Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea La E Pono Ai?

Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa is a Native Hawaiian historian, and this academic book, published by Bishop Museum Press, a museum press specializing in Hawaiian and Pacific scholarship, examines traditional Hawaiian land tenure and cosmology and how they were disrupted by the nineteenth century Mahele land reform, working from Hawaiian language sources and genealogical tradition. Its strength is that Kame'eleihiwa writes from within Hawaiian language and cultural knowledge while applying rigorous historical method to colonial era land records. Its limit is that it focuses specifically on land tenure and the Mahele period, so it is not a general survey of Hawaiian religion as a whole, and later developments in Hawaiian sovereignty scholarship since 1992 should be checked separately.