Thurs­day, May 23, 2013
4:00pm
Com­mu­ni­ca­tions 120

Bring­ing the Land to the Fight: Biotech­nol­ogy and Hawai­ian Ontol­ogy
Noe­noe Silva (Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Uni­ver­sity of Hawai’i, Manoa) and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Social Sci­ences, Pub­lic Pol­icy Cen­ter, Uni­ver­sity of Hawai’i, Manoa) exam­ine cur­rent polit­i­cal strug­gles of native Hawai­ians over the increas­ing pres­ence of biotech­nol­ogy cor­po­ra­tions in Hawai’i. Biotech­nol­ogy depends upon con­di­tions that facil­i­tate genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­ism (GMO) research and profit from ever-increasing pro­duc­tion of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms. Legal regimes of prop­erty rec­og­nize new organ­isms that can be con­trolled, sold, and exploited; anal­o­gously, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ist poli­cies recre­ate iden­tity through denial of indi­gene­ity, refus­ing land claims by indige­nous peo­ple that would inter­fere with biotech­nol­ogy indus­tries. This impacts Hawai­ians’ abil­ity to sur­vive on the land and to (re)create a Hawai­ian world, which would include native species, many of them kino lau or native deities. We con­sider Hawai­ian ideas of kalo, for exam­ple, as kin and sacred anc!  estor, and other plants, ani­mals, and nat­ural ele­ments as kino lau or body forms of deities, as cru­cial ele­ments in the strug­gle against fur­ther col­o­niza­tion and towards a resur­gence of native lifeways.

Indige­nous Approaches to Crit­i­cal Ani­mal Stud­ies and the New Mate­ri­alisms?
Kim­berly Tall­bear (Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences, Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley) high­lights what indige­nous thought has to offer aca­d­e­mic the­o­riz­ing as new crit­i­cal fields work to dis­man­tle hier­ar­chies in the rela­tion­ships of “west­ern­ers” with their non-human oth­ers. For exam­ple, “multi-species ethnog­ra­phy” now stud­ies humans and their rela­tions with nonhuman-beings such as dogs, bears, cat­tle, mon­keys, bees, mush­rooms, and microor­gan­isms. But the start­ing points of these inquiries can only par­tially con­tain indige­nous stand­points. Indige­nous peo­ples never for­got that non­hu­mans are agen­tial beings engaged in social rela­tions that pro­foundly shape human lives. More­over, their non-human oth­ers may not even be under­stood as liv­ing. “Objects” and “forces” such as stones, thun­der, or stars are known within our ontolo­gies to be sen­tient and know­ing per­sons. Indige­nous approaches also cri­tique set­tler colo­nial­ism and its man­age­ment of non-human oth­ers, link­ing vio­lenc!  e against ani­mals to vio­lence against par­tic­u­lar humans his­tor­i­cally accorded less-than-human or ani­mal status.

Pre­sented as part of B/ordering Vio­lence: Bound­aries, Gen­der, Indi­gene­ity in the Amer­i­cas, a John E. Sawyer Sem­i­nar in Com­par­a­tive Cul­tures gen­er­ously funded by the Andrew W. Mel­lon Foun­da­tion and co-sponsored by the Latin Amer­i­can & Caribbean Stud­ies pro­gram, the Jack­son School of Inter­na­tional Stud­ies, the Simp­son Cen­ter for the Human­i­ties, and the Insti­tute for the Study of Eth­nic­ity, Race, & Sex­u­al­ity (WISER).
For more on the B/ordering Vio­lence Sem­i­nar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and www.borderingviolence.com.