultural history from the Agricultural History Society and was granted Honorable Mention in the competition for the American Studies Association’s 2011 Lora Romero First Book Prize. 

My research explores the religious dimensions of race, authority, and freedom in the early modern Atlantic world. My book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), shows how debates between slave-owners, black Christians, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic World. I am currently at work on a few different projects. One, entitled “Constructing Religion, Defining Crime,” examines how some non-European religions—particularly those that were practiced under slavery—have been excluded from the category of religion and criminalized over the past three centuries. A related project investigates the religious and medical practices of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, paying particular attention to obeah. I am interested in how Afro-Caribbean ideas about healing, prayer, and worship influenced the construction of European categories such as religion and medicine. I have also been working on an article about Missionaries and Maroons, which takes a micro-historical look at how and why maroon leaders sought to create alliances with Christian missionaries.